Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, describes how New York is preparing principals and teachers for the new world order decreed by Arne Duncan and his Race to the Top.
She went to a training to learn how to evaluate teachers, something she had been doing successfully in her school for many years.
She learned which words were impermissible.
She was taught to think “out of the box” by conforming to the rules and regulations inside the box.
She was “calibrated.”
She thought she was trapped in a cheesy rendition of “Star Wars.”
She began hoping that Darth Vader would arrive and put everyone out of their misery.
And then she learned–read to the end of her piece–who started this insane process.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Craig Jerald, listed as author of the document Carol Burris references, is the head of Break the Curve consulting and…surprise: “He also worked for the U.S. Department of Education and began his career as a middle school teacher through Teach for America in California’s Long Beach Unified School District.” http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_alliance/craig-jerald
When I was an undergraduate in college in the mid-60s I worked for Ford Motor Company as a Work Standards trainee. In that job I was trained to observe the motions of assembly line workers, break them into component parts, and determine how long each motion took using a stopwatch. After 15 minutes of “sampling” I prepared a written report following a tight format devised by the industrial engineers. I switched my major and went into education where work was considered an art form. No more… more and more we’re operating our schools like the Rouge Engine Plant and using standardized tests as the “stopwatch”….
Are these people for real? When I was in the aerospace business we used to call this type of person an “Educated Idiot.”
Texas implemented in the early 1980’s a teacher evaluation system, based in large part on a check list from Madeline Hunter’s work. I was a curriculum director in Ysleta Independent School District in El Paso at the time, and I had been a successful teacher for 17 years prior to that point.
About 50 people from across the state were selected by the Texas Education Agency to be the guinea pig trainees on how to implement the new procedures. The training consisted in large part of viewing and scoring videos of teachers from Georgia teaching 15-minute segments. Those who did not score “correctly” had to stay after hours to be re-taught, and we could not leave until our scoring fell in the acceptable range.
Every administrator in the state would have to be trained, according to the law, and we had to be certified as an evaluator (calibrated?) or lose our administrative licenses. So getting the right score was important personally, as well as to the teachers under our supervision. We were also expected to be able to train other evaluators.
Many of us were near tears by the end of the first day, I among them.
By the third day, there were signs of rebellion breaking out. As we had talked together into the night after each day of frustration, we realized that the less content one knew and the less one knew about instruction, the more likely we were to score at acceptable ranges. For example, many of us who had been English teachers gave a weak score to a teacher who told his class that the elements of a newspaper story were plot, character, setting, and theme–totally confusing a non-fiction report with a fictional short story. The trainers gave that teacher a high score.
We got through the week, but our feedback to the trainers about their videos and rubrics was not flattering. Some few things were changed, but the system was implemented and instantly became hugely controversial and insulting to fine teachers.
Because teaching is both art and science and because kids differ from each other even more than teachers differ from each other, one would think that mechanistic, standardized approaches would never be promoted. However, three decades later it is even worse! My heart goes out to teachers–and to children.
My very fine Principal is in the process of being calibrated. Pretty sure he will leave the job sooner rather than later as a result. The entire matter casts a sadness over the teaching profession. How can any of this benefit children?
This madness has to stop. It is extraordinarily dangerous.
The people who are pushing these evaluation systems clearly have NO understanding, whatsoever, of teaching. I have dear friends who are teachers who are being subjected to this nonsense right now. They are all talking about trying to find ANYTHING else to do for a living rather than to have their work, which they care about deeply, ruined, despoiled, by arrogant, ignorant amateurs.
That’s the recipe for the most toxic of cocktails: arrogance and ignorance in equal measure.
The ending of the piece by Burris is precisely to the point. The same sort of extraordinary deafness to human factors was at work in that famously awful bit of technological interference with people’s work.
And, if these idiot technocrats wanted to apply real learning from business measurement to education, they would do well to scrap VAM and think, instead, in terms of worker-directed continuous quality control of the kind implemented, famously, in the Japanese auto industry, in which the workers on the line did their own evaluations, in concert, and were rewarded for their successful innovations (rather than having their autonomy removed and being themselves robotized). The great pioneers of quality control–William Edwards Deming and Joseph Moses Juran, were first and foremost humanists. They understood that work is done by humans and that humans require autonomy and intrinsic motivation. Key principles of Deming’s Total Quality Management movement included “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively,” “Eliminate slogans, exhortations,and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity” for “such exhortations only create adversarial relationships,” “Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factor floor,” “Eliminate management by objective,” “Remove barriers that rob the worker of his [or her] right ot pride of workmanship.”
People who know nothing of the history of industrial quality control and of its astonishing successes will be surprised to learn that such learnings as these are what the engineering types who studied quality improvement in the workplace and turned it into a true science came to. Exactly the opposite of what these idiot technocrats are now doing in our schools. Amusingly, the technocrats aren’t even familiar with the basic principles of modern industrial management, which run precisely counter to all that they are doing.
“They understood that work is done by humans and that humans require autonomy and intrinsic motivation.”
Probably when people do their best work and when the greatest inventions happen.
I say “amusingly,” but it’s a dark, dark humor that I find in the fact that the people who are attempting to apply business measurement principles to education aren’t even familiar with the most basic learnings from a century of quality control studies, which have led to breathtaking increases in industrial productively precisely by NOT doing, by scrupulously avoiding doing what the VAM zealots have foisted upon the nation’s educators. These VAM folks need some remedial education in the principles of modern management. If they had such education, if they were to read Deming, for example, they would recognize the key value of worker autonomy and self-directed continuous improvement.
I have not been calibrated, but I have been intimidated, mandated, hated, jaded, frustrated, (figuratively) castrated, and seldom celebrated.
Sounds like a Bob Dylan song. Sad that our noble profession is under siege. As individuals we must try to point out the folly of what is happening to parents and taxpayers. As a group, and with voices like Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris leading us, we need to act up.
Hilarious!!!! Well, well said!!!! 🙂
My principal and supervisor lamented over having to watch dozens and dozens of poorly angled videos in order to learn “how to evaluate” teachers. Gee, I thought they already knew how?
They did. We must now do it their way. Observations are now a multiple choice, standardized test.
We watched two videos in training and had a difficult time rating one performance. The majority if us teachers rated it lower than expected. We also had training on biased commentary–challenging, at first.
If new evaluation practices are not coming down from the federal level, why do they look the same in every state doing this?
I was calibrated for the edTPA. Like the calibration Carol describes, we watched video, were told we were to work on eliminating bias, and the entire exercise was designed for us to learn to see things the way the rubric demanded we see them.
Across the country people are being calibrated in order to be hired on a piece work basis and score student teachers’ edTPAs. They won’t even be in the classroom observing. but will only be viewing videos of classroom practice. And determining from this if student teachers can be certified.
If it is absurd for teacher evaluation, it is absurd for student teacher evaluation.
Still, while teacher education faculty are required to sign non-disclosure agreements.
While policy changes were made so that school districts cannot refuse to have video sent to Pearson.
While student and student teacher privacy is encroached upon.
While teacher educators are pushed aside.
An odd silence about this edTPA from those who otherwise are opposed to all of these ludicrous measures.
Curious.
More here: face.com/2013/02/04/pearson-comes-to-teacher-education-and-we-are-supposed-to-be-cool-with-that/
Curious indeed!
Are you sure the training wasn’t designed by Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter?
That is brilliant. Perfect!