Teacher Evaluations – The good, the bad and the ridiculous

BY:  James Hamric

 

On May 5, 2014, the Texas Education Agency posted some details on the new Teacher Evaluation and Support System (TESS) that has been submitted to the US Department of Education. This submission was required under the terms of Texas receiving a waiver from many of the more extreme requirements of No Child Left Behind.

This new evaluation system is slated to replace the Professional Development and Appraisal System (PDAS) that has been in use by over 80% of the districts since 1997. Commissioner Michael Williams justified this change calling PDAS ‘outdated’ and of little value of providing real feedback to educators.¹ While I have no opinion on the ‘outdated’ nature of PDAS, my concerns with either PDAS or TESS will be outlined below.

According to the details posted on the TEA website, 80% of TESS will be rubric based evaluations consisting of formal observations, self assessment and professional development across six domains. These six domains have innocuous titles and each contain anywhere from three to six sub-categories that, in turn, have multiple bullet points.² I do not have an issue with having some kind of rubric or instrument…indeed I do not believe most dedicated teachers would have any concern over having an evaluation instrument. As professionals, we tend to crave constructive feedback and are anxious to continually become better at our craft. The concern, in my opinion, lays not in the what, but in the who.

The administrators who are tasked with conducting the evaluations must have adequate training – and not just in how to do the evaluation itself. Ideally, the evaluators should be knowledgeable in the subject they are observing in addition to having a strong background in pedagogy, preferably in the form of extensive experience in the classroom. In my early years as a teacher, I was observed and evaluated by my principal who had an advanced degree in science and had spent many years as a classroom teacher. Some of those evaluations were tough to discuss, but they provided valuable feedback and helped me become the teacher I am today. In the last couple years, I have received ‘exceeds expectations’ on formal observations from two different administrators. That must mean I have markedly improved my teaching from those first couple years, right? Well, yes, I have…but I don’t think it tells the whole story.

I have had administrators tell me that they had no idea specifically what I was teaching that day but that it ‘sounded good’. I have had an administrator give me ‘exceeds expectations’ after observing a math lesson when the same administrator had previously asked a colleague how to find a percentage given two numbers. My apologies if that ‘exceeds expectations’ didn’t mean a whole lot to me personally. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll certainly put those evaluations on every job application I ever fill out. But I would sure like to know how an administrator that was highly qualified in math would evaluate those same lessons.

The remaining 20% of TESS ‘will be reflected in a student growth measure at the individual teacher level that will include a value-add score based on student growth as measured by state assessments.’ These value added measures (VAMs) will only apply to approximately one quarter of the teachers – those that teach testable subjects/grades. For all the other teachers, local districts will have flexibility for the remaining 20% of the evaluation score.¹ While the lack of consistency between districts for the 75% percent of teachers not under the VAM umbrella is a point of concern, the following discussion will focus on core teachers that will have a part of their evaluation come from VAMs.
In assessing the veracity of using VAMs to evaluate teachers, Jane David, with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) analyzed several studies. Ms. David addresses several concerns with regards to fairness of VAMs such as if “test score gains are biased because students are not randomly assigned to teachers”, if different assessment instruments could lead to dramatically different effectiveness ratings and the overall stability of effectiveness ratings over longer periods. Research seems to conclude that each of these concerns is valid and should be considered when making a final decision on whether to include VAMs in teacher evaluations. Ms. Davis also notes two different studies that suggest VAMs do not do a substantially better job of evaluating effectiveness when compared to standard, subjective evaluations.

On April 8, 2014, the American Statistical Association issued a statement strongly cautioning against the use of VAMs for high-stakes decisions in the education realm:

The American Statistical Association (ASA) makes the following recommendations regarding the use of VAMs:
• The ASA endorses wise use of data, statistical models, and designed experiments for improving the quality of education.
• VAMs are complex statistical models, and high-level statistical expertise is needed to develop the models and interpret their results.
• Estimates from VAMs should always be accompanied by measures of precision and a discussion of the assumptions and possible limitations of the model. These limitations are particularly relevant if VAMs are used for high-stakes purposes.
o VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores, and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.
o VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.
o Under some conditions, VAM scores and rankings can change substantially when a different model or test is used, and a thorough analysis should be undertaken to evaluate the sensitivity of estimates to different models.
• VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.⁴

The ASA statement is careful to note that there has been consistent research that growth that is both measurable and related to the classroom teacher actually makes up a small percentage of total variation. It is also established that VAMs have large standard errors, making “rankings unstable, even under the best scenarios for modeling,”⁴ even when multiple years of data are taken into account. Finally, while VAMs may provide families, schools and districts with general areas that are in need of improvement, they do not provide a way to actually make that improvement a reality.
The underlying mathematics of VAMs would be considered esoteric by the vast majority of people. Heck, I have a degree in Mathematics, consider myself to be a pretty intelligent guy, and I don’t fully understand the intricacies of these things. I am, however, aware of the substantial error that is inherent in complex models. This error is only exacerbated by adding multiple levels to the model (student to classroom to school). A friend and colleague of mine who is nearing completion of his PhD in Education Psychology with a concentration in Measurement, put it this way: “The models are sound, but, in my opinion, only in the natural sciences and perhaps some of the social sciences. We are talking about human beings as it relates to standardized testing, and it just isn’t as easy to predict.”⁵ Because of that I would not feel comfortable being put into a position of making high stakes personnel decisions based, even partially, on VAMs. Imagine a Human Resources Director, with little to no upper level math or statistical background, making those same decisions to retain or terminate a teacher.

I remember having a conversation with Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union, at the national conference of the Network for Public Education that was held in Austin, Texas, in March of this year. She agreed that the vast majority of educators want constructive feedback, almost to a fault. As long as the administrator is well trained and qualified, a rubric based evaluation should be sufficient to assess the effectiveness of a teacher. While the mathematical validity of value added models are accepted in more economic and concrete realms, they should not be even a small part of educator evaluations and certainly not any part of high-stakes decisions as to continuing employment. It is my hope that, as Texas rolls out TESS in pilot districts in the 2014-2015 school year, serious consideration will be given to removing the VAM component completely.

References:
¹ http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index4.aspx?id=25769811000
² http://txcc.sedl.org/our_work/tx_educator_evaluation/index.php
³ http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/may10/vol67/num08/Using_Value-Added_Measures_to_Evaluate_Teachers.aspx
⁴ http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf
⁵ Text message from colleague May 12, 2014

This article can be found on James Hamric's blog here http://edreformblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/13/teacher-evaluations-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ridiculous/

Why I teach

By Kristin Vogel

            The middle school where I teach is a beautiful mixture of several ethnicities. Students claim heritage and culture from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Tonga, Samoa, The Philippines, and the majority of the countries in Western Europe. Our staff, however, is not as multicultural. This inevitably leads to some misunderstanding, and these misunderstandings can often damage the level of trust and respect that our students give us in the classroom.

            Our school holds dances several times a year for various reasons: welcoming the new 6^th graders, Halloween, winter holidays, Valentine’s Day, etc. During the Halloween dance this past October I was able to proactively prevent one of these misunderstandings and helped turn it into a learning experience for students and teachers alike.

            The DJ that our school hires tends to play a set of songs in the middle of the dance for our Spanish-speaking students that give them the opportunity to have the spotlight for a few minutes. Students can come on stage and dance, lead the crowd in singing along, and be part of the merriment. I was assigned to dance duty with a colleague of mine who pointed out a group of Tongan and Samoan students who looked agitated. My colleague thought they were going to fight, and when the group of 15 boys and girls walked out of the auditorium to the basketball courts he began to walk towards the office to notify the principal. I asked him to hold off while I went outside to investigate.

            Walking outside into the beautiful California afternoon I noticed that the boys had formed a semi-circle while the girls were sitting off to the side watching. The boys began to perform what is known as a haka, a traditional war dance. I’ve worked with Pacific Island students in the past, and know how important their traditions are. I began to talk to the girls to find out why the group had left the dance.

            The girls told me that the group felt disrespected that the DJ never plays their songs. “There are more Tongans at school than Korean kids and the DJ plays one or two K-pop songs a dance. It’s not fair!” By now some of the boys came over and agreed with the sentiments. “We just want to dance to our music.” I asked the group if I could ask the DJ if he had a song they wanted to play. This is where my lack of knowledge came into play. One of the boys laughed playfully, “We don’t need a song, we bring the song!”

            After explaining to the DJ what needed to happen to make things right the Samoan and Tongan boys gathered onstage, formed a semi-circle, and began to chant. Using their bodies to create the rhythm and beat, they performed the haka for the attendees of the dance, and received cheers and wild applause when they were done. After coming down from the stage they joined the rest of their peers on the dance floor while the DJ put on a Top 40 hit. As I left my assignment that afternoon the leader of the haka stopped me and said “We had never done that before at school. Maybe everyone will understand us now. Thank you.” I felt like I had done my job in diffusing a situation that could have gone horribly wrong, and hopefully shed some light on the fact that we should not assume the worst in our students.

            This is why I teach.

Kristin Vogel is a Special Education Teacher and a proud California BAT

On the "Civil Rights" Defense of Common Core

By:  Dr. Mark Naison

 

 

It is a grave error to portray the Common Core Standards as a Civil Rights measure opposed largely by right wing fanatics seeking to undermine pubic education. Not only does this offend people on the right whose views on education and social policy it caricatures, it offends liberals and people on the left who have view the CCSS as the product of the same undemocratic policies which have been undermining public education in the nation's great cities and deluging all public schools with tests.

CCSS is inextricably linked to school closings, data mining, VAM, scripted learning and a whole range of policies designed to subject public education to top down, standardized control, making it a new area for profitable investment by test companies, software companies, and management consulting firms. Given that toxic brew, to describe CCSS as in any way as "progressive" makes a mockery of that term- even more so with the term "Civil Rights."

No matter what labels defenders of CCSS place on its critics, the origins and consequences of CCSS will be subject to greater and greater scrutiny, and its profoundly undemocratic character will be exposed.

Hysterical attacks on Common Core opponents will do nothing to discourage that kind of inquiry- indeed, it will encourage more people to wonder what CCSS defenders are trying to hide

 

Taken off Dr. Naison's blog With a Brooklyn Accent

http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/

An Open Letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center on Common Core and Threats to Public Education
By:  Dr. Mark Naison

With public schools being closed all over the nation and charter schools being created in their place; with tens of thousands of veteran union teachers, many of them teachers of color, being pushed out of their jobs; with charter schools in inner city neighborhoods practicing zero-tolerance discipline and discriminating against ELL and Special Needs Students, one wonders why the Southern Poverty Law Center would issue a special report focusing on conservative opponents of Common Core as the major threat to public education in the United States today. Their report not only implicitly gives legitimacy to the most undemocratic education policy initiative in modern American History- CCSS- it implies that the greatest threat to pubic education in the nation comes from the far Right, when in fact it comes from the top leadership of both major parties.

Anyone who thinks that public education is only, or largely under attack from the Right and that liberal Democrats are there to save the day with CCSS needs to spend some time in Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Los Angeles where Wall Street funded Democrats have waged war on public schools and teachers unions. Worse yet, many of these attacks have been mandated by the education policy of the Obama administration, Race to the Top, and cheered on by its Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

I have long respected the Southern Poverty Law Center for speaking out against racial injustice, in times good and bad, but in this instance, they have me, and many other long time supporters shaking their heads, wondering why they would see Glen Beck and his followers, rather than Barack Obama, George Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rahm Emmanuel and the Billionaires who support them, as the greatest threats to public education in the United States

 

Taken from Dr. Naison's blog With a Brooklyn Accent http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2014/05/an-open-letter-to-southern-poverty-law.html

BATs Weekly Roundup - Week of May 5th
By:  Marla Kilfoyle, BATs General Manager

TN BAT Lucianna Sanson was one of 20 teachers selected to go
to White House Social for Teacher Appreciation Week w/
Dr.Jill Biden and Arne Duncan!  She wore her BAT shirt!

Wow did BATs have a busy week!  On Monday we swarmed Louisiana Governor Jindal.  He has done a flip flop on Common Core! First he wanted Common Core and now he doesn't want Common Core! What is it Governor Jindal?  On Tuesday BATs flew to Ohio to call out Jungle Jack Hanna for his support of virtual charters.  Shouldn't Jungle Jack be supporting public education who visit his Zoo's and support his television show?  Wednesday BATs had a HUGE day.  First, TN BAT Lucianna Sanson was chosen as one of 20 teachers to attend a White House Social with Dr. Jill Biden and Arne Duncan.  Yes, you heard that right BATs - a BAT met with Arne Duncan.  We are looking forward to a write up of her experience with Duncan in the near future.  On the same day BATs flew to Jefferson County, Colorado where we called out the BOE for not supporting children and teachers.  The BOE of JeffCo refuses to settle a contract that would make the working conditions of teachers fair and equitable, but instead, they want to seek to privatize the district like neighboring Douglas County!! BATs called them to task - when you support and nurture your teachers you provide a great place for kids to go to school!  Thursday and Friday BATs supported the AFT initiatives #BringBackOurGirls and Alliance to Reclaim our Schools.  Please attend one of the events in your area for the Alliance to Reclaim our Schools here http://www.reclaimourschools.org/nationwide-actions  and if you are in D.C. on Tuesday, May 13th please attend the kick-off event here http://www.reclaimourschools.org/may-13.  To end our week, BATs asks all our Newark, N.J. BATs to get out the vote for Ras Baraka.  He is a candidate NOT bought off by Wall Street!  Get out the vote for a man who wants to do great things for the public schools in Newark! 

What Teacher Appreciation Week Means to a BAT
By:  Dr. Yohuru Williams

 

This week some of the worst offenders, in terms of detrimental educational policies, have been full of platitudes for teachers.  Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy for instance, whom education blogger Jonathan Pelto ranks along with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as one of the most “anti-teacher, anti-public education”  Governors in the country, issued a press release holding a sign reading “Thank a Teacher,” even as his administration worked to effectively silence parent and teacher voices.  Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s remarks, for better or worse, more accurately reflect the agenda of the corporate education deformers working to hijack education. "It is more important than ever,” Brewer noted in a message ostensibly celebrating  teachers,” that our students graduate high school with the knowledge, critical thinking, motivation and work ethic necessary to contribute to our increasingly demanding workforce and competitive economy.” Brewer, Malloy, Cuomo and other politicians wooed by corporate education reform, limit the scope of education to job readiness with little consideration of its impact on building civic values and the critical thinking skills necessary to contribute in a participatory democracy.

It might be too much to ask that any of these so-called leaders actually inform themselves on the issue, say perhaps by reading Diane Ravitch’s compelling book Reign of Error. However there is abundant evidence even outside the world of education that their model of reform is both dated and broken. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink compellingly makes the case that we need to move beyond the old assembly line model of education and testing with schools as learning factories where children were drilled with information and their intelligence measured by test bubbles filled in by number two pencils. Pink notes that this model no longer meets the dictates of what he calls the Conceptual Age where issues can no longer be boiled down to one approved answer. Adopting his argument, high stakes testing and Common Core belong to a bygone era which is quickly fading despite its proponents best efforts to revive it. Teachers, of course, know this. This is why they have pushed for smaller class sizes and instructional flexibility that will allow students to deal with the nuances and complexities of a rapidly changing world. SAT and other standardized test scores only reveal how well students perform on such tests and not how they will respond to the demands of Pink’s Conceptual Age. We live in an era that will require them to be much more resourceful, imaginative, and creative in the ways they approach problems. Over the past decade however, we have watched as the education deformers stripped away the very programs of inquiry and instruction, including music and the arts that help students develop their creativity, thus enhancing their abilities in other areas. “The future,” Pink explains, “belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.” The leaders Pink describes will start as learners who require teachers to think outside the box or more appropriately outside the bubble. Teachers who value the range of senses, he posits, are essential to the future. They understand the importance of “empathy” and “play” that can only be realized when student creativity is unleashed rather than bottled.

Longtime CBS News Anchor Dan Rather perhaps best expressed these humanistic values of teaching - values that high stakes testing and a national curriculum could never encapsulate. They find expression in the bond between teachers and students working together in the fertile field of human inquiry where exposure to critical issues and real problems, mathematical, historical, artistic or linguistic, awaken the desire for self-expression and ignite the flames of imagination and the passions of the heart. In this space, critical thinkers are born and directed through the combined study of science and the liberal arts to tackle the great issues of our time. In the broad wasteland of poverty, indifference, disease, and human suffering, it is an intellectual oasis, or better yet, an academic field of dreams where dedicated teachers stand ready as coaches to help students see past what is to what might be. “The dream,” Rather explained, “begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called 'truth'.”

Heartfelt notes of appreciation to all of my teacher colleagues who help students pursue such truth daily.

Yohuru Williams is a professor of History and a proud CT/NJ BAT

OPEN LETTER TO ANDREAS SCHLEICHER, OECD, PARIS

REGARDING PISA TEST!

IF YOU WISH TO SIGN THIS LETTER PLEASE DO SO IN THE COMMENT SECTION.  CLICK REPLY UNDER THE TITLE - LEAVE A COMMENT.  THAT IS CONSIDERED A SIGNATURE!  PLEASE LEAVE ANY TITLE THAT YOU HAVE (DR., NBCT, PROFESSOR)
http://oecdpisaletter.org/

Dear Dr. Schleicher:
We write to you in your capacity as OECD’s director of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). Now in its 13th year, PISA is known around the world as an instrument to rank OECD and non-OECD countries (60+ at last count) according to a measure of academic achievement of 15 year old students in mathematics, science, and reading. Administered every three years, PISA results are anxiously awaited by governments, education ministers, and the editorial boards of newspapers, and are cited authoritatively in countless policy reports. They have begun to deeply influence educational practices in many countries. As a result of PISA, countries are overhauling their education systems in the hopes of improving their rankings. Lack of progress on PISA has led to declarations of crisis and “PISA shock” in many countries, followed by calls for resignations, and far-reaching reforms according to PISA precepts.

We are frankly concerned about the negative consequences of the PISA rankings. These are some of our concerns:
-while standardized testing has been used in many nations for decades (despite serious reservations about its validity and reliability), PISA has contributed to an escalation in such testing and a dramatically increased reliance on quantitative measures. For example, in the United States, PISA has been invoked as a major justification for the recent “Race to the Top” program, which has increased the use of standardized testing for student-, teacher-, and administrator evaluations, which rank and label students, as well as teachers and administrators according to the results of tests widely known to be imperfect (see, for example, Finland’s unexplained decline from the top of the PISA table);
-in education policy, PISA, with its three-year assessment cycle, has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years to come to fruition. For example, we know that the status of teachers and the prestige of teaching as a profession has a strong influence on the quality of instruction, but that status varies strongly across cultures and is not easily influenced by short-term policy;
-by emphasizing a narrow range of measurable aspects of education, PISA takes attention away from the less measurable or immeasurable educational objectives like physical, moral, civic, and artistic development, thereby dangerously narrowing our collective imagination regarding what education is and ought to be about;
-as an organization of economic development, OECD is naturally biased in favor of the economic role of public schools. But preparing young men and women for gainful employment is not the only, and not even the main goal of public education, which has to prepare students for participation in democratic self-government, moral action, and a life of personal development, growth, and well-being;
-unlike United Nations (UN) organizations such as UNESCO or UNICEF that have clear and legitimate mandates to improve education and the lives of children around the world, OECD has no such mandate. Nor are there, at present, mechanisms of effective democratic participation in its education decision-making process;
-to carry out PISA and a host of follow-up services, OECD has embraced “public-private partnerships” and entered into alliances with multi-national for-profit companies, which stand to gain financially from any deficits—real or perceived—unearthed by PISA. Some of these companies provide educational services to American schools and school districts on a massive, for-profit basis, while also pursuing plans to develop for-profit elementary education in Africa, where OECD is now planning to introduce the PISA program;
-finally, and most importantly: the new PISA regime, with its continuous cycle of global testing, harms our children and impoverishes our classrooms, as it inevitably involves more and longer batteries of multiple-choice testing, more scripted “vendor”-made lessons, and less autonomy for our teachers. In this way PISA has further increased the already high stress-level in our schools, which endangers the well-being of our students and teachers.
These developments are in overt conflict with widely accepted principles of good educational and democratic practice:
-no reform of any consequence should be based on a single narrow measure of quality;
-no reform of any consequence should ignore the important role of non-educational factors, among which a nation’s socio-economic inequality is paramount. In many countries, including the United States, inequality has dramatically increased over the past 15 years, explaining the widening educational gap between rich and poor which education reforms, no matter how sophisticated, are unlikely to redress;
-an organization like OECD, as any organization that deeply affects the life of our communities, should be open to democratic accountability by members of those communities.
We are writing not only to point out deficits and problems. We would also like to offer constructive ideas and suggestions that may help to alleviate the above mentioned concerns. While in no way complete, they illustrate how learning could be improved without the above mentioned negative effects:
-develop alternatives to league tables: explore more meaningful and less easily sensationalized ways of reporting assessment outcomes. For example, comparing developing countries, where 15-year olds are regularly drafted into child labor, with first world countries makes neither educational nor political sense and opens OECD up for charges of educational colonialism;
-make room for participation by the full range of relevant constituents and scholarship: to date, the groups with greatest influence on what and how international learning is assessed are psychometricians, statisticians, and economists. They certainly deserve a seat at the table, but so do many other groups: parents, educators, administrators, community leaders, students, as well as scholars from disciplines like anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, linguistics, as well as the arts and humanities. What and how we assess the education of 15 year old students should be subject to discussions involving all these groups at local, national, and international levels;
-include national and international organizations in the formulation of assessment methods and standards whose mission goes beyond the economic aspect of public education and which are concerned with the health, human development, well-being and happiness of students and teachers. This would include the above mentioned United Nations organizations, as well as teacher, parent, and administrator associations, to name a few;
-publish the direct and indirect costs of administering PISA so that taxpayers in member countries can gauge alternative uses of the millions of dollars spent on these tests and determine if they want to continue their participation in it;
-welcome oversight by independent international monitoring teams which can observe the administration of PISA from the conception to the execution, so that questions about test format and statistical and scoring procedures can be weighed fairly against charges of bias or unfair comparisons;
-provide detailed accounts regarding the role of private, for-profit companies in the preparation, execution, and follow-up to the tri-annual PISA assessments to avoid the appearance or reality of conflicts of interest;
-slow down the testing juggernaut. To gain time to discuss the issues mentioned here at local, national, and international levels, consider skipping the next PISA cycle. This would give time to incorporate the collective learning that will result from the suggested deliberations in a new and improved assessment model.

We assume that OECD’s PISA experts are motivated by a sincere desire to improve education. But we fail to understand how your organization has become the global arbiter of the means and ends of education around the world. OECD’s narrow focus on standardized testing risks turning learning into drudgery and killing the joy of learning. As PISA has led many governments into an international competition for higher test scores, OECD has assumed the power to shape education policy around the world, with no debate about the necessity or limitations of OECD’s goals. We are deeply concerned that measuring a great diversity of educational traditions and cultures using a single, narrow, biased yardstick could, in the end, do irreparable harm to our schools and our students.

Sincerely,
Heinz-Dieter Meyer (State University of New York)
and
Katie Zahedi (Principal, Linden Ave Middle School, Red Hook, New York)