We hope that the Palm Beach County School District gets the $120 million grant it’s seeking from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But first we need to deal with the infamous “70 percent” number.
In charts and text, the grant application says several times that only 30 percent of the district’s 13,000 teachers are “effective.” Which means that 70 percent must be “ineffective.” Last week, Laura Green of The Post reported those percentages. Of course, teachers have been outraged.
In a “Management Letter” to employees, Superintendent Art Johnson blamed the media. He said it was “unfortunate” that The Post article “left teachers to believe that 70 percent of PBSD teachers are ineffective.” He said that conclusion was based on a statistic in the application “which indicated that only 30 percent of PBSD reading and math teachers taught students who achieved MORE than a year’s growth in the same year.”
Dr. Johnson’s blame-shifting is disingenuous. His explanation of the statistics is not in the Gates application, so Ms. Green could not have reported it based on that document. Rather than blame The Post, Dr. Johnson should have accepted responsibility for the confusion and moved on.
And now, we will move on – to the proposal itself. The remainder of the district’s application contains remarkable candor and worthy goals. It also hints at – but does not nail down – how to achieve those goals. The foundation’s money and a hefty chunk from the district would help provide those specifics.
A big goal is to close racial achievement gaps. The graduation rate for white students is 87 percent, but it’s 20 points lower for Hispanics and 30 points lower for African-Americans – in a majority-minority district.
2 thoughts on “EDITORIAL: Revolutionize the classroom”
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Here is a link to the full 76 page proposal.
http://gateskeepers.civiblog.org/_attachments/4285484/palm%20beach%20gates%20proposal.pdf
It seems that neither the press nor the superintendent read the proposal — as they both seem to get “effectiveness” wrong!
I took about 1/2 hour to scan the proposal and it much of it was not clear to me — it will take more effort than the time I have at the present. Nonetheless, I have quotes from the proposal, which leaves me only with confidence that neither the reporters nor the superintendent got the definition nor its complexity right.
From page 9 of 76.
“Fact 4: Less than 20% of elementary and middle school teachers and less than 40% of high
school teachers are able to get more than 50% of their low-achieving students to achieve one
year’s reading growth on the FCAT.
One of the specific milestones for this reform effort is to develop an agreed upon measure of
teacher effectiveness; however, teachers achieving one year’s growth is a metric we have used
for understanding what percentage of our teachers are currently “effective.” Even more telling is
the fact that teachers in our low letter-grade schools appear to do an equal or better job than
teachers in higher graded schools at improving learning outcomes for students who score Level 1
or Level 2 on the FCAT.”
And from much further on in the proposal (sorry, I forgot to note the page):
“Like most school districts across the country, the teacher evaluations used in our District today
are one-dimensional indicators that do little to measure or support teacher effectiveness. This,
and other key facts, has driven the development of the new teacher assessment system that is an
integral part of the STEPSS System:
Over 99% of all teachers receive a “satisfactory” rating on their annual evaluation,
despite the fact that fewer than 20% of elementary and middle school teachers and 40%
of high school teachers are able to get more than 50% of their low-achieving students to
achieve one year’s reading growth on the FCAT”
I don’t know about you, but I will have to think hard, and read extensively to come up with a definition of effectiveness that seems truly useful. I did not see from perusal of the proposal, how the reporters and superintendent got 30% effective teachers given the language cited above — I may have missed something. I hope they just didn’t “average” the 20% and 40% mentioned in the quotes paragraphs — that would be truly sad.