Pearson Fearsome?

According to this NY Times article from May 6, the people Pearson is hiring to evaluate my Teacher Performance Assessment video and my 7-page, single-spaced lesson plan are going to be paid about $75  for their efforts. I know EXACTLY how much effort I would put into a $75 assignment, because that's what I got paid writing 200-word articles for The Hollywood Reporter. If it was done in 20 minutes I considered myself lucky; half an hour was about average; and if I spent more than 45 minutes on it I was furious at the world. I'm going to be submitting 20 minutes' worth of video to Pearson, so if the evaluator watches the whole thing I'll be stunned. The first three minutes have to be fabulous, I'd say - and as for the lesson plan, my guess is that it hardly counts for anything at all.

The devil is in the details, as usual. Having outside professionals evaluate teachers and teaching  licensure candidates based on video and lesson plans sounds like a great idea, but if you're going to charge the teachers and candidates $300 for the privilege of being evaluated this way, you've got to pay at least half of that to the evaluator.

Higher One is SO annoying!

Because I was gone for much of the summer, I had to reapply for a Higher One card in order to get my student loan refund since my university says it will no longer mail paper checks. I received the new Higher One card yesterday and just went to the MyOneMoney website to register it. The company claims that you can EITHER have your check directly deposited into a Higher One account (which you're supposed to open for that purpose) OR have the check direct deposited at another institution with a 2-3 day delay. What they don't tell you is that you have to print out and snail mail the request to have the check deposited in your regular checking account.

I have enough checking accounts to keep track of, and I'm almost done with student loans anyway, so I went through the whole procedure. But it's incredibly annoying, totally unnecessary and environmentally unsound. I just paid my regional taxes with an electronic ACH request from my checking account, so I know perfectly well that this is just a way to get new college students (who probably don't even have any stamps at home) to open an account with Higher One.

I plan to complain to the university, and I hope Higher One goes out of business very soon.

Teacher Performance Assessment

Yesterday was the big orientation meeting for my student teaching experience, which starts next week. We were introduced to the latest education flavor-of-the-month, the Teacher Performance Assessment project. This will involve submitting incredibly detailed lesson plans and producing about 15 minutes of video of me teaching the plans, as well as student work, my feedback and reflections on the entire process.

I've been fascinated by the subject of teacher evaluation since my first semester as a post-baccalaureate education major, and I heartily approve of a more comprehensive method than the geeky, tooth-and-claw capitalistic and ultimately unfair "value-added" calculus. My reservations are as follows:

• The pilot program is being run by Pearson, a for-profit textbook company that has made a decidedly inferior impression on me after three semesters of using its education software and textbooks; and
• Inevitably, teachers who are good at making interesting videos will get higher scores.

This second point is probably more relevant, given the current position of education "reform" as a political football. If personnel decisions like raises, hiring and even firing of teachers grow to be dependent on the TPA scores, we may see a cottage industry grow up of dynamic education filmmakers producing videos "guaranteed to get you at least a 3" out of a low score of 5.

This is, of course, not at all the idea. But I'm all for the principle of having a variety of sources for teacher evaluation, so I'm going to focus this semester's blog entries not so much on my student teaching experiences per se as on my preparations for, and experiences with, the TPA.