In this post, Anthony Cody takes issue with Randi Weingarten’s decision to write an essay with Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation about teacher evaluation. Here is the essay.
The fundamental problem with the Gates Foundation is that they have directed the entire national conversation to blaming teachers–instead of poverty and segregation– for low test scores. They have put hundreds of millions of dollars into evaluating teachers, finding good teachers (and rewarding them), finding “bad” teachers (and firing them).
For the past four years, since Gates dropped his small high school obsession, the foundation has been determined to prove that it is possible to find a metric to evaluate teachers. Test scores are a large part of that metric. In some states, thanks to Bill Gates and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, the test scores count for as much as 50% of a teacher’s evaluation.
This emphasis on test scores has predictably led to narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and cheating. It has also distracted policymakers from addressing the real causes of student failure, not teachers, but the conditions in which children and families live and the growing inequality in our society.
Gates has also funded phony teacher groups–made up of young teachers with little experience and no career commitment to teaching–who demand that teachers be evaluated by test scores, despite the evidence against it, and who testify in legislatures that they are teachers and they want no job protections. Gates, in short, is no friends to teachers, to the teaching profession, or to unions.
In 2010, he urged the nation’s governors not to pay teachers extra for experience or master’s degrees, but to increase class size for the most “effective” teachers. How will education improve if classes are larger, and teachers have less experience and less education?
I think I understand what Randi is thinking. She thinks she got Vicki Phillips to agree that teacher evaluation is moving too fast. And Randi did not endorse VAM or MET. She believes she won concessions from the nation’s most powerful foundation.
But here is my view: the teaching profession across America is under attack. The Gates Foundation has helped to fuel that attack by its claim that teacher quality is our biggest problem. Teacher-bashing has become sport for talk shows and pundits. Legislatures are vying to see what they can do to demoralize teachers, what benefit they can strip away, what right they can negate.
In the face of this onslaught, the issue of teacher evaluation is less important than the morale of teachers and the survival of the teaching profession. I have concluded that the effort to reduce teaching to a metric–the goal of the Gates Foundation–is failing and will continue to fail because the flaws are too deep for it to ever work. Teachers should be evaluated by their peers and experienced administrators. I have been impressed by the Peer Assistance and Review program in Montgomery County, Maryland. I note that no other nation in the world is trying to quantify teaching. There is a reason for that. What matters most cannot be measured, so we value only what can be measured. And that may be what matters least.
It’s terrible that Randi thinks testing should be included in teacher evaluations. Even though she is trying to keep the high ground with her position on VAM she refuses to concede the testing strategy endorsed by Gates.
In this case guilt by association applies. You can’t co-author a position and then claim you don’t totally agree. Randi’s bully-pulpit should never be shared with those that fuel teacher bashing.
Bottom line high stakes testing abuses children, it’s an ineffective way to evaluate teachers, it’s wasting millions of dollars, it’s fraught with corruption, it’s driven by greed and it will destroy our public education system.
Randi is wrong on this one
Excellent summary of the sad facts.
WATCH OUT!!!!!!!
Ms. Weingarten is going to come back at the Ravitch blog with plenty of slithering, smoke, mirrors, and other unctuous tricky rhetoric that will never commit to a uniform focused stand, but will attempt to concoct a melange of “let’s hold hands and we’re all in this together”.
She has not only deceived teachers and the profession over the years; she continues, perhaps just as bad, to lie to herself.
And I have little confidence that she can ever admit that to herself.
Perhaps she should run for office. Sounds like she’s the perfect politician.
I think the Gates Foundation and Randi have made it clear where her next six-figure job is coming from.
Let’s work to get her there as soon as possible.
Bill and Melinda will be long remembered for the harm they are causing to public education and teachers. What a sad legacy. It could (should) have been different.
For it to have been different, Gates and his people would have had to have actual experienced teachers in his decision-making process. But we all know that teachers are rarely if ever asked about what good teaching involves by anyone with the power to determine what teachers and schools must do.
And the harm they are causing to children.
To even give the appearance of uniting with The Gates Foundation was a huge misstep. You think you know what Randi was thinking on this one? I can’t even begin to imagine what Randi was thinking. Her alliance with Gates showed a total disregard for what public school teachers are going through right now. For Ms. Weingarten to not understand how her actions would hurt us makes me wonder if she is REALLY listening to her members or if her members are truly letting her know what they are going through. Unless she lives in a cave, she must have known that aligning herself with Gates, Murdoch,The Walton Foundation, or any others of their ilk who seek to privatize and destroy public education, would be a huge mistake. Therefore, because I respect Ms. Weingarten’s intelligence, I am led to believe that she knew EXACTLY what she was doing but chose to align herself with those corporations who are using our children as pawns. When I read that article I felt as if I had been slapped. I am a union advocate through and through and I have much higher expectations of my union leaders. I also don’t feel the need to pretend that I believe she is acting in our best interests. Our union isn’t weakened by that admission. Do you not think the corporations already knew we were weakened? Ultimately, challenging our union leaders will bring us the solidarity we have been lacking for a long long time.
Anthony Cody or Karen Lewis for AFT President! Karen Lewis is the only teacher union leader with any guts these days.
Apples and oranges. Karen is the only choice.
Thank you for this thoughtful response, Diane. VAM has no place in evaluations, and numerical ratings are inaccurate and demeaning.
Carol,
Do you recall the piece in Edwize that mischaracterized your mission against using testing for evaluations?
Who do you think ordered that piece to be written? It certainly wasn’t Bill Gates. Then there was the piece by Goodman who made a disparaging comparison of those who opposed VAM, And who does Goodman work for?
Basically you defend Randi’s actions even though VAM is clearly part of that article although thinly veiled. Everything in that article was wrong, yet Randi put her stamp of approval on each and every point when her name appears as a co-author. At least Anthony took her to task. BTW, your facts are wrong. She did introduce and back VAM in NYC. In fact she sent her reps to spin it to teachers. And when teachers asked the hard questions, they were met with hostility (See posts by NYC Educator and other NYC bloggers on this subject.) If you really think you know what Randi is thinking, then perhaps you can also explain why she endorses charters and merit pay as well and why she agreed to contracts that caused many teachers to be fired. And what was she thinking when she endorsed mayoral control not once, but twice and did nothing to put a stop to his third term. Is that really the kind of thinking that jives with your mission??
Thank you for writing a response, but frankly I was not surprised to see the blunt of the blame on Gates and a pass for Randi. Maybe one day you will come to see what others have been trying to tell you. btw, are you sure about that $20 figure???
The AFT and NEA have received millions from Gates in the past few years:
It doesn’t surprise me at all that Randi is giving false credibility to Gates. What surprises me is that others are surprised.
Gayaneh,
We are not at all surprised. But we are surprised that Diane is not surprised.
Thank you for saying what I was thinking, Gayanah. When I attempt to state these types of facts in the world of Favbook and Twitter I am sometimes met with defensive hostility from certain people I would not expect it from. They try to dazzle me with grandiose paragraphs and verbose language. Basically, they try to embarrass me into line. I see right through their tactic and continue to fight to regain a semblance of union strength.
I was a UFT chapter chair in NYC while Randi was UFT president, and while I think she did a generally good job of keeping the Bloomberg/Klein evil empire from succeeding in its ugliest attempts to destroy teachers and schools, she always struck me as a smart strategist rather than a fighting teacher. The UFT under her leadership was highly undemocratic in many respects. Randi herself has a history of trying to “defeat” bad education policy by co-opting gentler versions of it and claiming it as victory – see her creation of UFT charter schools in NY. She wanted to prove that a union charter could be as excellent as the private charters that were springing up all over the city in the early-mid 2000s. Fine. But in doing so, she lent credence to the notion that charter schools are a good idea. Innovative schools are most definitely a good idea. The charter architecture is not about innovation, however; it is about privatizing education and crushing unions, and Randi helped legitimize it. She’s not awful by any means, but she gets some really big things really wrong, and like most people in high places, she does so as power working with power to determine the fates of the powerless. I would blame it at least as much on institutional structure as on Randi herself.
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Randi Weingarten has consistently thrown her constituents under the corporate right bus during her own tenure as a union leader — she is the worst sort of infecting shill or Trojan horse pretending to front for teachers seeking ‘compromise’ and ‘common ground’ before the onslaught of Gates/Broad/Bloomberg and their very willing corporate right henchpersons Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada, et al…
Weingarten is a poseur, an accommodator of the billionaire boys club, the Neville Chamberlain, if you will, of a formerly formidable union…
Weingarten is a traitor to the interests of teachers and of workers in America, and SHE MUST GO!
Teachers are only as good as their material. With nonscience of creationism (excuse me, christianity) and anti evolution, what do you expect? When you teach your kids they’ll be rewarded for just showing up, why should they strive to be their best and put in the work and effort? And now you want to treat the symptom, not the cause? Oh, did I hurt your feelings? Sorry. Here’s a trophy for being a good sport and listening to me.
The two-part, four-hour PBS special “180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School” ended minutes ago. Watch it in its entirety. Then consider whether it supports—or severely undermines—the Phillips-Weingarten approach.
Krazy–off-topic, but we should discuss this. It was very good, & I, too, recommend it. I’d love to hear comments from those D.C. Met staff members.
“I note that no other nation in the world is trying to quantify teaching.” Really? The UK?
Also, when you have the OECD doing the quantifying for you, it’s then not only about nations, but about global institutions (and multinationals) too.
Randi is destroying the profession from the inside and this may have been her mission all along. Why is it so difficult to get rid of her? She has done nothing to honor and support our profession. If we served our students the way she serves us, we would be long gone.
I say give her a standardized test! One that WE make up!
Hi folks. I’m from Montgomery County which Diane references at the end of her blog. The PAR program we have in effect is fair, clear and spells out 6 Standards (and an additional Standard for school leaders) which provide a “rubric” for good teaching practices/skills. The standards are based on the book, “The Skillful Teacher,” by Jon Saphier, Mary Ann Haley and Robert Gower. As new teachers enter the county, they are asked to take The Skillful Teacher I and II PD courses valued with credits which clearly spell out the expectation MC has for it’s teachers. They are supported by teacher leaders in our schools as well as a Consulting Teacher outside of the school and connected with our union. If the new teacher or one who is tenured is found not to meet a standard, they typically have one year, with supports in place, to address the skills they are lacking. At the end of many observations, a PAR panel comprised of principals and teachers decide if they continue with their position in the county.
Maryland rejected our county’s proposal to the state however, to evaluate teachers based on the PAR because it did not include using test scores as a part of Race to the Top. The county’s next steps are to be determined.
As change is being pushed across the country in education, by other folks who clearly don’t have an understanding of what good practices in teaching are all about, can I suggest we, as educators find a solution to our individual issues in pockets across the US and WE take initiatives to advocate them. I often find myself complaining about what is wrong, just as many people on the outside of the education establishment complain about what they see as wrong…they’ve come up with a plan…what have we done?
Thanks for hearing me…Pam
The estimable Ms. Weingarten has apparently fallen prey to the “Iron Law of Institutions” (Schwarz, 2007 — http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_institutions ):
“The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to ‘succeed’ if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”
Her actions may best be regarded in this light. She knows on which side her bread is buttered
Whomsoever suggested she might be angling for her NEXT “big job” with the Gates Foundation? You should be ashamed of yourself…How COULD you? Why, that would only demonstrate her abject careerism.
If this is just a matter of Weingarten thinking “teacher evaluation is moving too fast”, how does this explain her more than ten year collaboration with The Broad Foundation? Beginning in 2002 she was an instructor at the Broad Superintendents Academy to train their future superintendents in developing labor and management collaboration.
http://www.broadeducation.org/news/117.html
(See page 2)
The 2008 Broad Foundation annual report prominently featured Weingarten’s participation in the awarding of the annual Broad Prize for Urban Education.
http://www.broadfoundation.org/asset/101-124-2008tbfsannualreportfinal.pdf
(See pages 13 – 15)
In its 2009 Annual Report, The Broad Foundation said,
“Teacher unions have always been a formidable voice in public education. We decided at the onset of our work to invest in smart, progressive labor leaders like Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City for more than a decade and now president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). We partnered with Weingarten to fund two union-run charter schools in Brooklyn and to fund New York City’s first incentive-based compensation program for schools, as well as the AFT’s Innovation Fund. We had previously helped advance pay for performance programs in Denver and Houston, but we were particularly encouraged to see New York City embrace the plan.”
Click to access 101-2009.10%20annual%20report.pdf
(Page 10)
On April 28, 2009, Education Week’s Teacher Beat reported Weingarten was partnering with the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation to create the Innovation Fund whose purpose according to Weingarten, is to “incubate promising ideas to improve schools”. As an example of its purpose,the article says,
“She gave a couple of possible examples: Districts and teachers could propose a new way of evaluating teachers that would incorporate evidence of student achievement. Or they could come up with a school-turnaround model akin to the Fresh Start project in Chicago or the now-defunct New York City chancellor’s district.”
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2009/04/aft_and_four_foundations_flesh.html
A March 11, 2009 GothamSchools article described her close ties with Eli Broad, Joel Klein, and Arne Duncan:
http://gothamschools.org/2009/03/11/eli-broad-describes-close-ties-to-klein-weingarten-duncan/
She continues to promote AFT collaboration with corporate education reform:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/31/usa-politics-teachers-union-idUSL2E8IV6KD20120731
The AFT website is filled with “charter-friendly historical revisionism” and nothing about corporate education reform.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2013/03/weingarten-gets-arrested-for-cameras-in.html
Don’t forget the 05 contract where she gave into each and every Klein demand that not only took away seniority rights and hiring rights, but also took away vacation days. The deal was practically written by Klein. People voted their pocketbook over rights, and now they are like deer stuck in the headlights and counting the days to retirement. If they make it to retirement. Then their was the NYS deal with Cuomo on evaluation where VAM supposedly equals 40% except after the 2nd year it equals 100%. So how has her “thinking” changed? And since when does it make sense to write what someone is “thinking” rather than reply to their actual actions??
“We decided at the onset of our work to invest in smart, progressive labor leaders like Randi Weingarten …”
And she has provided them with an outstanding return on their investment.
Diane, I read the article you linked to, and I’d like to challenge you to respond specifically to each of the 6 ideas presented. In your response above, you describe common arguments you’ve presented in the past against using state tests to measure teacher accountability, but I’m not seeing any response to the linked article, which advocates such things as using a balance of measures – not just state tests – and matching high expectations with high levels of support. Already knowing that you don’t support use of state tests at all, what is your response to the rest of the article?
Ended education,
The point of my comment was that a discussion about teacher evaluation–especially one that includes test scores–is irrelevant when the profession itself is under attack.
But the profession is under attack (in part) precisely because of issues related to that discussion. That discussion isn’t irrelevant – it’s the central theme of the conversation. If we ignore the discussion or refuse to have anything other than ideological arguments, we aren’t going to do anything to convince anyone of teacher quality.
I think it’s also important to remember there are multiple audiences. Even if some “reformers” (e.g., corporate reformers you speak of) won’t listen, there are a lot of other folks who are tuning into this discussion, ranging from parents to administrators and other policy officials. If we leave the discussion now, we allow those who stay to determine anything we want.
Three things stood out especially to me in this article. First, they have been collaborating for 4 years on this project to “help” states implement effective evaluation systems. Really? So does that make you responsible for the mess we are in now if you have been collaborating with the fund makers for 4 years?
Secondly, quote: “The responsibility for improving teaching shouldn’t rest with teachers alone.” Once again we are looking at something that is being done TO teachers, not with them or even more importantly, BY teachers. Would the Gates Foundation care to venture into physician improvement recommendations? How about lawyers?
This is just continued DE-professionalization of teachers.
Thirdly, aligning teacher evaluation to Common Core is guaranteed to produce more of the same with VAM and inappropriate evaluation systems.
Louisiana is one of those 50% VAM states with a provision that if you fall into that automatic 10% WILL be ineffective, normatively determined bottom tier, VAM then becomes 100%.
I have had enough. The teaching profession is turning on itself. I dread to see what our schools will look like in 5 or 10 years but I fear it is no place I want any of my grandchildren in. Teachers are leaving the professional in droves in Louisiana and telling their children to not go into education programs when they go to college. What a mess.
Randi Weingarten was unarguably the most despised UFT official in the eyes of NYC teachers.
She was universally viewed as a turncoat who was chummy with Joel Klein and Bloomberg.
She even endorsed mayoral control of the schools as she left NY on her way to the AFT presidency.
It’s little surprise she’s in cahoots, with Gates. Disgusting
“Tutor.com provides teachers with individualized, online coaching on how to teach concepts.”
That sounds to me as if teachers will be turned into salesmen who learn how to pitch their “ware”. We need teachers who genuinely like kids and connect with them; whose enthusiasm for the subject really resonates with students, and that can not be taught, or measured!
Glaringly missing in the suggestions is mention of the importance and need of differentiation. As long as students are mostly taught through direct instruction as a whole, a large number of students will not be engaged, let alone flourish.
Tutor.com is a means of outsourcing teaching to Asia.
Vicki Phillips was the superintendent here in Lancaster when I first started teaching. None of her policies made the changes she promised us. I can remember her telling us to wait until the kids who began all day kindergarten filtered through to middle and high school. We would be amazed at how capable they would be. Still waiting, and it’s been at least 10 years, so we should have seen some difference. What hasn’t changed is the high level of poverty in our district.
She went on to be the state Secretary of Education. Then a major spending scandal hit the Lancaster district. Problems with improper credit card spending and use of consultants, which began under Vicki and continued with her successor who spent time in jail as a result. So what did Vicki do? She went across the country to become superintendent in Portland, OR. Those of us here in Lancaster were not surprised at the speed with which she went to the opposite side of the country.
Long story short, I don’t trust that she really knows what to do about educational reform.
I would really like to see some evidence, any evidence, that the Gates Foundation’s messing around with education has been positive. It has been heavily anti-democratic, the Foundation supports many organizations and efforts that many of us consider hostile to public education, and Gates himself is prone to making comments about public education which demonstrates how little he understands it.