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9486 in the collection
Just When You Thought Things Couldn't Get Worse
The colorful computer-generated bar charts hang in the Maple Lawn Elementary School hallway near the posters on healthy snacks and how to do fractions.
Visitors might not notice the innocuous titles – TAKS 2003 – Third Grade Reading, Fourth Grade Writing, Fifth Grade Science, Sixth Grade Math.
Make no mistake about it, however, the public posting of these charts constitutes a small revolution in the traditional world of Texas public schools, where getting information about which teachers are most effective can be difficult for parents.
"The teacher unions may shoot me full of holes," said Juanita Nix, the Maple Lawn principal.
There, on the charts for everyone to see, is what amounts to a batting average or a report card for each teacher based on student performance on last spring's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the state-mandated test that determines how much a student knows about a subject.
Also Online
Records access could be thorny
For example, we find that 91 percent of Courtney Owen's third-graders passed the reading TAKS last spring. Ruby Richardson's third-graders came in second with 88 percent.
"This is accountability for individual teachers," said Ms. Richardson.
The charts comply with privacy laws because they don't reveal any particular student's test score or his pass-fail status. Nonetheless, Ms. Nix said she understands that publicly sharing teacher effectiveness data – numbers that usually are closely held between individual teacher and principal – is a bold stroke.
"It's a little gutsy," she said. "I think they want me to put numbers on the charts where the teachers' names are. But I think everyone has a right to know where they stand."
DISD Superintendent Mike Moses and other Texas education experts said they haven't heard of any other principal who publicly shares classroom-level TAKS data with the teacher's name attached to it.
Dr. Moses said he applauds the openness at Maple Lawn as long as the bar charts are "tempered with other data" on academic performance – things such as a DISD benchmarking test that shows a student's progress from year to year.
"I give credit to the teachers and principal for leadership and for having the courage to put a focus on teacher effectiveness," he said. "Obviously, the principal has laid the groundwork and spent a lot of time on teacher training to minimize any discomfort."
Mostly Hispanic
Maple Lawn Elementary School sits in the middle of a modest, mostly Hispanic neighborhood between Love Field and Highland Park. The overwhelming majority of Maple Lawn's 805 students are Hispanic. More than 90 percent of them qualify for government-subsidized school lunches.
In the hallways, a visitor hears conversations in Spanish or English.
Ms. Nix, who is 70, has been a DISD teacher or administrator since 1954. In the school hallway, she might be mistaken for a student's grandmother. She is bilingual and speaks with a slight Spanish accent. She's pleasant but deadly serious about educating her students.
Now in her sixth year as Maple Lawn principal, she and her staff have put the school's academic performance on an upward trend.
The students may be poor. They may not speak English very well. Ms. Nix says she and her teachers are sensitive to those problems but try to keep the focus on academic achievement.
Call Maple Lawn an excuse-free zone.
"We believe in continual improvement," she said.
Of course, all principals say they believe in continual improvement. But most of them don't give parents and the public seats at the high-stakes testing table. At Maple Lawn, posting a teacher's pass-fail rate on the wall means sharing information. And information is power.
Craig Tounget, executive director of Texas PTA in Austin, is among the public education veterans who have trouble wrapping their minds around Ms. Nix's bar charts because they are so unusual.
"As a parent, I can see how nice this would be," Mr. Tounget said when told about them. "As a school administrator, I can see what a headache it could be."
Here's one way it could be a headache: Many parents try to lobby a principal to assign their child to the "best" teacher. But most parents have no real information about which teacher, objectively, is the best. So, principals historically have been able to portray teachers as basically equal in ability.
Real information
Ms. Nix acknowledges that her bar charts give parents a piece of real information to use in the dialogue about class assignment.
"And when I get one of those requests, I do everything in my power to put the child there," she said.
At most schools, principals counsel one-on-one with teachers about student performance on TAKS tests. That happens at Maple Lawn, too. It's a stressful topic. Test scores make up part of a teacher's and principal's annual evaluation.
Generally, parents and the public have access to TAKS pass-fail rates only for a grade level or for a campus. The public also gets the breakdown by race – how blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians perform as groups.
But the disaggregation of data that might shed light on a teacher's individual effectiveness in the classroom generally is kept secret from parents and the public.
Michael Paschall, principal at Casa View Elementary School in East Dallas, says he's never heard of a principal sharing teacher-level data with parents and the public.
"I'm not saying it's something you don't want parents to know, but it's a professional courtesy to teachers who need help," he said. "It's one of those need-to-know things."
Mr. Paschall and other educators also question just how much the Maple Lawn bar charts really reveal about teacher performance.
Data experts say the percentage of students that pass TAKS in a teacher's class is informative – but only up to a point. They say it may be unfair to compare three or four teachers' passing rates because students enter class with widely varying abilities. A student's year-to-year academic progress is a better indicator, they say.
Ms. Richardson, one of Maple Lawn's third-grade teachers, said she understands that simple concept but brushes it off as excuse-making.
"Regardless of where they were at the beginning of the year, my job is to get them where they need to be," she said. "The path is clear."
So why has Ms. Nix thrown convention out the window?
Because she believes teachers might strive harder to make their students successful if their performance is visible.
Malcolm "Rock" Barnebey, her assistant principal, might be another reason they do things a little differently at Maple Lawn.
Data freak
Mr. Barnebey is a self-described data freak. In a previous career, he crunched data as an international bank economist. He talks passionately about the joys of disaggregating data. He used to analyze a country's industrial data. Now, he does it for Maple Lawn.
"The longer I'm here, the more we use data," Mr. Barnebey said. "We have a mature attitude about data because we all understand we're on the same team."
Some teachers and their union representatives decry the overall emphasis on high-stakes testing. The public school system, they say, has become too focused on TAKS and has squelched teacher creativity.
Ms. Nix's bar charts, they say, are an emblem of the problem, not a solution.
"This goes to the heart of how the system has gotten to focus everything on one standardized test," said Richard Kouri, a spokesman for Texas State Teachers Association in Austin. "It's gotten over the top what we are doing to the system."
Undoubtedly, some teachers at Maple Lawn would rather not be identified with their class's pass-fail rate on TAKS.
Raymie Venable, who taught fourth-grade last year, is not one of them.
On the fourth-grade TAKS reading test, her class came in first with an 82 percent passing rate, just ahead of Melanie Bass' class with 81 percent.
Ms. Venable says she takes her classes on "hallway field trips" to look at the bar charts. Ms. Nix encourages the kids to get in on the competition to excel academically.
Standing in the hallway, looking at the charts with a visitor, Ms. Venable matter-of-factly concluded, "The teachers this scares are the ones who aren't in teaching for the right reasons."
— Scott Parks
TAKS Data an Open Book
Dallas Morning News
2003-08-02
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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