In response to an earlier post about the escalating cost of teacher evaluation programs, a reader submitted this comment. I wish that our elected officials in Washington and in the state legislatures and departments of education would read it.
This voyage is beginning in Connecticut. Every hour that teachers and administrators focus on the new Teacher Evaluation system, and every dollar they spend on training, materials and systems to keep it working means less for students. Now throw in NEW standards, and new books to match the standards, and more training for teachers, and then a new online test in a year, and the corresponding technology requirements again mean less for students. Lastly, add the fact that in 2014 teachers will set goals and compare them to an entirely different test/standards in 2015. The chance for success is very slim. Again, who loses? That would be every single child in the state of Connecticut who senses the anxiety, stress, confusion, pressure to do well on a test, pressure to deny their developmentally appropriate needs to be children all to feed into a poorly designed and completely non-child centered plan. Who wins? Book publishers, technology companies, professional development trainers, administrators, policy makers….but not children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent post!! Money is wasted day after day to measure nothing of value. Did higher test scores help Adam Lanza? Do test scores determine who we are as a people; a culture; a nation? This is such a farce – such a waste of taxpayer funds!!
mb mbutz24@aol.com
Right on!
Here in NJ, fewer and fewer educational dollars are making it into classrooms. Spending on education has gone up though, lining the pockets of the well connected or well positioned “consultants and trainers”. And MORE administrators are being hired to do evaluations too. So, more money is being spent on “education” but not for educating.
Also lost is the focus on and ability to address individual student needs and goals. As we standardize and common the core, the flexibility and subjectivity of learners and THEIR educational priorities gets sacrificed to outside (nefarious? maybe…hate to be a cynic, but how else to label the pushers and the path?) interests. We are being told what is important to us as the tellers enjoy all life has to give, while limiting access and freedom for the rest.
This reader hit upon the salient feature of data-driven evaluations – their real goal is the churn itself: Control, Compliance, and Churn.
I looked at Connecticut’s evaluation system because it’s being used as a model in my district (in Massachusetts). It’s worth examining, wherever you are. Here’s a PDF.
Click to access SEED_System_for_Educator_Evaluation_and_Development.pdf
As in Connecticut, the corrupt leadership of the MTA has signed off on a bargain that allows bogus VAM scores to be used as “part” of a teacher’s evaluation. In exchange, there is supposedly a component of the evaluation based on “goal setting” by the teachers themselves.
It turns out, for our “collaborative” component, teachers are required to set a quantitative goal of how many points of score increase we wish to be held accountable for. We must then present a step-by-step plan as to how we will accomplish that score increase. If a teacher’s students take a standardized exam, then that exam must be the instrument on which our collaborative evaluation is based, as well as our VAM score.
Take a good look at page 97:
” In SEED, a standardized assessment
has all of these features:
o Administered and scored in a consistent – or “standard” – manner;
o Aligned to a set of academic or performance “standards;”
o Broadly administered (e.g. nation- or state-wide);
o Commercially produced; and
o Often administered only once a year, although some standardized assessments are
administered two or three times per year. ”
I think “commercially produced” says it all. Do we even know whose foot we’re placing on our students’ throats, if we let sell-out leaders negotiate a preemptive surrender to this for-profit fraud?
“Collaborative” has irked me for some time. Union leaders continually tout teacher “cooperation” as a quality to be admired-do you applaud the fool that exposes their neck for the vampire?
“…do you applaud the fool that exposes their neck for the vampire?”
Yes, “collaborative” bothers me, too.
And the leader of the superintendent group here in CT, CAPSS, was quoted saying they would have to lay off teachers to hire more administrator to conduct evaluations to elimintate the “bad” teachers. Yeah, just what we need….more administrators, less teachers, increase in class size, full inclusion, less direct sped. services, etc. And only 23% of the teachers in CT will be evaluated by test scores….great incentive for the other teachers to work collaboratively on literacy skills when 77% will not be evaluated by test scores. Lambs to the slaughter. Everyone will be watching their back while “teaching”.
Don’t count on only 23% of teachers being evaluated by test scores, Linda, because as soon as the commercially produced Common Core assessments arrive, the others will have to submit to them. It’s already written in.
Also, the “incentive for the other teachers to work collaboratively on literacy skills” is nonsense, in any case. The professional development we undergo for Common Core “literacy skills” is focused entirely on the sacred new holy grail: raising scores on Gates’ as-yet-unseen, commercially produced, computer scored essay assessments.
I plan on going down swinging. I will continue to do what I think is right for my students. I think I already am a teacher with high standards. My students work hard, but we also have time for fun. If my best is not good enough, so be it. I will not sell my soul for rheeform.
In your book, Diane, you talked about the situation in San Diego where the superintendent imposed a curriculum, and the ensuing major increase in teacher-related stress sick days. While this takes experienced teachers out of the classroom, it also ups the cost to the district to pay for more substitutes. I also recall that, after the curriculum was removed, the situation corrected itself.
I was wondering if anyone has information on increases in sick days in districts across the country that coincide with increased testing and pressure on teachers being rated ineffective by the likes of VAM.
Also, we hear anecdotal evidence of students being subjected to pressure at school to get high scores. Has that translated into more student sick days? Districts get funded based on the number of students who are present in the class(ADA-average daily attendance).
If attendance is being negatively affected by the testing regime, this alone could result in lower funding for school districts. There’s plenty of recent evidence that lower resources gives school districts the opportunity to fire higher paid teachers, replace them with TFAs, bring in technology which will replace teachers, and cut out “extras” like counselors, nurses, librarians, the arts and PE. Instead of “saving” public education, these actions hasten its demise. But we already know that this is the ultimate goal.
Exactly right! Why do out of state corporations fund school board elections for candidates? Could it be to influence their vote on what the school district buys in the future? Charter schools are even easier, because there is no school board.
15 years ago, as a teacher, we were told to buy all our supplies from one major school supplier because we get 20% off the catalog price. A roll regular roll of masking tape was $9. That was in print.
Then I question making our local collection of neighborhood schools in my grammar school district into one big school by busing. Schools were not over crowded and no racial balance was needed. Busing is now 11% of the total budget.
At the same time, I worked at a high school that insisted on breaking the high school up into smaller schools.
To save on costs and unify instruction, the state wanted one school board to administer the 5 feeder grammar school districts and high school, instead of having 6 school boards. Not one step was ever taken in that direction.