Science teacher, Dana Allen, tells me about defending his colleagues in court, and how we measure teachers.
Dana Allen drove to Santa Fe District Courthouse fast, and with metal music turned up loud. He was nervous about representing all teachers in New Mexico, but confident that he knew what he was talking about, and the more careful and detailed he made his testimony the more helpful it would be.
It was a bright day in the summer of 2014, and even the early morning was too hot for the suit and tie Dana had chosen. The huge stone pillars that punctuated the stunning glass front of the courthouse added to the gravity of an already tense occasion.
When summoned to the courtroom he felt the atmosphere shift. It was dark: wood seating, heavy carpet that muffled the sound, and a confusing smell of wool with a hint of smoke.
“Almost as soon as you walked in everything just felt very sombre and serious, and it put its own pressure on you,” he says. “I physically felt weight on me when I walked in. It was strange.”
As he took the stand he began to sweat with the nerves, and his emotions only settled once the attorney began leading him through the testimony.
It was nearly the end of a two-year struggle that began when State Secretary-Designée for Education, Hanna Skandera, introduced a new system for evaluating teachers. Dana is naturally chilled, as you might expect of someone with ‘Earth’ for a middle name, but he felt anger and disbelief at the effects the changes were having. When a friend lost her job, he knew he needed to act, a feeling he recalls with characteristic understatement in saying, “My emotions at that point were not peaceful.”
On the surface, the reforms looked simple. The focus would be on pupil progress, measured in standardised tests every three years. No matter where they started, if the pupils in your class made the expected progress, you were an effective teacher.
As is so often the case, the reforms fell apart in the real world. Teachers were not allowed to see example tests, or how the tests were marked: a bid to prevent so-called ‘teaching to the test’.
“Hanna Skandera was really big on all the high-stakes testing,” Dana tells me. “She came out of Florida, and they had changed the system so that about fifty per cent of a teacher’s evaluation came from students taking tests the teachers were not allowed to see. For the first year and a half we weren’t even allowed to see which students we were being evaluated on.”
He continues: “We finally got the right to see that, and most of the teachers had a significant number of students that they had never taught. There were so many problems.”
The administrative errors were bad, but, for Dana, the system itself was simply unjust. All contextual information about students was removed from the model’s predictions: family income, disability, specific learning needs and the like.
“They had a model with a super-complicated formula and took out all the things that made it work well at predicting how much students should grow; everything outside of the classroom they removed,” he says. “At my school, ninety-seven per cent of the kids were from low-income households, with huge numbers of single-parent families and many homeless students.”
As Dana put it, “whether a student was from a deprived background or had two parents at home with PhDs”, the same growth was predicted, and the model placed students into percentile groups; they had to move up to show progress, sometimes in a test taken two years after a teacher had taught them, if indeed they had taught them at all.
“I was teaching some advanced courses with students in the ninety-eighth percentile,” he recounts. “According to the model they needed to score above the hundredth to show progress.”
He was judged ‘minimally effective’ against an impossible target, based on blind tests students took two years after he taught only some of them. With seven years remining on his teaching licence he had time on his side, but his friend was not so fortunate. Based on similar data, her licence was withdrawn. She had been sacked.
“I couldn't believe that good colleagues were being told over and over again that they were really bad at what they did, and students were losing their teachers,” Dana says. “It had such negative consequences for the schools and communities, which were already in rough shape.”
In court, the state attorney began the cross-examination focussing on the years Dana had left on his teaching licence. He would not be losing his own job for a long time, so why did he care?
“I wasn't there for myself,” he says. “It was for other teachers and students who were being affected by it all.”
Listening to Dana, it felt natural to begin comparing his experience in New Mexico with systems in the UK. Broad measures of school success tend to focus on public exam results – SATs, GCSEs and A-levels – and infrequent reports from Ofsted, the national schools inspectorate. As politics change, the curriculum and criteria for accountability – such as changes in the weighting of exams – likewise shift. And Ofsted dictates the focus of inspections that might move from exam results, progress and leadership, to exclusions, disadvantage and personal development.
Annual league tables based on five GCSEs have mostly given way to more nuanced measures based on progress where the context of the school and background of the pupil matter. ‘Progress 8’ at GCSE breaks down the average progress of students into groups that can be compared: How did your SEND students do compared to your non-SEND students? How do those on free school meals compare to similar students nationally?
Individual teachers are appraised by senior leaders against ‘mutually agreed objectives that support the school’s aims’. These objectives must be ‘SMART’, and whilst ‘robust assessment data’ will be used, these must come from independent national exams for multiple teaching groups, and cannot be used in isolation. Observing classroom practice is central, as is the responsibility of the school to provide support and ongoing feedback to enable teachers to meet their goals.
Whilst the UK is not quite New Mexico in 2014, many of the subtle problems Dana described are shared. How accountable can a Physics teacher, who sees a student once a week, be for their performance in a short series of tests? What about their Maths teacher, or life at home? And the Progress 8 measure is zero sum, giving positive or negative scores relative to 0 as the national average. If one school is doing well, it is because someone else is doing worse, but we do not see both improving. We cannot tell if all schools and teachers are great, or if all need serious reform. The truth is almost certainly somewhere in between.
I asked Dana, who now teaches in Switzerland, what he would propose. If not Hanna Skandera’s ideas, then what? He wants teachers to be evaluated, but through many different channels – observations by leaders and colleagues, student voice, exam results – to get an overall picture of their contribution.
But perhaps the best summary is the answer he gave in Santa Fe District Courthouse that day when asked the same question: “Just one that is fair, where teachers and students, advanced or struggling, wealthy or poor, would all have a chance.”
Throughout our conversation I felt Dana had little time for Skandera – who declined my request for interview – and her focus on high-stakes testing. She was touted briefly as a potential candidate for a junior post in the Trump administration. Dana saw her as a politician rather than an educator; a sentiment that might be shared by teachers in the UK discussing the latest Education Secretary or Ofsted Chief.
“She was the Acting Secretary for seven years,” he says. “We had a law in New Mexico that you couldn’t be the Secretary of Education unless you had actual classroom experience, and she had none.”
A few months after his appearance in Santa Fe, the result of the action came through. The state’s system was suspended indefinitely, and the sacked teachers, including Dana’s friend, could renew their licences.
“I had the opportunity to be the voice of teachers for the state, and anyone negatively affected could now come back and work again,” he says.
“It was a really good feeling.”