Buffalo Teachers (BTF) President Rumore: CCSS, Evaluations Driving Down Teacher Morale

Mike Desmond, WBFO public radio, June 3, 2013:
Union president says teacher morale at a low point
(WIVB-TV story on parents' anxiety over high-stakes tests in Buffalo area, including discussion of opt out activity in Western New York area.)

Morale among teachers in Buffalo is worse than usual, according to union president Phil Rumore, because of this spring's evaluations of students and teachers.

The head of the Buffalo Teachers Federation has long complained about constant testing of students and how test results are used in evaluation of teachers. Now, he says neither principals nor teachers have received all of the training they were supposed to receive on how to evaluate students.

Rumore says students are now being tested on material they haven't seen.

"Teachers are being asked to be evaluated on things they have no control over. Kids are being tested and re-tested. Now, you have the Common Core standards where there's only two states in the nation, New York and Tennessee, that are actually going to try and test kids on the Common Core standards before the curriculum has been put into place and the teachers have been trained," Rumore says.

State Education Commissioner John King recently told school board members from across the state he expects scores on tests students just completed to be 30 percent lower than last year's tests. That's the result of Common Core tests being used when students weren't prepared.

Rumore says there is also the issue of kindergarten, first grade, and second grade students being given "bubble tests." He says parents are starting to fight back.

"Some of the parents are starting to say 'I'm seeing my children come home with stomach aches. They don't like school anymore.' The parents are starting to beginning up and see what we see in schools that this testing is insane and it's ruining the joy of teaching and the joy of learning, and it's really sad," Rumore added.

Rumore says one teacher came to him crying recently regarding the stress both teachers and children are under, telling him "I can't take it anymore."

Surveys: teacher morale at record lows; when the profession "no longer exists"; 2013-2014 for NYC teachers under new evaluations

Teacher morale at record lows - Judging by test scores, an American exception - Worse respect than other profession, than teachers in other countries

The NY Times' Schoolbook reports record low in teacher morale. This appears from a national study. One would wonder how changes in teacher morale have changed in New York State in the era of governor Andrew Cuomo and education commissioner John King's tough stances on (Race to the Top-driven) teacher evaluations,such as the system that King recently imposed on New York City. --How much would indices of dejection and alienation from the teaching profession have teachers felt as the scapegoating and Gates/Walton/Broad/DeVos-driven micro-managing has intensified.
Given the pressures, is it any wonder that we are seeing plaintive "I Quit" postings on the Internet and on videos going viral? --video resignations like that of history teacher Jerry Conti of Westhill High School (see at right, and see his letter republished at Huffington Post about how testing and number crunching means that the teaching profession "no longer exists"), and the western New York state teacher that penned the "I am a teacher and I am tired" poem, published at the NYSUT blog site. Even principals are quitting over the over-emphasis on tests.

And is it any wonder that the low morale and high pressure drives teachers to quit, signaling high turnover rates. Note the above chart of the high percentage of New York City teachers working two years or less.

The March 8, 2012 NY Times article by Mary Ann Giordano began:

FIRST BELL Teachers' Morale Reaches 20-Year Low
The outpouring of reaction to the release of the teacher data reports, as well as the stream of recent articles on blogs and in other publications, has provided a pretty good sense of how many teachers in New York are feeling these days: disappointed, angry, depressed, put upon and fed up.
Now comes a new survey that shows those feelings are not just held by teachers in New York — nor by an outspoken few. The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, an annual check on the feelings of teachers, parents and students, found that morale among teachers nationwide is the lowest in 20 years, Fernanda Santos reports in The New York Times on Thursday.

More than half of teachers expressed at least some reservation about their jobs, their highest level of dissatisfaction since 1989, the survey found. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years, citing concerns over job security, as well as the effects of increased class size and deep cuts to services and programs. Just three years ago, the rate was one in four.

The Times article identifies a good source of the dissatisfaction:

Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, said the push for evaluations, punctuated by a national movement to curb the power of unions, had fostered an unsettling cultural shift.
“It’s easy to see why teachers feel put upon, when you consider the rhetoric around the need to measure their effectiveness — just as it’s easy to see why they would internalize it as a perception that teachers are generally ineffective, even if it’s not what the debate is about at all,” Ms. Jacobs said.

Many of the teachers also report that their schools have been hit with budget cuts, often resulting in layoffs, the loss of important enrichment courses and lags in technological capability in classrooms.
The dissatisfaction was across the board, though worse in urban schools and those with large minority populations, the survey found.

It is striking how much some media outlets are recognizing that the media attacks are abusive. Note, the language that this Christian Science Monitor opinion piece uses:
"The beatings will continue until teacher morale improves"

Walt Gardner's piece at the Christian Science Monitor really gets at how punitive and nasty the "reformers"' campaign is and how teachers are subject to greater demoralizing treatment than many other professions.

It’s hard to understand what reformers expect to accomplish by their incessant attacks on what seems like all teachers in general. These reformers claim that only by holding the feet of teachers to the coals can educational quality improve. It’s this argument that led to the publication in the Los Angeles Times last August of teacher ratings in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest.
Teachers are treated worse
Yet few other large organizations aimed at improving performance participate in this kind of large-scale naming and shaming, because they realize how counterproductive it is. The military, for example, has some of the strictest standards for promotion. But the details of determining who should be moved up are done behind closed doors. The top brass has long known how important it is to maintain morale among the rank and file.
Large private-sector corporations know, too, that exposing and vilifying their employees will do little to improve performance. Even companies who pride themselves on transparent, broadly shared performance reviews share them internally, not with an unscrupulous, angry national public.
Teachers, however, are denied the same kind of treatment. Their performance, which is disproportionately judged by standardized test scores of their students, is broadcast far and wide. They are pilloried on all fronts as the chief culprits behind failing schools even though decades of research has shown that out-of-school factors are responsible for two-thirds of the variation in student achievement, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Just look at the turnover rate
The result is reflected in the turnover rate. Close to 50 percent of teachers nationwide quit the field within the first five years. The cost of replacing these teachers is conservatively estimated to be $2.2 billion a year, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education.
. . . .
The main reasons teachers cite for leaving the profession are lack of support for the work they do and bureaucratic impediments, according to a study on teacher retention from the Center for Teacher Quality at California State University. The poor teaching and learning conditions exiting teachers described included lack of planning time, professional development, supplies and books, and support from the administration. They also spoke of excessive paperwork, classroom interruptions, and other restrictions that prevented them from doing their jobs.
. . . .
Lack of respect for teaching in US
Sadly, this state of disrespect, turnover, and burnout is the antithesis of the situation of teachers in other countries. In Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, which are widely considered to have some of the best school systems in the world, teachers are held in the highest regard. That may be in part because these countries recruit their teachers from the top third of their college classes. But it’s also largely the result of the culture, which reveres learning for its own sake.

Click here for the full article in the CSM. The author, Walt Gardner, was a 18 year veteran of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

What bodes for New York City teachers with the new Education Commissioner John King-imposed teacher evaluation system: massive burn-out, particularly in the SLOs (well-explained by Gotham Schools).

Teacher Job Satisfaction Plummets -Survey

Kenzo Shibata, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, wrote earlier this week in the Huffington Post, that teacher alienation has worsened to the point that one in three teachers is considering quitting the teaching profession in the next five years, and increase over the one in four teachers that was considering leaving in a survey three years ago.

According to a report on a survey commissioned by Met Life last spring, morale among the nation's teachers is at its lowest point in more than 20 years. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years. According to the report, just three years ago, the rate was one in four.
Met Life's results did not shock me. I often felt powerless as one teacher, advocating for the supports my students needed to succeed. In my first two years, not a week went by that I didn't consider changing careers and that had nothing to do with my students or their parents -- it was the system.

And read this posting by Valerie Strauss from The Washington Post, August 7, 2012:
Teacher job satisfaction plummets — Survey

This was written by Kevin G. Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and director of the National Education Policy Center. The center is housed at the university’s School of Education and sponsors research, produces policy briefs, and publishes expert third party reviews of think tank reports.

By Kevin G. Welner

It’s not fun to be repeatedly punched in the gut. And we can now quantify how not-fun it is, at least when teachers are the punchees.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That’s according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American Teacher.

While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it’s also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman, the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed “scores” that purport to evaluate teachers based on students’ test results — an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. Teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

Similarly, teachers see states and districts implement policies that largely base their performance evaluations on student test scores. These new policies are layered on top of No Child Left Behind and the subsequent years of narrowed curricula and teaching to the test. Teachers have been watching sadly as the sort of engaging learning that attracted them to the profession is increasingly squeezed out. Further, teachers in many states are facing attacks on their collective voice in education policy by anti-union governors such as Walker (Wisconsin), Scott (Florida), Christie (New Jersey), Daniels (Indiana), Kasich (Ohio), and Brewer (Arizona).

While all those governors are Republican, the trashing of teachers has been a bipartisan effort, led by groups that include Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children. In fact, President Obama is widely viewed as part of the problem. He will never achieve a Santorum-esque level of anti-public-school rhetoric, but Race to the Top and related policies have continued the drive toward privatization and test-focused instruction. Although the title of a U.S. Department of Education press release from a few weeks ago read “Obama Administration Seeks to Elevate Teaching Profession,” the headline a couple years ago was, “Obama Official Applauds Rhode Island Teacher Firings.”

None of us would want to have our job performance judged on an outcome that we don’t really control. Research suggests that a student’s teacher for a single given school year influences as little as 5 to 10 percent of her or his test-score growth. Sensible policymaking does not leap from “teachers are important” to “teachers can be evaluated as if they are the only thing that’s important.”

Similarly, none of us would want to have our evaluation based on an outcome, like test scores, that we know represents only a fraction of what we do and why we do it. And we wouldn’t want to pursue a good evaluation by doing our job in ways we think unwise or even harmful.

But that’s where teachers now find themselves. Maybe we should feel grateful that their job satisfaction only dropped 15 percentage points.
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By Valerie Strauss | 12:01 AM ET, 03/07/2012