by Ken Derstine at Defend Public Education!
July 6, 2015
Last updated: July 16, 2015
Last updated: July 16, 2015
TeacherMatch: Matchmaking Towards
a Corporate Hell?
by Ken Derstine at Defend Public Education!
July 6, 2015
Last updated: July 13, 2015
In Philadelphia, all new applicants to the School District of Philadelphia must create a login and apply through a corporate portal called TeacherMatch.
All across the country, school districts, such as Chicago, are outsourcing their hiring of personnel to a private firm called TeacherMatch. This hiring method takes away community control of
who staffs schools and gives the control to a private corporate entity.
In their About
page, TeacherMatch would have us
believe that four teachers just happened to spearhead “the design
and implementation of a comprehensive hiring and professional development plan
involving thousands of teachers.” They were so successful “that the U.S.
Department of Education used it to shape their multi-billion-dollar school
improvement program.”
There
is no hint on the website of who the funders of TeacherMatch are, but it is
full of “great teachers” corporate education reform jargon. And doesn’t their logo
“Because Teachers Matter Most” sound like the preppy talk of StudentsFirst?
TeacherMatch is a collaboration with the Northwest
Evaluation Assocation that describes itself as a “global not-for-profit
organization” which “offers educational products and services”. Once again,
nothing about who the funders are for NWEA but its website describes it
origins.
Back when NWEA was established in
1977, paper-based testing ruled. So founders Allan Olson, George Ingebo, and
Vic Doherty pioneered new ways to measure student growth using an
empirically-derived scale based on Danish mathematician Georg Rasch’s Item
Response Theory model. Their solution—our NWEA RIT (Rasch Unit)
scale—accurately measures student growth term-to-team and year-to-year.
NWEA
built from this model and developed MAP, Measures of Academic Progress in 2000.
The MAP led to protests at
Garfield High School and a boycott of the MAP in Seattle in February of 2013 that
was the beginning of the Opt Out Movement.
If
you look at the TeacherMatch
Advisory Board, it includes Charlotte Danielson, head of Framework
for Teaching, which is “a comprehensive and coherent framework that
identifies those aspects of a teacher’s responsibilities that have been
documented through empirical studies and theoretical research as promoting
improved student learning.”
The
Framework is used by the Gates Foundation-funded Measures of
Effective Teaching, or MET. The Gates Foundation has given at least $335 million to
“promote effective teaching” including $45 million for MET.
Important partners
in this effort are the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National
Education Association (NEA) and their affiliates in the participating
communities.
"This process
has been a thoughtful, deliberative, collaborative way to understand—and then
design and implement—systems that improve teaching and learning. These
districts, working with their unions and parents, were willing to think out of
the box, and were awarded millions of dollars to create transparent, fair, and
sustainable teacher effectiveness models,” said Randi Weingarten, President of
the AFT.
“Collaboration and
multilevel integration are important when it comes to transforming the teaching
profession,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “These grants will go far in
providing resources to help raise student achievement and improve teacher
effectiveness. Our local NEA affiliates are working daily to help improve the
practice of teaching,” added Dennis Van Roekel, President of the NEA.
The foundation will
work with the Intensive Partnership sites to ensure that their successes,
challenges, and lessons learned are shared widely with school districts and
policymakers around the country. Progress will be tracked through common
indicators and communicated regularly.
When MET was announced to study “effective teaching” in its November 19, 2009 press release the Gates Foundation said,
The MET project will enroll 3,700 teachers from a number of
school districts around the country and will gather a variety of data,
including videotaped teacher observations, student surveys, teacher surveys,
and supplemental student assessments. As with the Intensive Partnerships, the
MET project represents a real opportunity for teachers to inform the national
discussion on education reform.
Though an overhaul
of teacher evaluation in New York has been stalled by the failure of teachers
unions and school districts to agree on how to conduct it, both the New York
City teachers union and the Department of Education agreed to participate in
the Gates Foundation study when it launched in 2009. The union helped recruit teachers to join, and ultimately, teachers from about 100 schools signed up to have their lessons videotaped and
analyzed.
“It takes the
politics out of what’s being measured,” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said when
the union first agreed to participate. “Teachers are very frustrated with the
political debate. They are always saying, ‘why don’t you just come into the
classroom?’ That’s what this is doing.”
Since then, the
politics over teacher quality has grown even more heated.
Last summer, a
GothamSchools reader who had worked in a school piloting the Danielson
evaluation said it was very hard for teachers to be rated
“effective.”
Also see:
Where Obama’s Race To The Top Leads: Chicago, Philly, Miami Public Schools Privatize Teacher Hiring | Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report
Turning Collaboration Into a Bad Word | Defend Public Education
The Charlotte Danielson Who Is Getting Rich on the Misuse of Intellectual Property | Schools Matter
Would you need any further proof of teacher union collusion with the corporate reform movement?
ReplyDeleteAbigail Shure