Mass Board of Ed April meeting: opening remarks

You can find the agenda here.
I'm posting remotely today via the livestream, so please excuse any hiccups. 
Chair Sagan announces that Roland Fryer has resigned from the Board of Ed.

Board of ed: educator evaluation

Chester: revision of educator evaluation in light of superintendents, principals, teachers concerns
separate impact on student learning
"those conversations continue"
"I do have a fair degree of concern"
"seems as though the positioning on this issue is shifting, particularly with regard to the teachers' associations"
architecture of set up "informed by discussions that teachers were very much part of"
"it was the MTA that at the end of the day argued essentially that student learning is relevant but it should be documented separately within the educator evaluation system"
impact rating, professional practice ratings separate
interaction with those ratings
discussion shifted from endorsing schema to rejecting that schema
both teachers and superintendents shift to not endorsing separate rating
DDMs problematic, but common assessments as looking at student learning valuable
revised regulations
concerned "about whether the goalposts are being shifted once again"
whether there remains a commitment to student learning being a part of the professional practice rating
"I don't want to say that there's no hope here"
"some of the rhetoric, particularly the MTA in writing to their membership, makes me concerned that the goalposts are being moved"
plan to bring back revised regulation next month
"I want to be clear with the Board as to what I am hearing"
Sagan: were hoping that we'd be taking that vote for comment at this meeting
Moriarty: somewhat distressing that only one group seemed to be driving this
accountability, particularly in seeing that effective teachers are in front of every child
five year drive to strengthen accountability
given local districts to determine what's going to matter most
using ESSA to abandon five years of work
"to see if it might function properly"
"I'm very unlikely to support any of this...I think we should stay the course so far"
Fryer: "I'm a little perplexed by this...I don't see any other way than to include test score data in the evaluation"
Gates Foundation spent $50M on what impacts student learning in the classroom; teachers this year as to last year
"something that we actually know is actually correlated with higher scores, but higher wages...a lot of the things we care about"
"the idea that we'd put zero weight on that is inconceivable"
Doherty: "I have a lot of conversations with teachers"
"I'd like to put on the table in layman terms where teachers are coming from"
believe assessment is important, believe student achievement is important
what is in dispute "is that there should be a direct leap from a teacher evaluation to a student's performance"
if academic performance isn't what it should be, it ought to be a flag
evaluator ought to be in the classroom to see what is going on: if things aren't going on with what should be
if teachers are teaching well, and the students aren't performing, that isn't necessarily the teacher
"unreliable and not valid to try to winnow out a teacher's impact on students"
greatest predictor of student achievement is the education and level of poverty in the family
"if there is not something observable going on, then it should not impact the evaluation"
Chester; just want to make sure that the design that's being discussed: there is no automatic
evaluator decides: doesn't tie an evaluator's hands
"no one should have the impression that any evaluator is forced to arrive at any results" due to test scores
Doherty: I understand that an evaluator doesn't have to, but an evaluator can
McKenna: what you are proposing now has no mandated percentages?
Chester: correct
Peyser: concern about arbitrariness on the part of the evaluator absent the data on student learning, as then the evaluation is entirely on the part of the evaluator, whereas having data is your best defense against arbitrariness
some 40-odd indicators, to have student learning explicitly be excluded is contrary to "what the teacher's job is all about"
"seems to be to be crucial" to that
one of 33 standards
Doherty: it's also in standard two, if they don't get proficient in standard two, then they can't be proficient overall
DESE: "as a staff, we really like our current system, because we think it's helpful to provoking the kinds of discussions of teacher performance we'd like to see happen"
"a real elegance, a real fairness" to current system in view of DESE
Doherty: principals aren't on board either
"not just the teacher organizations, but the teachers in the field" are not happy with it
Stewart: it makes parents feel very uncomfortable when teachers have to deal with this outside impact right now in the course of the year
I was on the task force, the evaluation system that we do have minus the indicators, was a complete document
"everything in the rubric keeps students in the center"
"A test that is created to one thing and then is used to do another doesn't do either very well"
Sagan: maybe having a deadline will make it clear we need to come to an agreement Chester: "it's not clear to me that we're in good faith; we're in a different place than we were in the spring"
"cannot endorse a regulation that removes student learning from consideration"
"I think a case can be made that we've been too soft on this."

Two new additions to the Board of Ed (and one at least you should be concerned about)

Governor Baker announced his two new appointments to the Board of Ed yesterday.
The easy joke here for Sherlockians is Baker literally appointed Moriarity to the School Committee, and he's not the one we should be worried about. 

Michael Moriarity is a lawyer from Holyoke who currently is executive director of the Olde Holyoke Development Corporation. He taught social studies in junior high before attending law school. He served 13 years on the Holyoke School Committee (he's a Holyoke High alum.) and was a 2012 member of the MASC All-State School Committee.  He's a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association and headed Holyoke's Campaign for Grade Level Reading. He was blogging for awhile, but he hasn't recently.

Professor Roland Fryer is an economics professor at Harvard, with a compelling personal background; he heads the Education Innovation Laboratory (which the Broad Foundation helped start), which (among much else) was involved in a "turnaround" at one of Springfield's high schools until they abruptly pulled out with the following explanation:

EdLabs said its decision to pull out of Springfield had nothing to do with the district but with the state — and the inability to work in a larger set of schools.
 “We are proud of the work that Springfield Public Schools has done with EdLabs and of the accomplishments in Springfield schools,” said June Daniel, executive director at EdLabs.

The Globe article from which the quote comes was discussing the lack of success these external providers had with actually turning around schools.
I have been unable to find anything more about EdLabs suddenly pulling out of Springfield.

The front page of EdLabs claims "Schools alone have the power to overcome the learning obstacles of children in poverty and to close the racial achievement gap." He has released studies on such subjects as pay for performance for students and applying charter models to public education in general. Professor Baker analyzed a number of those last studies in 2012 and came to this conclusion:

Setting aside the exceptionally poor documentation behind any of the marginal expenditure or cost estimates provided in each and every one of these studies, throughout his various attempts to downplay the importance of financial resources for improving student outcomes, Roland Fryer and colleagues have made a compelling case for spending between 20 and 60% more on public schooling in poor urban contexts including New York City and Houston, TX.

emphasis in the original. What's particularly troubling is Fryer's assertion in the past that he found no correlation between school effectiveness and inputs like school spending, teacher certification or advanced degrees, or class size. To quote Baker on this:

Let’s be really clear here – simply testing the correlation between spending and an outcome measure – comparing higher and lower spending schools and their outcomes to see if the higher spending schools have higher effectiveness measures – WOULD TELL US LITTLE OR NOTHING, EVEN IF THE DATA WERE ACCURATE, PRECISE AND WELL DOCUMENTED. Which, by the way, they are not.

And I urge you to go read that post, because you know it's going to impact what is said at the Board of Ed.
Baker also questions Fryer's work on loss aversion (in rewarding teachers for higher student test scores) here.
Fryer has also done research on "acting white" and its possible impact on children of color; you can read his own words here; note that this argument ends up pointing back towards having segregated schools.
In 2012, Fryer gave a lecture regarding his work at EdLabs. He had this to say about standardized tests:

I haven't figured out why no one has tried a two-tiered system for standardized testing. So, I live in Concord, Massachusetts which is a wonderful suburb of Boston -- my wife and I just moved there -- and I actually don't want a lot of standardized testing in Concord because it will crowd out my kids learning Shakespeare and those types of things I never really read. However, in the schools that are failing, we really do need standardized tests because at least we know where they are and that's really, really important. Just because we don't test them doesn't mean they're not failing. And so I would actually say if schools are high-performing suburban schools or high-performing schools ought to be able to say, 'You know what? 90 percent passed the test in 2008, let's not take the test for 2 or 3 years so that we can focus on different and more holistic types of instruction'. For schools that are in the bottom, I think they ought to test those kids every day.

The Board of Ed next meets on Tuesday.