House Bill 239 Could be Antidote for ‘Test Distress’

by Dan Greenberg, Sylvania Education Association

Most mornings, after about three or four slaps at the snooze bar, I get up around 6:15. One school day this past March, though, I was up, out the door and in the parking lot of my district central office by that time. On that frosty morning, I met up with seven other bleary-eyed individuals for a trip to Columbus for OEA’s Lobby Day.

It was a diverse group that included two other teachers, a retired teacher, a parent, our Assistant Superintendent and Treasurer, as well as a Sylvania School Board Member.   Not only was the group full of people with diverse ties to public education, they also had diverse political views.

We had a long day. It’s a 300-mile trip to Columbus and back, which meant five hours on the road. When we weren’t on the road, we were in meetings, starting with a briefing at the OEA office, followed by meetings with Representative Teresa Fedor, Senator Randy Gardner and an aide from Representative Barbara Sears’ office. Throw in a break for lunch, and we ended up with a ten-hour day that left me ready for a nap.

Following our trip to Columbus, lawmakers didn’t immediately take action to change the amount of time spent on testing or the amount of money our school district received. Charter school accountability didn’t improve either. The next day, I went back to my classroom and legislators went back to their meetings and responsibilities as scheduled.

To the untrained eye, it may seem that we didn’t accomplish much by participating in OEA Lobby Day.

That’s flat-out wrong.

My group’s participation in Lobby Day, along with the efforts of groups from other districts who attended Lobby Days this year, will have an impact. While our efforts won’t solve all the public education problems, and while changes won’t happen immediately, the results of our efforts have been, and will continue to be recognizable.

I know this from experience. Two years ago, I brought a similar group to Lobby Day. At that time, we were dealing with OTES issues, the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and switching from state minimum school days to minimum school hours. OEA staff suggested many things we could bring up in conversations with legislators. Among them was urging legislators, if they changed our laws from minimum days to hours, to keep the wording requiring a five-day school week. There was concern that districts, in an effort to cut costs, would implement four-day weeks, with longer days that would diminish the integrity and effectiveness of schools. We went to our meetings that day and brought up that point, and the five-day language remains in law.

True, we didn’t solve every problem. We still have OTES and the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, but I truly believe we made a positive difference.

The verdict is still out, from a legislative standpoint, on the impact of this year’s Lobby Day, as debate continues about the best solution to the testing crisis and school funding. But no matter what the outcome may be on those issues, I have already seen the impact of our trip.

The positive impact comes not only through legislative items, but also through the process. Our trip engaged a diverse group for a common cause. Teachers were able to share their insights with those who are not in the classrooms every day.   At lunch, my colleague, Heather, told our school board member, Stephen, about proctoring the first round of state tests. She relayed her concern about the validity of the tests, as she explained that, not only was each test different in the questions posed to students, but that some students had five test questions, some had six and some had seven.   Stephen was shocked. He said something like “Are you kidding me?” and went on to talk about his own misgivings about the state tests. Later that afternoon, I heard him relay that story to someone else in a phone conversation.

Any time teachers are able to share their stories and convey the absurdity of our mandated testing system to non-educators, especially school board members, is significant.

It didn’t end there. Spending five hours in a car with Stephen, as well as my Assistant Superintendent and Treasurer, allowed me to build relationships with them. I know more about them, their interests and their families. This makes it easier to talk to them about school-related issues in the future. In fact, I called Stephen last week, and invited him to be part of a meeting this week with one of Senator Portman’s aides, to talk about high-stakes testing policies at the Federal level.

Not only did Stephen accept the invitation, he asked me if I could get him some information on the topic from OEA.

I encourage all locals to participate in Lobby Day.   Bring a few teachers and some other education stakeholders along too. Even though you won’t fix all the ills of education in one day, your participation will definitely yield positive results.

While teachers and students were busy celebrating the holidays, the Ohio legislature was moving full steam ahead, putting the final touches on House Bill 555 (HB 555). This “present” was completed during the holiday season, yet it has taken weeks to unwrap and understand the true impact it could have on individual teachers. It is causing, concern, anger and frustration.

The HB 555 legislation sets new guidelines for the use of “Student Learning Objectives,” or SLOs, to measure student growth, which will account for 50% of each teacher’s overall rating in the newly-established Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES).

SLOs are basically goals that teachers want their students to work toward, which will demonstrate student growth over the course of the year. These are not one or two sentence descriptions, but multi-page documents that outline the means of assessment, curricular standards covered and many other categories.

SLOs offer teachers the chance to maintain some of the individuality and autonomy they seek as professionals. SLOs can outline a plan for teachers to get beginning and end-of-the-year data, demonstrating student learning and progress. Many teachers have seen SLOs as an opportunity to break away from the over-reliance on data gathered through standardized tests.

SLOs are not without their problems, however. In my district, a teacher and administrative representative returned from an SLO writing conference and shared an example of what was deemed an excellent SLO. In this example, written for a choir teacher, the growth measurements included “tonal quality and accuracy” and “effort during performances” — completely subjective criteria. The choir teacher would then be responsible for reporting the students’ progress, as it would be nearly impossible for an administrator to evaluate these things without having a choral background. So the obvious question is, why wouldn’t a teacher, who believes wholeheartedly in his/her program, report stellar results and progress for all students? If hard-working teachers across all grades and subjects believe in what they are doing, and are able to create subjectively measured SLOs, they could all report outstanding progress. Wouldn’t that nullify the attempts to use these measures to show which teachers are more effective than others?

Another issue is manpower. If hundreds of teachers are writing SLOs, who in each district will be responsible for evaluating each plan and managing all the data collected? Districts are already strapped for cash and hiring another administrator as an “SLO guru” doesn’t sound like the best way to spend precious money that could benefit students in so many other ways. One suggestion was to have a Building Leadership Team (BLT) at every school, comprised of teachers, to approve SLOs. That may sound good in theory, but how many teachers will want to reject as sub-par SLOs that their colleagues worked on for umpteen hours and that they truly believe are appropriate?

Nevertheless, many teachers tried to get ahead of the legislation by creating their SLOs now, instead of waiting until OTES is fully implemented next year or the year after. However, HB 555 will penalize the teachers who worked proactively, demonstrating professionalism and commitment to their students, for all their hard work. In the last days of the legislative session, when many in the education community were not focused on the dealings in the State House, legislators inserted language in HB 555 that precludes reading and math teachers, grades 4-8, from using those SLOs that they spent countless hours developing. In lieu of the SLOs, standardized test scores must be used to measure student growth. This type of legislative maneuver frustrates teachers and makes it hard for them to buy into education reforms. They fear that their efforts will all be for naught as regulations and programs change without notice.

Why reading and math in grades 4-8?

Simple. The state will have “value added” data for these grade levels, where they do not for all other levels and courses. For reading and math teachers in grades 4-8, the “Student Growth Measures” will be based on the progress students show on standardized tests. Students, no matter what their level of achievement is at the beginning of the year, will have to show a year’s worth of learning when they take standardized tests in the spring — regardless of the external forces that impact each child’s learning and achievement, which have nothing to do with a teacher’s competency.

Another wrinkle in the value added component is that many 4-8 teachers don’t teach strictly math or reading all day. Value added data would factor in for these teachers in proportion to the part of the courses where the data is applicable.

SLOs, OTES, SGM, Value Added…

Who can keep it all straight? And yet, these acronyms represent things that will determine our teacher ratings and potentially our careers.

When it came to determining how to implement these things, as it pertains to HB 555, there was no consultation with teachers. There was no “heads up” about the changes in this legislation. The only growth I can be sure will come from these changes is not student growth, but a growth of disenfranchisement from quality, hard-working teachers, who tried to get ahead of the changes coming in the fall, only to be tripped up by lawmakers. They earn an F in the category of understanding what’s best for Ohio’s students.

By Dan Greenberg, Sylvania Education Association