You have probably heard of the Vergara decision in CA where a judge ruled that it’s teacher rights to due process mostly or only that are responsible for low achievement among poor, black or brown students. I haven’t written anything original on this, but here is some statistical discussion cited by Diane Ravitch. I also recommend looking at Jersey Jazzman.

Here in DC, teachers have already lost almost all tenure and seniority rights, and well over 90% of the teachers in DCPS and the charter schools were hired and “trained” under the Rhee-Henderson chancellorship regime, or have been already replaced several times over.

So you can’t blame any black-white or income-level achievement gap in DC on us VETERAN teachers and our jobs-for-life, because we either retired or got fired quite some time ago.

But what’s that? Oh, those NAEP results, concerning that achievement gap here in DC?

Well if Judge Treu’s arguments made any sense at all, then with removal of all DC teacher seniority or tenure rights (ditto for principals, too!) then DC should show the greates Gains anywhere in the US on closing that achievement gap.

Well, guess what?

DC — both public and charter — continues to have the VERY LARGEST ACHIEVEMENT GAP IN THE NATION.

THERE HAS BEEN NO NARROWING OF THE GAP.

The judge is wrong on all of the facts, but the other side had all the money for the best lawyers.

Guy Brandenburg

Sent from my iPhone so full of hilarious errors… ;-€}}

Begin forwarded message:

From: Diane Ravitch’s blog <comment-reply@wordpress.com>
Date: June 13, 2014 at 10:00:27 AM EDT
To: gfbrandenburg@gmail.com
Subject: [New post] The Statistical Error at the Heart of the Vergara Decision
Reply-To: “Diane Ravitch’s blog” <comment+p6kq961q173snstbha30bbwt@comment.wordpress.com>

Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on Diane Ravitch’s blog The Statistical Error at the Heart of the Vergara Decision by dianeravitch Jordan Weissman, a business correspondent for Slate, read the Vergara decision and noted that the judge’s conclusion hinged on a strange allegation. The judge quoted David Berliner as saying that 1-3% of the teachers in the state were “grossly ineffective.” The judge then calculated that this translated into thousands of teachers, between 2,750 and 8,750, who are “grossly ineffective.” Weissman called Professor Berliner and asked where the number 1-3% came from. Dr. Berliner said it was a “guesstimate,” He told Weissman, “It’s not based on any specific data, or any rigorous research about California schools in particular. “I pulled that out of the air,” says Berliner, an emeritus professor of education at Arizona State University. “There’s no data on that. That’s just a ballpark estimate, based on my visiting lots and lots of classrooms.” He also never used the words “grossly ineffective.” And he does not support the judge’s belief that teacher quality can be judged by student test scores. Dr. Berliner mailed Weissman a copy of the transcript to show that he did not use the term “grossly ineffective.” Weissman then called Stuart Biegel, a law professor and education expert at UCLA, to ask him “whether he thought that the odd origins of the 1–3 percent figure might undermine Treu’s decision on appeal. Biegel, who represented the winning plaintiffs in one of the key cases Treu cited, said it might. But he thought that the decision’s “poor legal reasoning” and “shaky policy analysis” would be bigger problems. “If 97 to 99 percent of California teachers are effective, you don’t take away basic, hard-won rights from everybody. You focus on strengthening the process for addressing the teachers who are not effective, through strong professional development programs, and, if necessary, a procedure that makes it easier to let go of ineffective teachers,” he wrote to me in an email.” dianeravitch | June 13, 2014 at 10:00 am | Categories:

Staff Seniority Versus Percentage of School in Poverty

I was under the impression that our highest-poverty, lowest-achieving students were being saddled with our most inexperienced teachers.

Apparently, that’s not quite so.

Brand-new teachers abound everywhere in DCPS, and continue to quit in droves in the middle of the year or after just one or two years. It’s not just in high-poverty schools: it’s everywhere.

This graph shows the lack of correlation between the median hire date of all staff at all DC public schools that I could find data on, and the percentages of students deemed eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The latter status is generally used as our only way to judge the students’ families’ poverty level. The median hire date is the date where half of the staff were hired before that date, and the other half were hired after that date.

I tried running a linear regression, and the correlation was so low (o.o2) that it’s not worth considering.

What is significant is the fact that we have in DCPS about twenty schools that have less than 50% of their students in poverty, and we have about a hundred (yes, roughly 100) schools with very high poverty rates.

Here’s the graph:

Comments?

Half of all Current DCPS Teachers and Administrators Were Hired by Rhee and Henderson

 

By my count, over half of all current DCPS teachers, counsellors, librarians, and administrators were hired after Michelle Rhee became Chancellor. In other words, more than half of all DC staff (not counting aides and custodians) were hired in 2007 through today, 2-20-2012.

This fact has led to NO wonderful breakthroughs in educating our youth during that time.

Only a tiny handful, roughly 1.5% of the entire staff, remains from the days when I was hired (late 1970s).

I don’t really think this is a good thing. Most school districts have a large core of veteran teachers with 10 to 20 years of seniority and experience. Among other things, they help to train new teachers (and administrators, too) in the accepted norms and procedures. Today, in DC, is not at all unusual for department and grade-level chairs to have only one or two years of experience, and the rest of the teachers to be absolute neophytes.

What we have here is the inexperienced “leading” the clueless newbies — and both end up quitting in droves. It’s also called “churn and burn”, and shows the utter ineptitude of the current leadership of DCPS. If I had to give young folks out of college advice, I would probably NOT advise them to apply to teach in DC (public or charter) because the leadership has not a clue as to what it is doing and has instituted extremely arbitrary and punitive ways of evaluating teachers while giving them next to no support. No wonder so many of the new teachers quit after only a year or two.

My count is based on the most recently-published list of all DC public employees as of 9-7-2011. (Warning: it’s a HUGE file!) Unfortunately, the PDF document does not list what schools these teachers and administrators are located at. You also have to wade a long ways into the document before you reach the group of DCPS employees. If the list omits folks, or lists folks who retired, quit, got fired, or died, that’s not my fault. Ditto with wrong hire dates or wrong classifications.

If anything, my estimate  probably UNDERSTATES the actual percentage of brand-new teachers and administrators, because I have no data on any teachers or administrators hired after that date – so about five months’ worth of new hires (needed as other teachers quit or are fired) aren’t counted. Please don’t think I’m making that up! If you look at the dates that teachers and administrators are hired, a very large percentage are hired at other times than during the summer months.

My count is based on a sample of all the data, since I really didn’t feel like counting every single teacher and administrator (there are many thousands!). Instead, I arbitrarily decided to count all of the teachers and administrators whose last names started with A, J, S or Y. I did not count custodians, clerks, receptionists, substitute teachers, summer school staff, or aides. I did count classroom teachers, administrators, psychologists, counselors, librarians, “program coordinators”, principals and the like. I ended up counting over eleven hundred people, which is a fair-sized sample. If I chose a different way of selecting the sample, I doubt my results would have been very different.

Here is a table that shows the absolute numbers I counted, and the percentages, for each year going back to 1967, the hire date of the most veteran person I found. I would like to read your comments.

Year of Hire,  staff members with names starting with A, J,  S, and Y.	Number of staff members I counted	Percen-tage of the whole	cumulative percentages
2011	141	12.67%	12.67%
2010	147	13.21%	25.88%
2009	168	15.09%	40.97%
2008	79	7.10%	48.07%
2007	48	4.31%	52.38%
2006	20	1.80%	54.18%
2005	39	3.50%	57.68%
2004	26	2.34%	60.02%
2003	30	2.70%	62.71%
2002	22	1.98%	64.69%
2001	38	3.41%	68.10%
2000	32	2.88%	70.98%
1999	45	4.04%	75.02%
1998	27	2.43%	77.45%
1997	13	1.17%	78.62%
1996	13	1.17%	79.78%
1995	13	1.17%	80.95%
1994	8	0.72%	81.67%
1993	13	1.17%	82.84%
1992	9	0.81%	83.65%
1991	17	1.53%	85.18%
1990	10	0.90%	86.07%
1989	12	1.08%	87.15%
1988	17	1.53%	88.68%
1987	63	5.66%	94.34%
1986	16	1.44%	95.78%
1985	13	1.17%	96.95%
1984	4	0.36%	97.30%
1983	2	0.18%	97.48%
1982	2	0.18%	97.66%
1981	1	0.09%	97.75%
1980	2	0.18%	97.93%
1979	4	0.36%	98.29%
1978	2	0.18%	98.47%
1977	0	0.00%	98.47%
1976	2	0.18%	98.65%
1975	1	0.09%	98.74%
1974	3	0.27%	99.01%
1973	3	0.27%	99.28%
1972	1	0.09%	99.37%
1971	1	0.09%	99.46%
1970	1	0.09%	99.55%
1969	0	0.00%	99.55%
1968	1	0.09%	99.64%
1967	3	0.27%	99.91%
1966	0	0.00%	99.91%
1965	0	0.00%	99.91%
1964	0	0.00%	99.91%
1963	0	0.00%	99.91%
1962	1	0.09%	100.00%
total	1113	100.00%