This just in from an advocate for children who live in poverty:
This week the Cleveland Plain Dealer has a new series, “Grading the Teachers.” It is basically an endorsement of the new Ohio Value Added Measures (VAM) program by which teachers will be rated. Scores are being made available on-line. Ohio’s VAM formula, according to the news account, does not consider the socioeconomic information about the children.
Here are the articles thus far in the series:
· Grading the Teachers, Part I ‘Value-added’ ties teacher ratings to pupils’ test scores.
· Grading the Teachers, Part 2” Value-added scores show no link between performance and salary.
I just sent the following to the paper for use as either a letter or op-ed. I suspect it won’t be published, which is why I’m sending it around now. Usually I would wait to see if it gets published, but this time I’m not going to, because this is so important.
Fifty years ago Johns Hopkins sociologist James S. Coleman documented the most powerful factors affecting student achievement: the socio-economic background of children’s families and the concentration of poverty in particular communities.
Two years ago Duke economist Helen Ladd wrote: “Study after study has demonstrated that children from disadvantaged households perform less well in school on average than those from more advantaged households. This empirical relationship shows up in studies using observations at the levels of the individual student, the school, the district, the state, the country.”
A year and a half ago Stanford educational sociologist Sean Reardon documented that while in 1970, only 15 percent of families lived in neighborhoods classified as affluent or poor, by 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods. Reardon documents a simultaneous jump in an income-inequality achievement gap between very wealthy and very poor children, a gap that is 30-40 percent wider among children born in 2001 than those born in 1975.
Surely we can agree that poverty should not be an excuse. But blaming school teachers for gaps in scores on standardized tests, as the Plain Dealer does in “Grading the Teachers,” is not only cruel to the teachers singled out when scores are published—for example, Euclid’s Maria Plecnik, a previously highly rated teacher who will leave the profession this year— but foolish as public policy. Who will want to teach in our poorest communities with the system of Value-Added Measures that the Plain Dealer acknowledges, “do not account for the socioeconomic backgrounds of students as they do in some other states.”
Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville critiques the logic of those who would blame school teachers: “Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well.”
Blaming teachers certainly gets the rest of us off the hook. If we can just fire teachers, we won’t have to fund schools equitably or adequately. We won’t have to address the impact of economic and racial segregation or the shocking 22 percent child poverty rate in America, the highest in the industrialized world.
Ms. Jan Resseger
Minister for Public Education and Witness
Justice and Witness Ministries
700 Prospect, Cleveland, Ohio 44115
216-736-3711
http://www.ucc.org/justice/public-education
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.” —Senator Paul Wellstone, March 31, 2000
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ohio is a 50-50 state but ruled by Republicans. The goal is not to improve public schools but to destroy them. The governor himself vowed publicly to “break the backs” of teachers. Funding to schools has been cut by nearly $2 billion while billions more is being secretly distributed to corporations under a JobsOhio program that cannot be publicly audited. Teachers are being graded on a hidden formula based on tests from PARCC that are not even available. The best analogy is judging the effectiveness of Ohio doctors by measuring patients’ waistlines. Most teachers who teach in high poverty districts have pretty much resigned themselves to a short career no matter what they do unless a new administration is voted in 2014. It is a no-win situation right now based on far right ideology rather than education. Look for years of high turnover, gamed statistics, and general overall decline of Ohio. We are already 47th in job creation. The uber-rightists are destroying whatever we have left.
It sounds like the urban areas will be ruled by junky, inferior charter schools. No young person in their right mind will work in an urban school. The Plain Dealer used to be the left leaning paper in Ohio while the Cinn. Enquirer was conservative. It looks like the Plain Dealer is another bought out paper like the Free Press in Detroit. Don’t bother to believe anything they print. Kasich has shown that he is nothing more than a petty political hack. No one cares about the teachers or children. Just wait until the economy begins to move and no one will want to work in schools. Bravo Gov. Kasich and USDOE
It is sad what is happening in Ohio. The current far right GOP ousted all moderate Republicans from the Central Committee and leadership roles. The Ohio Department of Education staff was cut in half and pro-Kasich people (read anti-teacher) moved into executive roles. Money is being shifted from public entities to JobsOhio and when the Republican State Auditor Yost tried to account for the money, the legislators and governor passed a bill in one week to stop the audit. Bills are being introduced to give high school credit for religious classes taught in church. One district Springboro is adding creationism to the science curriculum. Schools are being decimated financially, teachers laid off, programs cut. At one point the Republicans proposed sending teachers to jail for even mentioning kissing in sex ed classes. Kasich was elected with only 49% of the vote and then with only a 25% turnout (mostly angry tea party). The Ohio Constitution says “thorough and efficient” education bit we now have chaotic and meager. If not for the auto bailout and surge of fracking, Ohio would be last in every ranking.
The quote by Wellstone is so true. No wonder he was “wellstoned” by the powers that be.
“. . . On the Absurdity of Ohio VAM”
Well, considering that the Ohio version of VAM (which sounds especially egregious considering that even their person in charge claims to not know how it works-Ohioans, aren’t you glad your getting your money’s worth for that clown) suffers the same basic fundamental flaws that all “grading” teacher/school/district systems have because they rely on the invalid concepts of educational standards and standardized testing.
Until we break free of the chains of pseudo-scientificity that educational psychometrics are, we will continue the absurdities. Wilson has proven the invalidity of the whole process of educational standards and standardized testing on which these VAM and SGP evaluation systems are based in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 . See below for a very brief summary, realizing that it is like reading the Cliff Notes of Moby Dick and thinking that you completely understand what Mehlville was attempting to say.
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking. The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. This is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the
Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.” In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit-in shit out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures NOTHING as the whole process is error ridden and therefore invalid. And the whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.