A reader called my attention to this comment by an anonymous teacher in Florida. It appears following an article in the Tampa Bay Times about the disastrous implementation of the value-added methodology in Pinellas County.
I was reminded when I read this comment about a conversation with an economist in Austin, Texas, who wondered if it might be fruitful to study the question of why “reformers” assert they are improving education when everything they do demoralizes teachers. How can one improve the profession, she asked, by making it unattractive. I hope she follows through, because this is a crucial issue.
Teachers in Florida, Tennessee, and other states are suffering under the inaccuracy and invalidity of value-added assessment; careers and reputations are being heedlessly ruined. The damage will continue as long as the Obama administration blindly clings to this nutty scheme in which numbers replace professional judgment. But there is some comfort in knowing that these methods are so harmful that they educate the public about the destructive nature of the alleged reforms. The more the public understands the damage they are doing, the sooner the day will come when these so-called reforms are exposed as fraudulent. They will blow up in the faces of those who designed them. This whole house of cards will come down, hopefully sooner rather than later. As the reformers like to say about their hare-brained schemes, “we can’t wait.”
The following is a comment on the article cited above:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
just think to be considered a top rated highly effective teacher and to get the merit bonus is easy–all you have to do is go to the worst school in the worst neighborhood where only 4 kids passed the state exams–just get 6 to pass and thats 50%–8 pass 100% voila-the greatest teacher in the world
It their quasi science can devastate an experienced teacher, just imagine what it does to at risk students.
Tom Friedman, the NY Times pundit who manages to be wrong about pretty much everything he ever writes about – from the Iraq war to the wonders of globalization – wrote the following in his tribute to Obama’s education policy today:
“Race to the Top said to all 50 states, we have a $4.35 billion fund that Washington will invest in the states that come up with the best four-year education reform plans that have these components: 1) systems for data-gathering on student performance, dropout rates, graduation rates and post-graduation college and vocational school success, so schools are held accountable for what happens to their students; 2) systems for teacher and principal evaluation and support, as well as systems to reward great teachers, learn from their best practices and move out those at the bottom — essentially systems that help elevate teaching into an attractive profession; 3) systems that propose turning around failing schools by changing the management and culture; 4) systems that set college- and career-ready, internationally benchmarked standards for reading and math.”
Notice the fetishization of both “systems” and “data” from Friedman.
He thinks adding teacher and principal evaluation systems based upon test scores is going to “elevate” the teaching profession and make it “into an attractive profession.”
Attractive to whom?
Not to teachers or prospective teachers, that’s for sure.
If Friedman and the other Times pundits bothered to get off their overfed, overcompensated backsides and talked to some actual teachers, as opposed to only elitist education reformers like Duncan, Klein, Rhee, Gates, et al., they’d know that these Obama reforms are neither improving public education nor making the profession more attractive.
The same could be said for these elite pundits talking to some actual public school parents.
Maybe then they would learn about the horrors of VAM, the reductionism of the school report cards that do more to harm schools than improve them, the insanity of adding standardized tests in every subject in every grade in order to evaluate teachers, and the insanity of the reforms that add daily meetings to the school day so that teachers have less and less time to teach and plan and grade and interact with students.
But that would mean getting out of the Beltway or off the Upper West Side and talking to people outside of their cocktail party circle about these issues.
And who wants to do that? That’s work!
And so we get claptrap like what Friedman wrote today about the glories of Race to the Top and how Obama is adding on to the “good work” done by Dubya and Spellings with NCLB.
The public is getting this reform stuff is nonsense, teachers and principals are getting it – but the politicians and their functionaries aren’t getting it, and thus, our “elite” journalists and elite journalist wanna-be’s aren’t getting it either because they don’t talk to anybody outside of their own circles.
As for Friedman, clearly there is no “accountability system” in journalism, or anybody who gets as much wrong as he does would have been thrown out on his butt a long time ago. (Please see the following link for Friedman’s pundit track record: http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/one-true-wanker-of-decade.html)
Accountability is apparently only for the little people – not for the billionaire school reformers, their political flunkies or their court jesters in the media.
His daughter was one of the chosen few who miraculously gave up two years of her life to slum in a lowly public school as a teach for a while saint and so you see, he is an expert on all things education.
Just what we need…another pompous ass bloviating about a topic he knows nothing about. He must lunch or summer with Wendy and Dick or maybe they call it “holiday”. They drink mimosas on their porch and chat about the poor brown children and how to help them…..a new field of study…social entrepreneurship.
Matt Taibi skewered him quite nicely months ago.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/thomas-friedmans-new-state-of-grace-20120627
The Taibbi take-downs of Friedman are priceless. I hadn’t seen the June one you linked to. Thanks, Linda – that’s a great piece.
Ms. Ravitch,
As a Lousiana teacher and parent with a child in first grade, I so appreciate your support of our profession and your analysis and spot-on criticism of the new value-added models. The Florida teacher above is exactly right. I’ve spoken with many Louisiana teachers who now feel like failures simply because of a flawed evaluation.
I’ve put a link to a guest column I wrote today in the Shreveport Times. Feel free to contact me should you want any more information on Louisiana’s Compass assessment. I’ve been researching and protesting like mad.
Diane please ensure that “Dedicated Educator” read this:
“I am too embarrassed to even share that I am not the great teacher they thought I once was when they were in my classroom… because the “secret formula” the state has developed said so.” We usually only do satire, DEducator but your words really moved us. We hope that you do not for one minute, not for one second believe the nonsense that is the “secret formula”. You should feel no embarrassment, no shame about your VAM. You are an excellent teacher by a thousand different measurements some of which you shared with us and some of which your students and their families hold in their hearts.
Speak out! The reformers count on our silence, on our wrongly placed inner-shame, on our pointing to ourselves as the problem. It is the reformers who should be SILENCED. It is they who should be ASHAMED. It is they who are the PROBLEM. Add your face, your name, your voice to the fight against their foolishness. That is the only way the public will understand who the reformers are bullying and abusing.
I don’t know if that person reads this website. I will copy and paste your reply to the Tampa Bay Times website with the hopes that this person will see your comment.
By my second year at my “first” school, my mentor shared a comment from my principal: “I think **** is becoming a master teacher.” I served his/our school for three years. We were very busy, but it was not the madness and the barrage of needless mandates that we see today. In his fourth year, “collaboration” became the “buzz” word, and our mandated meetings began to take a toll. All of the procedures and color coding and organizational structures that I had finally put into place as a new teacher were soon washed away in a Tsunami of meetings after meetings after meetings.
I remember the day I saw my mentor running down the hallway, shoving food in her mouth, holding a pair of scissors and purple paper, huffing and puffing to a meeting. I asked, “*** what are you doing?” Her reply, rolling her eyes as she almost choked trying to eat her lunch, “I have to cut out purple piggies for our meeting.”
I just shook my head in disgust at the indignity and stupidity of it all…
Well, in my 5th year at the same school, our principal left and we got our “new” principal, a tyrant, a gifted individual with ZERO social skills, zero leadership. And she hired weak assistant principals to carry out her bidding.
So, after receiving teacher of the year, teaching students the art and craft of writing, loving my new professions… I received a senseless hit on one evaluation. The evaluator actually entered a “walk-through” on my record when I was not IN THE ROOM.
It’s a long story. So, to make a long story short, I left that school for no good reason other than HORRIBLE leadership. My kids searched for me the following year, but I was OUT. The teachers that remained have literally fallen out of stress. Many have claimed disability and one even quit to work at TARGET.
I choose to work in URBAN schools. The kids need me. But, like my friends, I could work at Lanier and simply show UP every day. Those kids are going to pass the TEST whether I show up or not. Hence, at my current school, I risk being labeled a failure because of a standardized test, but in the burbs, I WILL BE labeled a MASTER teacher for just showing up….
In my district, they are moving the experienced teachers from school to school. It’s terrorism. I say we do whatever we have to do to combat it. It’s called COUNTERTERRORISM.
Just as they set cutoff scores where they want for student test results (which we know can be rather meaningless), they will set cutoff scores for teachers to meet their own needs…the labels might be used to lower salaries, or give teachers somewhere to go so that the state looks like they are doing something right in a dew years. The existence of high-ranking, great teachers doesn’t fit their narrative.
It is MEANINGLESS. It says NOTHING about this teacher. I agree with the post above. Please speak out. Get your students to rally behind you. Do not be ashamed or silenced. Be proud and KNOW who you are as a teacher and bring light to the ridiculousness. PLEASE.
What makes you think Obama is “blindly” clinging to this nutty scheme? He just received about 400 letters explaining what’s wrong with this scheme, so it’s not like he can say he doesn’t know (and it’s hardly like that was the first he ever heard anyway). Have we heard a positive response of any kind? Has Obama given any indication that he is even considering looking into the matter, let alone reversing course?
Oh, and what’s education like at his daughters’ school?
The sooner we give up the notion that Obama (let alone any other rheeformers) is “blind”, the closer we are to ending the madness. Appealing to Obama’s decency and level-headedness clearly isn’t going to cut it.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina and commented:
This nonsense is coming in Delaware. A complete disgrace.
I too have been highly effective for the 13 years I have been in the classroom, until last year, that is. I am now a teacher in need of improvement, not due to my teaching or my rapport with my students, but because I didn’t have my learning goal posted next to my rubric and I didn’t put descriptive feedback on 100% of the papers in portfolios )I missed 3 papers out of the 100+ that were in there). I didn’t refer to my rubric at the beginning, middle and end of my 15 minute small group lesson and when dealing with a child on the autism spectrum, I didn’t ask him to recall what the rule was for sitting on the carpet, I used the cue that I had discussed with him instead. This VAM is ruining the psyches of teachers and making us feel like we just fell off of the turnip truck. Way to make us want to stay in the career we love…tell us we suck every day!
What a bunch of nonsense! Who would enter this profession? It is not even a profession anymore. It is a systemic form of abuse.
This teacher need to pull out all those evaluations, newspaper articles, and awards along with getting former students to write letters about her impact in their lives. This is exactly what we need to fight this garbage. ANd as my husband says now we have Springboard and scripted curriculum, teachers can blames a crappy program.Let the lawsuits begin!
There is a common thread to all these “evaluations.” The idea is to drive you insane so you quit. After all, you are on the high end of the pay scale. The longer you stay the higher the pension. Correct me if I’m wrong. Don’t the younger teachers get a lot of praise and you wonder why? The younger teachers avoid older teachers and have nothing to learn from veteran teachers. Crazy like a fox to bring costs down. Of course, the students lose, but that is no longer the issue. It is the cost per unit and not the quality.
Anybody want to tell me I’m wrong?
Here is the solution. Become an administrator. Find the skeletons in the closet and you will have a job for life.
Being on the high end of the pay scale is only half the equation. Veteran teachers also know what works and what doesn’t and they tend to be quite confident. Can’t have that. New teachers are much more malleable.
VAM is coming to Connecticut. It will pilot in 10 districts this year, then hit all of us next year. From what we know so far, we will get a crazy mixture of administrator evaluations, parent surveys, “credits” for students’ standardized test scores and “school-wide indicators”. I work with wonderful, dedicated, talented professionals. How many will leave in the next five years?