New Mexico recently released teacher ratings, 50% based on standardized test scores. The teachers are hopping mad, because they know that the evaluations do not truly measure their quality, and the tests are not good measures of what students know and can do.
In Taos, teachers burned their evaluation reports. Teachers in Albuquerque also burned their evaluations as a sign of protest.
During the Vietnam war, anti-war protestors burned their draft cards. Feminists burned their bras in protest at the Miss America contest in 1968.
This is a venerable protest activity against injustice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I filed mine away and ignored it. It doesn’t come close to the reality of my classroom and doesn’t offer evidence on how to improve.
I just opt out of the evaluation. I only have 2 years left, so I can. It’s ridiculous to think the rookies have to do this crap.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
awesome!
Wish other teachers would do that. I filed mine away, also, and never want to see it again. Retired after 32 years; the last with CC, was the one from hell.
Now we are getting somewhere. Congratulations to the New Mexico teachers who torched their evals. Bob Shepherd is right – awesome!
It’s time that the CounterRheeformation started getting a little press attention. This kind of political theater is quite valuable.
Yes, Bob, it is well neigh time to stop being ‘nice’. teachers will find their outrage and grasp that they are, in fact, being treated as fungible machine parts, and that it is time to throw a wrench into the cogs of the ‘deform’ machine. Burning evaluations is a fine first step to snap the chains of passivity and move teachers toward reasserting their own human agency.
that is beautifully, powerfully said, john a!
50% when all the research going back for decades clearly shows teachers are only responsible for about 10% of the results of student scores on standardized tests. Why don’t we evaluate parents and fake education reformers. Then we could have a really big burning.
Same 50% weighting for test scores in Ohio, with the proprietary SAS formula for VAM and the SLo process for the majority of teachers. Not even a thimble-full of research on the latter.
It’s time for teachers to start some bonfires!
Bravo to Taos and ABQ! Mine’s in the garbage too.
We’re all in this fight together and we should be there for each other. These injustices must stop. Enough in the name of profit and power and greed.
My understanding is that the bra burning is a myth. Best burning I’ve heard about lately is the Chilean student debt notes that were burned up.
Suevanhattum, not true. My college classmate was one of the early feminists who burned her bra at the Miss America pageant. I did not join her. But it happened. Actions speak louder than words or petitions. Political theater is very effective.
I could never pass the pencil test so I was not getting rid of mine;^)
Or, if you run out of toilet paper……..
I almost can’t wait until the nonsense really hits where I live. This close to Chicago and there are teachers who are totally oblivious to what is going on. I’m not sure how the prejudice and stereotyping between Chicago and suburban districts is going to play out. There is also the division between downstate and Chicago and urban/suburban vs. rural. The corporate raiders can really take advantage of this latent distrust between and disinterest in the needs of different constituencies. I am continually surprised by the ignorance of well educated people, but they do listen when I talk.
I agree.
In my district we are seeing the teachers at the “good” schools (read: white, middle to upper middle class) develop a superiority complex. They seem to think that because their schools are “A” and “B” schools they are safe from the evils of VAM and differentiated accountability and they clearly think they are superior to those of us who have stuck with Title I schools for our whole career.
They speak to us like children at district inservice meetings now. This makes me sad because we were once partners in education and the reformers have succeeded in creating a class system where one never existed before.
I’ve got news for them. The superintendent has already spoken about his desire to move the “good” teachers into the Title I (majority Hispanic/ESOL/ESE/Black students) schools after he gets rid of us “bad” teachers through the VAM law.
When they fail to perform, it will be their turn to be humiliated, belittled, and fired. And they will fail, spectacularly, because every time one of them in the past that has chosen to come into our school to “show us how good teaching is done”, they have left in tears nearly having a nervous breakdown after a week or two, screaming “How do you teach these kids? You can’t even get them to sit down and raise their hands!” Who will they cry too? We will be gone.
They aren’t able to manage their classrooms when most or all of the kids are delivered to them already polite, familiar with white middle class social customs, completely literate and coached by a college-educated mom and dad who pay for them to take dance, learn karate, play soccer, and read chapter books in Kindergarten while going on exotic vacations and visiting museums and going to the ballet.
They can’t fathom having 20 kids who don’t know the alphabet in 1st grade and that may throw a chair or desk across the room in frustration when you ask them to write their name on a paper. They have no experience with children who, despite months of one-on-one tutoring still can’t identify simple sight words because they suffer from brain damage due to teratogens the mother came into contact with voluntarily or in her daily environment.
These are the kids the charters don’t want. They take the one or two each year that come to our classes showing great academic acumen and promise but they have no time for the challenging and difficult children that are the majority of our population.
I am honored to have called myself a Title I teacher for the past 17 years and I will continue to do my best with these “unwanted” children as long as I am able. When they VAM me out I will try to open my own school somehow.
After teaching my first three years at an alternative junior high school, I firmly believe that ALL teachers should teach in an at-risk school at some point in their careers. Not necessarily their first three years, but at some point. I learned SO much about students and teaching while I was there. By the way, I have taught at both privileged schools and at-risk schools, and I prefer at-risk schools.
I worked with kids for thirty years that fit what you described and working with those difficult, at risk kids was nothing compared to dealing with people like Arne Duncan, Obama, Bill Gates and all the rest of the stupid, ignorant think-they-know-it-all fools, and there were always plenty of those idiots around in the district’s administration who all came from college educated, white, middle class families and had no clue what it was like down there in the ghetto.
In fact, when I was a child, I was one of those kids, and the schools back in the 1950s didn’t know what to do with me so they left me alone, my mother taught me to read at home, and that’s pretty much what I did for the 14 years I went through K to 12 (they held me back one year)—-I read books, lots of books (the ones I wanted to read; not the textbooks) and educated myself sitting in the back of each class reading science fiction and historical fiction, while the teachers taught the normal kids who didn’t grow up in poverty with two high school drop outs as parents, an gambling, alcoholic father and two parents who smoked and I also had severe dyslexia. But back then, they didn’t have names for that. That was called retarded.
My older brother, who drank and smoked himself to death, was worse than I was and he stayed illiterate until the day he died at 64. My brother was the kid who would throw the desk across the room, get in fights and if the teacher was female and cute, he’d try to seduce her. Once he turned 18, he quickly found himself in prison where he spent 15 years of his life.
That was my world as a child so I felt right at home teaching the kids I worked with, but for three of those thirty years, I worked with white middle class kids who had educated parents. Three years was enough. I transferred back to the barrio and the street gangs to finish up my last 16 years.
Oh, I’m white. Whites live in poverty too. Whites also drop out of high school like my parents did at 14 so they could find jobs to earn money during the Great Depression.
I too have to temper my sense of schadenfreude. I have been at a title one school in Nevada for 17 years. My school is being over run by alternate certified people that think they know everything. Administration indulged them and fawned over these bright cute young things. Then as parents got in their face, and kids got in their face, they wilted and ran away. Admin has insulted all of the veterans and now realizes they need our help in keeping order and making progress. We are not on the watch list, but if they keep this up we will be soon. I can probably make it to 20 years, these newby business models can’t take the heat even for a year. Like you, they will have to send me out, I will leave on my feet. This summer I am tutoring second graders and fourth graders, our test prep curriculum leaves phonics skills out. I have an M.A. in linguistics and am now working on one in special education. Fight on Chris!
I’m sorry you have felt so abused. I either taught special ed in a wealthy district or a poor one, not mixed except when I was subbing. When I taught in the poor district, my administrator told me that at first he thought I was a rich, white lady (he was white, too) come to do good. I think my parapros wondered at first as well. I had no street creds, so they were my “enforcers” until the kids learned I really cared for them and would go to bat for them. It was a real education for me and made me a better teacher. Each district had its own character and was really all consuming and was totally involved with the students I taught. At the end of the day I went home to more work. I had no energy for much beyond school. I found hard working teachers in every district I worked in. Unfortunately we are like all human beings and develop stereotypes about what teachers are like at “those schools that are not mine.”. Now that the more privileged districts are beginning to feel the heat and will more so as the new tests and evaluations kick in, we must find ways to work together. Each type of district has its challenges. As RTTT has done its damage, more and more districts have developed a more punitive than collaborative style of management that is not only evident in the poorer districts. We really have a lot more in common than we think and will be much stronger if we work together.
I teach in a downstate district, and am saddened when I see younger teachers who believe they are superstars and that unions are obsolete. I would strongly recommend that all college students, especially education majors, take at least a semester course on labor history. I don’t think they realize in the Warped World of Rheeform, no teacher is safe.
Other things to burn. Federal legislation for Race to the Top and NCLB. Newsweek ratings of teacher education programs.
LOL
I bow down to these teachers.
So Fire Me is my new motto. I might even have t-shirts made to hand out.
They won’t; there’s no one to replace me. No one wants to work in teacher-hating Dallas ISD. Today it was announced that only ONE original hire of Mike Miles’ “cabinet” is left. And she is probably here only to pump up her retirement pay.
I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I hope Eli Broad burns in Hell for what he has wrought upon the kids across this country. I truly do. And Bill Gates. I would hate to be them on their deathbed.
I would love to be a fly on the wall when karma pays a visit to Broad, Gates, Walton et al.
Don’t wait for Karma, take action now and Karma will follow.
Agree.
I would rather be part of that Karma! They have money, we have numbers. We have to band together in all social milieus, not just education. We will have to be part of a bigger movement to help everyone have a decent job, health care, and the essentials of life. My sons have started a community garden for the local church food banks. We have to help money of our parents go farther. If we can reach outside of education we can make our fight part of their fight. The going is tough, but it is still winnable a neighborhood and a community at a time. Even tea party types are suffering and questioning their beliefs, they worked hard, paid their bills, and now find out they were lied to. There is still hope.
I am a high school foreign language teacher with my B.A. and MaED. I have tenure and have been teaching for over a decade.I wanted to post this to see if others are experiencing problems similar to mine.
There are so many things wrong with the evaluation process. This year I became a victim of this process because of an undiagnosed medical problem.
During my annouced evaluation, my sugar dropped quite low causing me to go to my desk and take 4 sugar pills. I was unable to continue normally so I assigned classwork to my students and discretely told my evaluator what was happening and asked if we could do the evaluation at another time. The reply was no. Over the years I have had a few of these sugar drops but did not have it diagnosed. I have since been diagnosed with diabetes type 2.
At the follow up conference I learned that my scores varied considerably from the previous two years. I agreed that my teaching on that particular day was not up to par so and explained again about the medical issue. I asked if a note could be put on the evaluation. After viewing my average a couple of months later, I asked our proessional development coordinator about placing a note on the evaluation several times about the medical issue and nothing ever became of the request. A couple of weeks ago I requestd that our representative to TEA take this issue to their next meeting and was assured that she would.
Additionally, there was another teacher who was having problems breathing during her evaluation (with the same evaluator) and the following morning she was put in the hospital with blood clots. The clots were causing the breathing issues.
Obviously, there needs to be some recourse for evaluations that are done when medical problems cause a teacher to keep from performing at their normal level of expertise. In addition, I teach at the high school level and do not have TVAAS scores. I receive my scores from the school improvement and English scores.
I love teaching! I don’t even mind having other educators helping me to improve. I am upset and I feel that my evaluation file is tainted and I can’t do anything to fix this problem.
Sorry to be negative but what you need more than anything is to learn and accept the fact that the system is not supposed to be fair. It was never fair. It will never be fair. No matter how nice your job was in the past it will never be that way again — that was the point of RTTT, VAM, and all the reformy nonsense.
Your illness was a gift to the evaluator whose job is to get rid of as many experienced, “tenured”, expensive teachers as possible.
In my district the state differentiated accountability teams did walk-through evaluations in our elementary schools the day before Christmas break, on Halloween day, the day before Spring Break began, and ten minutes before dismissal in Kindergarten classes during the first week of school and, of course, they dinged the teachers for not having control of their classes and not being rigorous enough in their lessons. Over and over again. They also reminded us that we would be replaced with younger teachers who “can educate these children properly.” Over and over again.
Your experience and your “tenure” are now liabilities, not protections. You are marked for elimination. Read here about San Diego Unified school district, which Diane recently lauded for being an urban district that was getting it right. Their union has agreed to the pre-eminene of CCSS and to that end the need for CCSS teachers.
The district just bought out another 427 teacher contracts in an early retirement deal. The reporter had this to say about one benefit of early retiring teachers. [It will]
“. . . ease the transition to new Common Core academic standards, as less-experienced educators are still developing their formative professional practices.”
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/may/24/tp-472-take-district-incentive-to-retire/
In other words, they need and want to get rid of anyone who has the knowledge and experience to stand up and say “wait a minute” or “this doesn’t make sense” because they want inexperienced, compliant, cheap labor who will teach the CCSS as they are told to do by billionaires, economists, and politicians and the last thing they want or need is uppity educators who question them.
Your school may have been a safe haven before. It cannot be any longer thanks to the ALEC laws, RTTT, and the control wielded by Gates, Broad, Duncan, and the Waltons.
It is my hope that as these draconian measures continue to erode pubic schools that teachers will wake up and stand up for their profession and their students. We need more angry protests like the VAM-burners of New Mexico.
I wish you well and hope that things get better for you. We are allies in the fight.
Burn the evaluators.
Be careful, they will point the fbi at you for jokes like that. Buti i hear ya
yup, such are the times we live in
Cross posted: http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Taos-teachers-burn-their-e-in-General_News-Injustice_Protestors_Quality_Teacher-140531-691.html#comment492142
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.
What if ALL teachers stopped shopping at Walmart? What would happen if ALL teachers stopped supporting and/or buying products from corporations and foundations that support Ed reform?
It is time for educators to invest in their own futures. They are blinded by mini financial rewards and are soooo easily manipulated.
I never shop there and urge others not to. When the workers strike I join them or bring cases of water. They are doing what teachers need to. I never want to strike , but this is as good a reson as any . However, I love the idea of LA teachers burning evaluations outside school or the district offices. Politcal theater is cool. Right now robert rendo and i are brainstorming an illustrated manifesto for public education, maybe from a child’s perspective or possibly all stakeholders. He and I feel art can ignite people and oassion in epways exposition may not . We have to be creative to cinfront these subversives. Subvert the subversives with art!
Artsoldier 13
I’m with you! I keep Dr. Seuss’s Bee Watchers posted on my desk and attached to my email to protest the constant annoying walk-throughs that interrupt my teaching se frequently.
“Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there’s a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn’t work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said “Our old bee-watching man just isn’t bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!”. Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn’t watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who’s watching that bee. You’re not a Hawtch-Watcher you’re lucky you see!”
Chris in Florida,
It’s hard to beat Dr. Seuss for telling it like it is. Thanks.
Before long there won’t be any teachers left! Let’s see how school districts fare without teachers. Keep politicians out of Education!
here here!