A reader sent this comment about what happened recently in his district in Nevada:
Where I live in Pahrump, Nv, we have had 7 math and science teachers leave the high school this last week. They all planned to leave together as a protest. All of them had Ph.D degrees in math, and two of them had double doctorates in math and physics or biology. They left in protest of test driven evaluations now in place state wide here in Nevada, and they do not approve of the push to try to make all children go to college. As they stated in an open letter, They can only teach, advanced math takes a persistent concerted effort to learn. Many students in their Calculus classes do not need the class and are not prepared well enough to do well. Very few of these students will need the class either. To evaluate the teacher based on these factors they stated should be unconscionable. They close by stating that if math is so easy that all can readily master it, the district should have no problem replacing them. They all have other jobs in different states. None of them plan on continuing in public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As long as these educrats and deformers keep pushing these test driven evaluations, more and more educators will leave. Teachers are fed up! Students are being placed in these AP classes or honor classes when they are not prepared to handle the rigor. They are being placed in these types of classes to show on paper that students are in these “advanced” classes, but administration fails to disclose the truth. Who pays in the end when students, who are not ready for the class or should not be in those types of classes, the teacher. I won’t be surprised to hear about more teachers taking that action in other states.
The Rheeformers are quietly cheering about this protest resignation. More slots open for compliant, cheap, under- certified replacements.
@zulma, you know what happens when students who are not prepared to take “advanced” classes are enrolled? Forget rigor or challenge. The curriculum is made easier so all will supposedly succeed. My child is in a 7th grade Honors English class where they are studying basic grammar because not all students can identify verbs or linking verbs. Maybe her teacher is suffering, but my child is also suffering. She is bored out of her mind! No accommodations are being made for those students who are prepared for an Honors English curriculum.
In my district, the superintendent has decided that Honors classes are to be “self selected,” which really means parent selected. Any kid can take the classes, which can hijack the class for other students. I’ve been lucky: the Honors kids I have had have really been Honors kids, but some of my colleagues have had to deal with real problems, and no one at the district will listen to the concerns.
This is far too common, I’m afraid. I left my successful career as an engineer to become a teacher because I wanted to give kids from the rural area I grew up in a chance to go off to college better prepared to succeed in STEM majors than I was.
Unfortunately, I am unable to keep the expectations high due to the complete inability of administrators to understand the concept of a pre-requisite. Another huge factor is the fact that when the only thing administrators care about is getting more kids from the bottom half to become proficient, the kids who are already proficient are completely forgotten.
There are two consequences to this. First, the students I originally got into this game to help are getting short-changed. I simply can’t teach a proper physics class to students who haven’t mastered basic algebra yet. I’ll teach what I have to, but it isn’t going to be college-prep material. The second consequence is that people like me and the teachers in Vegas mentioned in this article make it to summer break, take a deep breath and say, “Wait, this isn’t what I signed up for.” Then they look at the low pay, lack of respect and dismal future of teaching as a career and go back to the private sector. For some crazy reason, I keep hanging on, but I’ve watched many highly qualified teachers come, try and leave as they bump up against the reality of low expectations and lack of funding for top performers.
I think public schools have difficulty dealing with students on each end of the academic distribution.
This new teacher evaluation system in Boston is a joke. There are wildly different expectations from administrator to administrator. My supervisor, who is not trained in science, refused to sign off on my personal goal of building a strong learning community in my classroom. Instead she wants me to focus on assessment. She wants me to improve on the scores they had in Physics last year. I teach Biology. She said that did not matter…it’s all science. She has asked me to write a goal that would call for 70% of my students reaching mastery in Biology (whatever that means). After consulting with the Director of Evaluation for the city I told her the average grade on the Biology final in Boston last year was 45% (which included the exam schools)while the average grade at our school was 35%. I asked her if she would accept a goal of a 10% increase from last year…assuming that I could donate $1000 for biology supplies (which would bring our budget up from $0 to $1000). Now she has stopped returning my emails. Despite this I’m having a great year. It’s a shame that teachers have to deal with more nonsense from administrators than from the kids.
Did these teachers have doctorates in math education or mathematics? If several have doctorates in mathematics and physics, not math and physics education, that is very impressive. It would be at least eight years of full time post secondary education, more likely ten or twelve years.
Right, because there’s nothing impressive about Ph.Ds in education. You can find those in cereal boxes.
Right. I found mine in a Cracker Jack Box :0
I did not say that, but the two degrees are different. An senior faculty member of an Ed school will have more active dissertation students in a year than a faculty member outside of an Ed school will have in a lifetime. If anyone is interested, I will track down the numbers of doctorates granted by my institutions Ed school and compare it to the number of doctorates granted by all the other schools. My guess is that the Ed school grants more than half of the doctorates at my university.
The original comment said their degrees were in math and physics. Why do you assume the commenter was lying?
I don’t, I was just trying to figure out if these teachers had multiple Ph.D’s. It is certainly possible to have a Ph.D in mathematics and a Ph.D. in physics, but it is extremely rare. Even more rare would be having a Ph.D. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in biology. There may be one or two people at a top flight university with multiple doctorates, but probably not. None of the faculty members in the Mathamatics Department at NYU, for example, list multiple doctorites. I just found it amazing that the school district would have more teachers with multiple doctorates.
I just realized that I should have written 8-12 years of post graduate education. I think it is becoming clear that this post is false. It is unfortunate, as K. Spradlin has been a frequent poster on the blog. That is probably why Dr. Ravitch featured this comment.
Their degrees were in math and physics, they then went back after working in their professions to become teachers and gain their certification. They are returning to math and engineering related fields. They taught here for five or more years.
This is more than a little fishy. I find no record of this event in local news papers and I’ve been in public education for a very long time and have never seen a concentration of PHDs like the one described. Perhaps the poster might offer a method of verifying his|her claims.
My sons attended this school, all of their AP teachers came from the University and had Ph.D’s in their areas. As far as no news story, our local paper only comes out twice a week. These are supposedly the types of people we want in a classroom, yet we will drive them out. Also Bill, our local paper really doesn’t cover education issues very closely unless it involves taxes related to schools, then it steadfastly opposes them.
This should be easy to varify. The school website lists Mr. Paxton as the faculty member teaching AP calculus. He has been teaching there since 2003. Was he your son’s teacher?
Not to knock a phd in education but a phd in hard science can usually be at the expense of a mindboggling level of research hours. It is not inconceivable to be in the lab 10 -12 hours a day for 6-7 days a week on top of class hours/ ta hours and this can go on for three or four years if you are lucky, five or six if you are not. Not to knock anyone’s phd efforts but there are very few phd programs that require the same intensity that science does on average, If you aren’t living and breathing in the lab then you aren’t dedicated enough is the philosophy and unluck in education, the next step is one post doc or if again you are unlucky/current grad, two or more postdocs slogging hours at less than teacher salaries for someone’s lab. Teaching is hard work on a daily basis but a phd in science is mind boggling intense. The pace of scientific change mandates that a person keep up with all the current research and stay ahead of the pack as well so that their research is not published first and they are scooped and have to restart from scratch.
Pahrump, Nevada is an unincorporated town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas, and has a population of 36,441. If it truly has such a concentration of actual math PhDs (let alone double PhDs), it must be the most well-educated rural settlement in America.
Moreover, the high school’s webpage ( http://pvalley-hs.nye.k12.nv.us/?PageName='Teachers‘ ) lists all the math teachers. One has a bachelor’s in math and a master’s in teaching; one has a bachelor’s in business with a minor in math and a master’s in education; one has a bachelor’s in math education; and one has a bachelor’s in education. Three of them have no listing of their qualifications.
It seems very doubtful that any of these teachers have PhDs in anything.
Many teachers don’t list all of their credentials and the web pages are not updated very often. I don’t list all of my credentials with the Clark County School District where I teach. Nye County has a high turn over rate which the district also does not mention. I wouldn’t read too much into what the district page states. I know these people, they taught my sons, and they are leaving. It is likely that they may already have been dropped from the web site as well.
So the explanation is that these teachers do not list their highest degrees, but rather the BA and MA degrees they earned. That does not seem credible.
And we can use the wayback machine site to check earlier versions of the high school web site. You can look at the faculty list here: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://pvalley-hs.nye.k12.nv.us
I just left Pahrump (in June), NV after living there for 8 years and let me tell you, if you are buying into this post, you are nuts. If PVHS – the ONLY high school in Pahrump – actually had this many teachers with these credentials, we wouldn’t have the low numbers we have had for graduation, GPA, CRT testing, etc. Whoever posted this did so in an effort to exploit a small town in rural NV, thinking that no one would see this or check on it. Many teachers have indeed left Pahrump in the past 4 yrs but most left due to budget cuts – NOT of their own choices. AND one VERY highly qualified chemistry teacher just returned this year – he WANTED to come back. He LOVES teaching these kids, they love having him back and they WANT to learn. The person who posted this lie should be ashamed – VERY ashamed.
And K. Spradlin – if you live(d) in Pahrump and work for CCSD and you find it acceptable that these teachers would actually be upset by having to teach children advanced subjects and encourage them to strive for college, then I would NEVER want you to teach my child in ANY district. While the system these people teach in isn’t great, many of them are. By bascially agreeing with this insane post and assuming that this event really took place, you are insulting all of those really great teachers. Makes me wonder if you are actually the person who posted this trash.
Well, we’re still waiting for the first actual shred of evidence that this rural unincorporated town ever had even a single math PhD teaching high school. Perhaps someone could link to the open letter of which the post speaks (if it exists), or identify one of the teachers (if they signed an open letter, they don’t have any objection to being made known).
Diane, and all who have commented on this post, – this just isn’t true! I’d be interested in knowing who posted this drivel in the first place, but IT ISN’T TRUE! Point 1- There aren’t that many Ph.D’s in the entire Nye County School district, and those we do have aren’t all in math/physics. Point 2- The teachers here are dedicated to their students, and only leave for compelling personal reasons, or because there has been a reduction in force. Point 3- Teachers are not yet evaluated on their test scores, since a new evaluation which allows for evaluation on that criteria hasn’t yet been approved by the school board and the teachers’ union. I know almost anyone can say almost anything in almost any venue in support of their own political agenda, but posting something this wrong on so many levels is irresponsible.
Well at least the title of the post was accurate: attention should be paid.
To all posters, Help! I received a call from a friend of mine telling me of this thread. I am Kevin Spradlin. My computer and pay pal accounts were recently hacked. I have not been on line in some time, I am trying to set up better security. I don’t expect to be able to regain my reputation, my name was attached to the post. I only hope that others learn that sometimes you lose more than numbers in these attacks. I see I’ve said a number of things I did not say. For the record to those here, my sons had Mr. Paxton for their calculus teacher and I am glad Mr. Mason is back in the district. I would not post such fabrication as posted. I hope the poster had a good time on my dime, when I finish getting my accounts straightened out I hope to pursue them next.
I hope no one suffered too much heart burn on account of this. I would also appreciate any advice on computer security from any of the experts out there.