Matt Di Carlo is a careful social scientist. He combs through the data on teacher evaluation and tries to understand whether they make sense statistically. In his latest blog, he reports that the the results so far seem to show that most teachers are getting very good ratings. This is a huge disappointment to the corporate reformers, because they were counting on the new evaluations to discover vast numbers of “bad teachers” and those teachers would be fired.
He cites an article in Education Week which found that “in Michigan, Florida and Georgia, a high proportion of teachers (more than 90 percent) received one of the two top ratings (out of four or five). This has led to some grumbling among advocates and others, citing similarities between these results and those of the old systems, in which the vast majority of teachers were rated ‘satisfactory,’ and very few were found to be ‘unsatisfactory.'”
In other words, the advocates believe that when students get low scores, it is the fault of bad teachers, so there must be lots of bad teachers out there.
The District of Columbia, as Di Carlo shows, just redesigned its ratings so that more teachers would fall into the “ineffective” range. How disappointing for reformers if they can’t find and fire large numbers of bad teachers! Think of all the job openings for the trainees of The New Teacher Project or TFA! All those little groups of new teachers funded by the Gates Foundation can cheer as the median age of teachers drops lower and lower, and inexperience becomes the norm.
Much as I admire Di Carlo, I disagree with him about teacher evaluation by test scores. I think it is clear that it will cause teaching to the test, cheating, gaming the system, avoiding the neediest students, and narrowing the curriculum. I think it is JUNK SCIENCE.
Value added assessment was cooked up by economists and statisticians to measure productivity, and it is out of place in education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Like all dumb ideas that come from the top-down approach, this is just another one. Get the FEDS out of Ed.!! They completely missed the dumbed down curriculum in the classroom.
All of the logic, statistics, and reasoning based on truth seems to make no difference.
This fast track rending of the public school system/community has been put in place over a long time and is well designed and now implemented. We have a government
which appears none functioning and in gridlock. Both parties in agreement with
privatizing anything that walks, talks, breathes, or chews gum. The name of this game
is follow the money and obey. A travesty and betrayal!!!
What would be a good measurement of productivity/performance for teachers?
If you have time, I recommend you watch this video. Diane starts at about 8:30…you shouldn’t miss her closing (first video posted):
http://atthechalkface.com/2013/03/23/video-saturday-with-ravitch-and-sirota-i-use-the-term-reform-ironically/
Linda, thanks – I on it.
There is no “good measurement of productivity/performance” as the teaching and learning process cannot be logically quantified in any way, shape or manner and therefore be “measured”.
So teachers should be exempt from such measures?
Angela, teachers should be evaluated by other professionals, not by formulae based on test scores. There is no science or validity to such measures.
Angela,
Exempt from what “measures”? Do you mean being evaluated? If so then no. If you mean being evaluated by illogical, flawed mathematically based testing regime systems, then yes. Please name any other “profession” that evaluates its personnel in such flawed illogical fashion.
Duane
Angela,
Teachers should be evaluated by experienced professionals.
As you commented, experienced professionals don’t always know everything, i.e., the NCLB policy makers and other studies. Professionals, being the creative crafters we are, will always find a way to game the system.
No one mentions the end-user feedback system – parent satisfaction controlled evaluation measures such as parent satisfaction surveys combined with other measures as simpler, far less expensive, and more indicative measures of teacher performance.
Kids can tell you if a teacher is bad or good; they also tell their friends and parents.
The last sentence is very true that students know who the good and bad teachers are. Students in high school should have more say in real time with education policy. After all they know what interests them and are not stupid. We need shop classes again. Is everyone a desk jockey? No. A Lexus mechanic can easily make more than the average PHD and his job cannot be offshored, has great benefits and retirement packages. What is wrong with that?
why aren’t teachers suggesting these measures for performance? To me and many others, it sounds like teachers want all the goodies – pay not based on merit and tenure – for showing up.
My experiences with public schools were not good and I have lost respect for teachers over the years – I am not alone in having those feelings. However, I owe my life to some great teachers.
My landscaper probably made more than I did as a PCP?
I thought about asking him for a job. 🙂
I do see the similarities to medicine. I don’t like what is happening to teachers.
You contradict yourself. Yes, we have all had a bad teacher. I have also had a bad dentist. I had a bad mechanic and a lousy plumber once. And we have some pretty crappy health care workers in our country too. How about the politicians? They seem to have a huge credibility gap. The list is endless.
Don’t talk to me about just showing up. As a CT teacher, I know six teachers who just showed up on 12/14/12. Erase those words from your diatribe.
You lose credibility if you continue to slam an entire profession and label us all lazy and incompetent because of your recent experiences. And sometimes “bad teacher” can mean many things, such as your kid didn’t get an A or your kid wasn’t chosen as student of the month.
Whatever your beef is don’t take it out on ALL teachers and stereotype. We are tired of the bashing of an entire profession or we will just ignore your ignorant rants.
Please don’t be so defensive, I am not attacking teachers. I am sharing my point of view which can be contradictory because I am truly conflicted about this problem. I see teachers as being muscled into a corner; however, I learned these things have two sides.
My brother is a math teacher in Florida. You will not win any points by attacking people who don’t agree or share your point of view.
I come to this blog because I want to understand and learn from you – then I can make a decision. Right now I have questions for both sides. You are more accessible which is a good thing.
I am sorry that you misconstrue my words.
The words “just show up” send me over the edge. Our Governor, a lapdog for the privatization movement, used those words in reference to tenure when he was on his teacher bashing campaign, written for him by non educators.
First, they are due process rights and I have witnessed the removal process for teachers several times. Many teachers will leave before the process is started, so the figures are usually inaccurate about how many teachers, who earned due process rights, are removed.
Also, the procedure to earn these rights is lengthy here in CT (and most states) and a teacher can be dismissed for no reason up until the point. I have mentored teachers working though the old CT portfolio process and it was grueling: lessons, reflections, student samples, surveys, videos, etc. The final submission was a binder many inches thick rated to be reviewed by a panel. It has changed since then, but it is still quite rigorous. Many teachers leave the profession before this point anyway.
I have seen very few just show up and the percentage of low performers would be about the same in any industry. Apparently we have low performers at the USDOE and there is nothing happening to them. They continue to lie and spin their schemes.
And Obama owns the race to nowhere…..you can’t cling to Bush and NCLB much longer.
There are always winners and losers in a race, far more losers. This will be a terrible stain on his legacy years from now.
@Angela: I wouldn’t want my fellow educators evaluated by parents. While I would be mostly immune (the parents of my students are mostly not involved whatsoever in the education of their kids), too many of my colleagues would be at the mercy of parents who thought their child’s teacher gave too much homework (or not enough), and teachers that are strong disciplinarians would be rated poorly by the “my child can do no wrong” type of parent that is ubiquitous now. In my experience, both as a kid and as a teacher, kids can tell if a teacher is good or bad years after that information would be useful. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say that they were glad they had a teacher that they hadn’t liked at the time; apparently it’s not fun having a “hard” teacher, but it is profitable.
Angela,
I disagree that parent or student surveys are a good way to evaluate teachers. I also do not believe that children always know who the good teachers are. I DO think that student and parent input and engagement are extraordinarily helpful. However, parents may be unduly influenced by issues that are not central to whether a teacher is doing a good job (“Why did my child get a B+ and not an A?” “Why don’t you assign spelling and vocabulary lists every week?”) I am always happy to answer this type of question, of course. But my point is that the criteria used by parents to measure a teacher’s skill are not always on target. In addition, I would be hesitant to have someone who has never seen me do my job be the judge of the quality of my work. I believe teachers should be evaluated by other professionals who know both the content area and pedagogy.
Peer evaluation has come up many times here. There is far from unanimous agreement that it is the best way to go.
In every faculty that I know, professors are judged by their peers. How about at your university? Are you judged by the test scores of your students?
I am an advocate of peer review. I did not notice that you were in favor of merit pay if peer review was involved. I apologize for missing that.
Angela: many of my students’ parents haven’t met me. They do not come to Open House or the mandated conference (we only ask for one per year). All they know is what their child tells them, and the grades on the report card. Only one parent has watched me teach in 5 years, but only because she came 10 minutes easly to drop off cupcakes. Not to mention most of my parents barely graduated high school, many don’t speak English and they can hardly be expected to understand the complex nature of education. Their decisions will be based on how cute my classroom is, or how happy their child is, NOT on my abilities to educate.
Kids are not trained to tell if a teacher is bad or good. How can you honestly say that?? There is no way they know what are effective teaching methods or the expanse of teacher content knowledge. Students will complain about teachers who challenge them and don’t give out easy grades. They will say a teacher is “good” if they give out easy grades. You are turning a teacher into a crowd pleaser rather than an actual teacher. Parents don’t actually know what a teacher does either.
Yes there are kids like that but the vast majority are honest and taken together I believe will give honest stories of a teacher’s performance. Their opinion counts! That is one of many community -driven approaches. But no one metric should be used for performance.
Isn’t that the case right now? StudentTesting accounts for 25-35% of teacher performance scores. When I practiced, one metric used to evaluate physician performance was patient satisfaction surveys another was disease management based on accepted guidelines; Individual physician results were compared to the average for the practice, the area, etc. I was skeptical but it worked! Unfortunately, it is not uniformly practiced. And it can be manipulated. No standard is perfect.
What would you suggest be done at this point?
Angela: at least patients have met their doctor. What about parents who have not even stepped foot in the school?
Certainly not the hundreds of tests given on the most chaotic curriculum in the history of education.
What about the PAR program used in Montgomery County, Maryland?
How sad for Bill Gates. His formula for Hillsborough County Fl, demands that five percent of tenured teachers be given the boot EVERY year. We are required to lose a much greater proportion of new teachers.
“I think it is JUNK SCIENCE.”
I don’t!
I KNOW it’s JUNK SCIENCE.
In TN whenever there’s a disparity between a teacher’s classroom observation score and TVAAS score, the Dept. of Ed. just insists the evaluator was incompetent or biased. Could it be the error lies with TVAAS? No, of course not.
If you really want a real evaluation let us take the Brentwood teacher and put them in Watts and take the Watts teacher and put them in Brentwood. Want to bet that the Watts teacher when placed in Brentwood has no problem and the Brentwood teacher placed in Watts does not know what to do and has bad scores. Now with this being the situation how can they say this is fair and reasonable and a true evaluation of a teacher. I want to see administrators evaluated. That is an easy one and they have much more power in decisions which directly effect students and the district than teachers do.
High Five George!
I know it is off topic but have you considered doing a piece about this?
From a Bradenton.com piece by Kathleen McGrory:
A growing number of lawmakers have personal ties to charter schools. Sen. John Legg, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, is co-founder and business administrator of Dayspring Academy in Port Richey. Anne Corcoran, wife of future House Speaker Richard Corcoran, plans to open a classics-themed charter school in Pasco County. House Budget Chairman Seth McKeel is on the board of the McKeel Academy Schools in Polk County. In addition, the brother-in-law of House Education Appropriations Chairman Erik Fresen runs the state’s largest charter management firm, Academica Corp. and Sen. Anitere Flores, also of Miami, is the president of an Academica-managed charter college in Doral.
Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2013/03/18/4441277/advocates-for-floridas-charter.html#storylink=cpy
Like I always say “You buy these people cheap.” Conflict of interests I would say. How about you?
Yeah, they are all for sale.
Please- call it what is it- JUNK. It doesn’t even live up to lowest bar of Junk Science.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
I created a response that offers another view of teachers getting rated and labeled. You’ll likely have to click on each of these two pieces and further enlarge them on your screen to read the copy.
The piece deals with how Charlotte Danielson’s rubrics are driving the narrative of teacher evaluation, and while they have some merit, everyone knows that you live in the 3’s and visit once in a while the 4’s. Why so many of us are subject to a rubric is mostly something to aspire to (a good thing) but rarely ever accomplished (a bad, foolish thing!) makes this evaluation system highly questionable.
See:
http://thetruthoneducationreform.blogspot.com/2012/12/blog-post_4204.html?view=snapshot
Also see:
http://thetruthoneducationreform.blogspot.com/2013/03/under-knife.html?view=snapshot
A Rubric is a devil’s tool
Excellent article. Thanks, Dr. Ravitch.
To all, from chalk face. A message to parents from your child’s teacher:
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?h=315&v=IQ-OtEdFAKI&w=560&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIQ-OtEdFAKI%26w%3D560%26h%3D315
For those who doubt parents and student controlled satisfaction performance measures, my thoughts keep coming back to a recently read book on the Positive Deviance (PD) approach, where solutions already exist within the community, the so-called disadvantaged communities we want to save. These positive deviances from the norm within their own communities have figured out the solutions. These have succeeded against the same odds. The genius in this approach is the use of empowerment. Letting the community discover the solutions within their own communities, embolden the residents to act because they see living proof that they can solve their problems. (The Power of Positive Deviance Pascale & Sternin, 2010)
I think each group in this battle think they are they the community, and they are; they are one in many other communities whose intentions are to influence the intended poor communities. Why not help provide the resources needed to help those poor communities find the solutions that already exist within their communities?
Instead I hear a lot of condescending and patronizing comments about parents in those poor communities which I find disrespectful, particularly, since it’s being reframed into a civil rights issue. Teachers don’t like to be disrespected neither do parents.
I lived in those communities. My mother may not have shown up not because she didn’t care but she worked 2nd shift. They are many working families in poor neighborhoods – some may find that hard to believe – please don’t lump them into one group. Many care about their children’s education but they WORK and don’t have the luxury of taking time off.
Angela,
I have been reading this blog since the summer of 2012 and I have not read any comments disparaging parents. Teachers are very well aware of the challenges families are facing. We are on the same team to do what is best for children. If you have time will you watch this. It is only four minutes.
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?h=315&v=IQ-OtEdFAKI&w=560&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIQ-OtEdFAKI%26w%3D560%26h%3D315
Linda, thank you for the link to the video. It was a nice video and I agree with many of its points.
I feel there is a lack of emphasis on parents. Maybe it’s the younger teachers from TFA, but the prevailing claim of teachers to know more about your child than you do is offensive to many parents.
Upon reflection, most of my children’s teachers in middle school and high school were young. Some of my children’s favorite were mature with decades of experience in elementary school. They were strict making the kids initially fearful, but those same kids came to adore them. When I volunteered for one particular teacher, I seemed never to please her because I was not artsy fartsy, and she would let me know. Indisputably, she was one of the best teachers and both my children were fortunate to have her.
Personally, The Trigger Bill does have some appeal.
If closing some schools mean allowing those children to go to any school including private schools, that is not a bad thing for a smart child living in poverty.
Teachers do not profess to know more about your child, but we are experts in our content area and I do know strengths and weaknesses in reference to reading, writing, thinking and speaking skills. However, I am not an expert on everything about your child. Sometimes parents don’t want to hear how their child can improve their skills. If they are not earning all A’s it must be the teacher’s fault.
Do you feel the same way when the pediatrician gives you advice when your child is sick?
It is the lack of respect for the profession that keeps some of us at odds. I see my kids as individiuals with dreams, aspirations, goals, personalities, hobbies, quirks, fears, etc. I don’t see them as a number or test score.
Some of the so-called failing schools have been set up for failure so they can be taken over. That is a tactic and a part of the “reform” shell game. All of sudden there is money that wasn’t there before. And there is the promise of shiny new things: iPads, brand new text books, young teachers who really care, uniforms….lots of promises are made.
I wonder if there will be a reverse trigger to get your school back once the privatized ones fail or refuse to service all and the only choice you have is if they choose you.
Linda,
Those communities with failing schools were already set up for failure long before education reform. Those children are entering a world stacked against them regardless of reform, unless we reform society.
I think the Ct model is interesting because there is emphasis on parent engagement. I see some good things – collaboration and healthy dialogue – that has to be good! 🙂
But that is not what the new crew uses as their metric when the want to deem a school a failure. They say poverty isn’t destiny and if we just get rid of the lazy unionized teachers with low expectations children will be saved.
The privatizers use test scores to rate schools as failures and then they use the new term underutilization as a reason to close schools. They will never run out of reasons to spin around, turn around, close, dismantle and disrupt communities because a better schools is not their goal. A profit stream..a funneling of money their way is the prize. Kids are props and their data is for sale….this is a stimulus program and the kids are the widgets.
Yes, many kids start behind others due to circumstances beyond their control. The so called achievement gap is an opportunity gap, an income gap, a job gap, etc. We are spinning our wheels by blaming teachers for the economic conditions in our country and all of society’s ills.
I don’t teach and bond with my students to produce workers for the wealthy. That’s not my job and it never will be.
There have not been many posts questioning parents, but there have be a few, and one in the middle of August generated 180 comments and several additional posts by Dr. Ravitch. The original post can be found here: https://dianeravitch.net/2012/08/12/do-parents-always-know-what-is-best/
The issue wasn’t questioning it was insulting parents because of their circumstances. We can question parents. I do. Is there a quiet time to do homework? Is your son upset about anything? Did she read the book I lent to her? Do you have any questions for me?
Learn something please.
I think poster Warren started the controversy by saying ” I have met maybe, MAYBE 10 families in twenty-plus years of teaching who were capable of making curricular decisions for their kids”. Some parents took offense.
Angela, you’re right. High quality, persistent parent engagement is critical to the success of children. A parent is a child’s first and most powerful teacher, and when an educator in the classroom has an alignment with a parent on a consistent basis, children improve their cognition. Our current systems and school culture – most of it – do not practice excellent parent engagement. There should be at least two parent workshops per month every month showing parents how they can help their children. Workshops should always be interactive, and preferably, parents should bring their children with them to participate. Federal and state funding should reflect this degree of resource offered to parents. It does not for the most part, even with block grants.
Parents, on the other hand, must commit to participating in their child’s education on all levels, and helping them directly with their homework to whatever extent they truly can. They must also impart the VALUE of education their children as part of an overall ethic and sensibility. This is lacking far too much in our consumerist culture, and schools can help cultivate this when they offer high calibre programs with proper funding.
Parents are able to communicate using the telephone, cell phone, internet, and a note. I honestly feel your responses are insulting. The parent eval, student eval. are not valid evals. You are just turning the teacher into a dog performing tricks for a reward. Teachers know if a parent is engaged and worried about their child’s performance in school. The parent who works on 2nd shift would contact the teachers before hand and tell them. The teacher and parent would find other ways to communicate. Why don’t you go into communities with the PD approach and make it work around the nation. You make it all sound so easy and “presto” all problems disappear.
Nothing is ever easy!
Many poor communities are filled with legal first generation mmigrants as parents who are set in the ways of their culture.
My mother raised four children after the death of my father; and worked two jobs at times. She still had time to prepare dinner for us when we got home. In those days, teachers and parents did not communicate much, partly, I suppose because there was no internet. or cell phones. So communication was not easy but I should not have to explain that. However, I felt the need to defend my mother.
Wacky Teacher Eval Schemes.
Diane: I am not always on your side regarding standardized testing, but I am often in agreement regarding teacher evaluation via test scores. I recently discovered a blog addressing this problem:
“Getting Learn’d: real learning is far too complex to “add, divide, and measure.”
“There’s a lot of talk in higher ed today about measuring student learning (k-12 ideas, like “outcomes-based assessment” have floated on up to the college-level). There’s a lot of talk of measuring student success. But really how do you define and measure success? It’s sort of complex. So we’re feeling a lot of pressure to increase graduation rates. Because this is something that is easily measured. [Not.] It can easily be put into “charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure;” the figures can be “ranged in columns.” See the lovely diagrams on the White House College Scorecard website.”
The author uses poetry, from Whitman and Dickinson, to tell “us that the way we measure our world (mathematically, scientifically), the way we break it down, does not do justice to the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of the universe.”
“The same is true of student learning: the measurements we’re forced to use to try to quantify [learning] will never be able to accurately assess true student learning…because real learning is far too complex to “‘add, divide, and measure’.”
http://hulehansays.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/getting-learnd/
Bob Gilvey
Also, if your mom worked on second shift, why not have your dad or someone else come to the meeting????????
I think I responded to that. My father died when I was 9. You make assumptions without facts.
Angela, the very vast majority of people writing and promulgating these teacher evaluation policies are neither educators nor cognitive scientists. David Coleman is one such superb example . . .
May I just say this, Angela, about measurement: if a physician uses best practices with a patient, and the patient still does not improve or improve enough despite many adjustments (changing prescriptions, different procedures, holistic, homeopathic, and naturopathic therapies, etc) because the patient refuses to cooperate, does not follow doctor’s orders strictly, or has no support system at home to reinforce health habits, should the doctor be forced to give up his license, be fired from the clinic or hospital, or be blamed for the patient’s lack of improvement or even death?
I’m not saying that teacher quality does not make a difference, nor do I believe that we teachers can’t compensate for children’s poverty levels and lack of support at home. But we can only do that up until a certain extent. Beyond a threshold and without wrap around services, teachers and administrators can do little else to increase the chances of student academic performance.
I’d like to disclose to you that I put in an average of 128 unpaid hours above and beyond my contract every month (and I am NOT seeking more pay or a bonus at all!), have spent over $2,600 this year of my own money for vital supplies for my student, am Nationally Board Certified, and perform one-on-one parent academic EIGHTY MINUTE long conferences once a month for each of my 28 families whose children I service (I am an ESL teacher to low income Latino students). You do the math in terms of how much time I put in. I usually am the first in my building in the morning and the last one to leave at night. my wife is a teacher, but despite her empathy, this has posed challenges to a balanced life outside of work, and legitimately so.
But guess what, Angela (and Diane and all others): when my 5 year old English language learners take their local computerized reading assessment (a test that I am literally not privy to use, that has no practice versions, that I will never understand the design of, and will never get specific and corrective feedback based on its design), I will have to adjust my teaching on hideously generalized feedback like, “Teach this child more high frequency words like ‘I’, ‘like’, ‘the’, ‘mom’, etc. . . .” Without getting the exact list of which words the children missed and which they were able to read, I am teaching in the dark. Yet I am told by the corporation that owns the software that this is proprietary information, and that I’m not privy to it. My district is basically complicit thus far because they spent large sums of money, some of which was supplemented by RTTT funds (though not much!) and how would it look if they posed this expensive data collecting program as inadequate to the Board of Education, who represent tax payers in the school’s township?
But this gets better: 20% of my yearly evaluation is based on this digitized reading assessment. I have very general ideas as to how I should adjust my teaching, but there’s nothing specific I am given by the software to tailor my instruction for each child, or at least form groups that show the same trends and patterns in their weaknesses. And BTW, after completing the first of 2 parts to this assessment, the children are rewarded with a mindless video game having nothing to do with literacy. We see dozens of children therefore aimlessly clicking away and rushing just to get to the video game because they are 5 years old, and there is not enough personnel in the school to monitor the children. The latest plan is to have 25 teachers (pulled at once form their teaching) to stand in between each laptop to monitor about 24 children. So far, this plan has not materialized due to resources and time. Furthermore, this assessment, which obviously stems from the data obsessed and fixated New York State Regents (which is influenced heavily by a phalynx of number crunchers like Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, and Rupert Murdoch) does not render a true picture of each child’s reading acumen? Why? Well, in this test, children do not actually voice any of the words being read. The text is read TO the child, and the child clicks on an answer in the form of multiple choice, sort of like a bubble-in-the-answer pencil and paper test. I gave a well known reading assessment – not digitized – known as the DRA (degree of reading acumen) to a child who started the year as a beginner English language learner, and is now reading a chapter book at DRA 8 as of 2 weeks ago. Our school goal for all kindergartners at the end of June is to be at DRA 4. This child was given comprehension questions and answered each of them accurately, including inferential questions that start with “Why” and “Ho do you know . . . . “. The child’s word count was 97% and her fluency was a little above average in terms of words read correctly per minute.
This same child, a little girl of 5, took the computerized reading test not long before I administered the DRA.
The result? The computer program declared that this child was below kindergarten level reading.
These are the same exact results that will be used to judge my pedagogy and effectiveness as a teacher.
It still gets even better: the standardized test my students will take measures literacy far more than it does overall second language acquisition. Granted, it is not cost and time feasible to design and implement a test that can do the latter. But we were also informed at a state meeting that we were to expect about a 30% to 40% drop in scores this year because New York State had adjusted the test to align with the Common Core Standards (CCS). Thus, my test prep has been without guidance, without materials to better prepare the children for the test, and alas, I just purchased $150 of test prep booklets for my students and their parents (after literally 5 requests for reimbursement to two directors in my district that were altogether ignored!!!!), which I have discovered don’t align fully with the CCS. The material is non-refundable, and my credit card will not dispute the merchandise in this instance. The publishing company, which assured me that these materials were CCS aligned, did not bother to do its homework by robustly consulting with state government or the publishers of the test, Questar.
BUT . . . . I GET TO BE EVALUATED ON THIS!
Angela, we teachers do believe in testing. Tests tell us about strengths and weaknesses in our students. . . . at least, well psychometrically designed tests do. According to that data, we make adjustments in our teaching monthly, weekly, daily, and even minute by minute. Teachers make hundreds of adjustments in their instruction a day. We do it automatically and before, during, and after a session with students is completed. But tests tell us little about our degree of teaching acumen and professionalism. A plethora of testing companies have come forth and formally declared that their products assesses the student and NEVER the teacher. They acknowledge the design of their product.
For judging teachers, peer review and an experienced administrator who was a classroom teacher for MANY years are the most accurate lens.
We teachers are not afraid of being evaluated and critiqued. It is JUNK, POLITICIZED SCIENCE that we will not tolerate by allowing it to mischaracterize us through tests that are simply not sophisticated enough to render accuracy and that are also given this highly theoretical, algorithmic, speculatively statistical and extrapolated spin with regard to their ability to label teachers.
Come to my school and shadow me for a week or even a day. I invite you.
I would day that if one wants to understand the “widget”, don’t just speak about it as someone consuming the widget, but speak as someone who has obtained the resources use to make the widget and as someone who manufactured the widget under all sorts of political and cultural shifts.
Then you’ll really understand the widget
There is so much teachers do but often goes unrecognized. Thank you for taking your time on a Sunday to give voice to the efforts of teachers. You speak for many. Well said.
You’re welcome; like so many of us, I feel passionate about teacher quality, and its definition has been mostly perverted and skewered by the very same policy makers whose models further stratify children.
There is tremendous hope and a push against people like Eli Broad, Bill Gates, to name just a very few. Let’s not forget at that at least 30 out of 50 governors are in on this educational fraud as well. Many more are jumping on the bandwagon.
I, for one, joined The Network for Public Education . . .
My money has also been sent. I hope every teacher, working, retired, or planning on teaching , sends their support. Add parents and community members who care, and eventually the truth will be seen in the numbers.
Bravo!
With all due respect to many of those who have commented on this topic, I think some people have (in good faith) offered what I consider inadequate ‘technical’ solutions to a fundamental problem: deep distrust of teachers and public schools.
To get a flavor of how powerful a deep trust of teachers and public schools can be, read Pasi Sahlberg’s FINNISH LESSONS (2011). I especially recommend chapter 3, “The Finnish Advantage: The Teachers.” Note the author’s choice and placement of adjectives in this heading on p. 93: “GOOD TEACHERS, GREAT SCHOOLS.”
Just my dos centavitos worth.
🙂
KrazyTA, Kudos!
I think Americans just aren’t happy unless they have something to be angry about. We just want to fight and pick each other apart. I wish I lived in one of those socialist European countries.
As someone with very strong ties to Italy and France, I can tell you that despite their problems there, they’re NOT socialist. They are democratic with far more diversity and equal proportions of parties than exist here in the United States.
Your adjective is an oversimplistic understanding of how countries like Italy, Spain, France, and Finland have evolved as sovereignties and how their citizens live a far more just and equitable life than we Americans.
We in the United States will have many hard lessons to learn and many injustices to overcome. We are experiencing exactly that in public education.
Having a society that has more fiscal justice does not trigger a “socialist” label. We have been brainwashed here into thinking that the wealthy paying a fair share of taxes for the common good is “socialism” or “communism”.
That is a truly cartoonish mentality (not necessarily yours!).