Watch as Luke Flynt tells what is wrong with his VAM score. It makes no sense.
Take 4 minutes and listen to Luke tell his story about the insanity of VAM scores.
The computer predicts what his students’ test score should be. In some cases, the computer prediction was higher than a perfect score. Most of the scores that counted against Luke were those of students who answered more than 90% of the questions correctly.
This is madness.
Tell his story.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow. Beautifully presented and horrifyingly real. Thank you, Luke, for speaking truth to power. Next year, test scores will begin to count on our evaluations here in Utah. While I do not know yet if VAM will be part of that, I am saving this link NOW so that I can show it far and wide to the decision makers here.
As much as one may love children and teaching them, how long can one last in a ridiculous, vindictive, and unfair system like this?
Do Florida charter school teachers get evaluated this way too? Or is this rigged system just a way of destroying the neighborhood public schools through persecution of their faculties?
Last I heard there is a bill before the legislature right now that would exempt charters and voucher schools from taking the FAS (CCSS) exams and allow them to choose whatever assessment they want.
Tests created, sold & mandated at lightening speed for quick $M, with little respect to quality, accuracy & knowledge of TEST & MEASUREMENT, produce such JUNK and impossibilities, where kids scoring above the 90%ile damage the teachers’ VAM-SHAM score & ruin their careers.
Why are we allowing such well-connected über-rich Nincompoops parading around as experts? Expose their B.S.(Bullsh**), their marginal education learned on Twitter, their arrogance,sexism & human cruelty.
Luke Flint is fabulous & it would be a crime to lose him as a teacher, as a real human being in children’s lives.
Captain, my Captain!
“Tests created, sold & mandated at lightening speed for quick $M, with little respect to quality, accuracy & knowledge of TEST & MEASUREMENT, produce such JUNK and impossibilities,”
One person who has full knowledge of “TEST & MEASUREMENT” is Noel Wilson who worked for many years producing such tests before breaking from that logical insanity and producing his never refuted nor rebutted COMPLETE DESTRUCTION of the concepts of educational statistics and standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students) in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And this error 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 logical 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. And 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 crap in-crap 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 attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” 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.
By Duane E. Swacker
This is criminal, and Luke Flynt is a victim. Where are the lawyers?
A federal judge, Bush-appointed, already said it is unfair, makes no sense, but it is legal and constitutional in Florida. We have no recourse left but civil disobedience.
It’s Florida, the Bush mafia runs the place. The lawyers were already bought and paid for, they are running the Ed department.
http://vamboozled.com/help-florida-teacher-luke-flint-tell-his-story-about-his-vam-scores/
Sorry about that. I put up the wrong link for the video
Here’s the Tweet I just sent out for this video
Discover how the use of standardized test scores judge teachers through VAM & labels teachers as failures
#EdBlogNet
“The computer predicts what his students’ test score should be. In some cases, the computer prediction was higher than a perfect score. Most of the scores that counted against Luke were those of students who answered more than 90% of the questions correctly.”
The owner of this blog then follows with: “This is madness.”
Actually, in my old neighborhood, we had another way of putting it: sucker punched.
Oh, and just where are we being sucker punched?
In something fundamental to America, one of the best parts of America, called “fairness.”
I just had a thought. If, as the zealots of self-styled “education reform” have expressed on this very blog in no uncertain terms, that charters are “just like public schools” except better in every way that matters—
Then even their vaunted [if sadly delusional] 100% graduation rates are clearly not enough. And going a little farther afield with rheephorm math, Michelle Rhee taking “her” [forgetting that pesky co-teacher!] students from the 13th to the 90th percentile is pathetic.
After all, what happened to that rheephorm mantra “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good”?
So I do not joke when I characterize the “thought leaders” of corporate education deform as spewing forth nonsense that is best characterized as word salad and cognitive dissonance.
And deep and self-wounding double talk that is an unintended salute to public education and all that ensures a “better education for all”:
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” [François de la Rochefoucauld]
😎
Diane,
I’m a huge fan if yours, have been for years. I keep an autographed copy of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” in my classroom. I’m honored to have you help me tell my story.
Luke Flynt
Thank you, Luke. I fixed the spelling of your name. Thank you for speaking up. This is the best way to alert the public to the damage that the electeds are doing to teaching and learning.
Hang in there Luke. Thanks for speaking so eloquently and succinctly to describe the horrors of these educational malpractices not only for the teachers but the students also.
Please read the above/below referenced Wilson dissertation to give yourself a further, deeper understanding of the COMPLETE INVALIDITIES of these practices.
Again thanks!
Duane
reposted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Help-Florida-Teacher-Luke-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Florida-Politics_Insanity_Madness_Story-150329-446.html#comment539147
Agggggh!
great post!
Thanks
“VAMidiology”
VAM is not a science
As any fool can see
Test and VAM reliance
Are idiology
VAM is actually even worse than one would conclude based on Luke Flynt’s testimony.
Some of the issues (eg, expected score higher than maximum) can be fixed.
But the worst problems with VAM (pointed out by American Statistical Association) can not be fixed: low correlation with student test scores (explaining only 1-14% of variance, and not necessarily a causal relationship at that), poor reliability from one test to another, from one year to another and even within a given year for teachers teaching more than one grade.
The problem with focusing on something like the “expected score higher than maximum” issue is that the people who make the VAM will simply fix it and proceed with the plan.
The people making these VAMs need to be called out on the fundamental problems with VAM.
I would actually support a public naming of all of those who have developed these models so that universities and businesses can be made aware of the specific statisticians to avoid when they are doing their hiring. These people have no business doing statistics — period. VAM is nothing less than a fraud and so are the people working on it.
..and the very worst problem with VAM is that it simply assumes that student test score improvement is a valid proxy (and the only one) for success later on and therefore a valid indication (and the only one) of good teaching.
And those leaps of logic you describe are far larger than leaps made on the moon by the astronauts. Hell, Evel Knievel could have used that kind of leap power on the Snake River Canyon jump.
Having grown up near Evel Knievel, he planned his leaps and was the only one likely to be hurt. These @#$%$#^ are like a drive by shooting, it matters not to them who gets hurt.
Indeed
These folks (statisticians, politicians, school administrators and funders like Bill Gates involved in developing and implementing VAM ) are being exceedingly reckless with other people’s lives with little or no risk to themselves — based on what any real scientist would recognize for what it is: junk science.
..and economists (can’t leave them out 🙂
junk pseudo-science
Duane
But isn’t saying “junk pseudo-science” redundant — like saying “junk economics”?
yes, purposely so
This is what happens to the teachers of the gifted when VAM is used. Teachers will soon be fighting to get the lowest students in their schools and be running from the gifted. It’s a crazy VAM mixed up world!
What a powerful presentation by Luke Flint! It is so crazy and sad what they have done to my beloved profession. No one loved teaching as much as I did, and I am now counting the days until I can retire. I still LOVE to teach, and I LOVE my students – but, I just cannot function and survive in the toxic environment that PARCC and the new common core have created for all of us.
I have spent the entire morning teaching concepts that are way above my students’ heads. Then, they will be unfairly tested on these developmentally inappropriate objectives on a confusing test that has moved in and taken over everything. I applaud Luke Flint for having the bravery to come forward and tell his very unfair circumstances. The sad thing is ….How many “Luke Flints” will we lose from this battered profession? It makes me sick of the number of outstanding educators, like Luke, who will walk away from it and retrain into a more favorable profession.
Thank you so much, Luke. Your words inspire us. Thank you for your bravery. Keep telling your story!
I teach in New Mexico. Our teacher evaluation system includes a student survey. We must have 95% of the students respond to the survey or, as we were threatened, our rating will be lowered one level. However, the State ostensibly made mistakes calculating the number of students assigned to each teacher. For example, they may have included a class of students assigned as a sort of homeroom. We see these students several times a year for administrative purposes. There must have been other glitches as well because after I wasted instructional time having each of my students take the survey, my response rate was in the 20s. Note: The students are asked to take the survey for each or their teachers. They must get to a computer, log on, take the survey, log off and return to class. The actual survey takes one minute but the process takes about 20 minutes.
In short, as hard as some teachers tried, the 95% was not being met. We were then told to have students retake the survey until the 95% was met. There is no way to determine who took the survey so it was up to us to choose the student to retake. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that we no longer had access to computers as they were all tied up with the testing. I had students take the survey at my classroom computer one at a time during class. Yes, imagine, approximately once a minute I called the next student to my desk.
I tried to give the students privacy but I couldn’t help but notice that one of my sheepishly grinning 14 year olds charged with rating my effectiveness as a teacher had hit ‘send’ a second time. As I approached, he filled the survey a third time. Before I could utter a word he hit send again. I asked if he had just taken the survey three times. “Yes, but don’t worry two of them cancel out.” That’s because he answered all ‘ineffective’ on one attempt then ‘highly effective’ on a second round, he reasoned. I stopped wasting my time and continued the class without concern for The Survey.
Later that day I met a colleague approaching me with his head hanging low. He said he had similar problems but their department solved the problem. Here comes a bit of hearsay. He said the principal told the department heads to instruct teachers to complete the survey themselves. Yes, you read that correctly. There is nothing from stopping us as there is no way to connect a survey to an individual.
Why would we be told to get the 95% anyway we can? I surmise that the principal is being rated based on his ability to get the teachers to get these surveys done. The school is graded based on these criteria. The grading system is clearly nonsense because my school received a B last year. We have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates, and lowest graduation rates in the country. The academic level is the lowest I’ve seen in my 20 year career. A ‘B’ translates to ‘above average’. The grade is meaningless. The surveys are meaningless, the PARCC is meaningless, and the evaluation system is meaningless. Unfortunately, all of this takes money and time away from the students and teachers, makes teaching and learning a nightmare and threatens the future of our country as we churn out a generation of poorly educated citizens.
US public school education is becoming an embarrassing nightmare. People, would you please get out and vote!
READ MY COMMENT TO HURLEY ON THIS Post. Go to the links and discover why they can do this to you now with VAM. They took tens of thousands of veteran teachers out in the nineties, and looked around… saw no on to stop them….saw a media that not only did not report their planned destruction of due process in the education workplace, but that teachers were being blamed in the media…and the said.”WOW, LET’S INVENT A NEW PROCESS TO THROW THE REAL EDUCATORS OUT OF THE INSTITUTION SO IT WILL FAIL.
Go to the links I provide. Discover what preceded VAM!
Then, scream not merely for a film or documentary, DEMAND THAT THE ATTORNEYS GENERAL end the lawlessness in our educational workplace.
We need LAWS and PROSECUTION NOT MERELY FILMS…WE GOT FILMS
http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=nfNxj-O1DiI
bigblackdog~
what an insane nightmare.
Anyone who has spent time in schools since the ToxicTestsCraze escaladed, and now ON FIRE, can only imagine the revolving door of Survey Interuptus for days…just to meet 95%.
Wonderful teachers who dedicate their lives to children are forced to cheat the system, just to survive and sneak in a little teaching.
The KillTheTeachers Algorithms are designed to do exactly that.
There is no there…there.
It is designed to KILL us, KILL the profession & KILL anything that can’t be exploited & designed to bleed the system blind.
Luke is right: we must tell our story!
Expose everything!
Never stop TELLING OUR STORY!
Record & document it all.
read what I wrote to you at a larger post, but I did not want it to crawl along the side of this blog as a reply to you, because it is THE TRUTH and too IMPORTANT, and I have said ti too many times already. You are saying something we have said for 2 decades….the “WE’ being the tens of thousands of veteran teachers who were utterly destroyed before VAM and th eNCLB came along to do its dirty work on YOU!
Find it and GO TO THE LINKS
H.A. Hurley, this is an answer to you, but I do not want it to crawl along the side of this blog as a reply to you, because it is THE TRUTH and too IMPORTANT, and I have said ti too many times already. You are saying something we have said for 2 decades….the “WE’ being the tens of thousands of veteran teachers who were utterly destroyed before VAM and th eNCLB came along to do its dirty work on YOU!
READ:
Not only do we need 60 Minutes, VICE, Michael Moore and Ken Burns to document the utter destruction of the PROFESSION OF TEACHING and the ensuing collapse of the INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT DEPENDS ON PROFESSIONAL EDUCATORS…., we need the ATTORNEY GENERALS in each state and the US AG to investigate an prosecute the school administrations that allow principals NOT SWORN UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY to testify at bogus ‘hearings’.
The Sixth Amendment gives Americans rights to defend themselves.
We teachers are Americans!I want to cry, when I realize that it is 16 years since I and began to tell my story, and since Karen Horwitz created her site: http://www.endteacherabuse.org, where the stories of thousands of teachers destroyed in the first assault teachers appears.
Lenny Isenberg writing now at Citywatch, offers this wonderful description of what created the incentive to end due process for teachers in LA, http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
It is a must read! But it is what has been ongoing everywhere, long before VAM . Isenberg’s site Perdaily chronicled it in LAUSD for almost a decade now.
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/lausd-continues-to-target-teachers.html
And I wrote this at my site Years ago:
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/The_Insane_War_on_Teachers_and_Democracy.html
… and this, which I wrote in 2004 is at Perdaily, too
:http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Then, there is Betsy Combier’s sites that chronicle the abuse of teachesr in NYC in the nineties and beyond;
http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html
http://parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=7534
and of course there is Norm Scott’s Ed notes,
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com and his grassroots blog:
Grassroots-Education@googlegroups.com.
and the Francesco Portelos site
http://protectportelos.org/allegations-against-me/
which shows that there is no end to the assault on teachers .
More recently, Rene Diedrich added her angry voice and revelations about LA’s morass:
http://www.hemlockontherocks.com/2013/08/justice-delayed-is-justice-denied-at.html
What strikes me, and should strike YOU, is how is it possible that all these years later, you and the teachers who are now under assault did not KNOW HOW LONG THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON!
You want it to be public knowledge?
And how is that going to happen when the people who own the media everywhere are the billionaires who engineered this catastrophe.
When teachers such as myself, and David Pakter (google him) were taken out, and a hundred thousand teachers were sent out the door, these malignant oligarchs discovered that there would be no ACCOUNTABILITY for the total destruction of the civil rights of AMERICANS who just happened to be teachers!
Hey, we saw how a total lack of accountability for lying allowed the banisters and those who were responsible for rating securities like Libor and Standard & Poors, to bring down the our economy and bankrupt our middle class.
No oversight, no punitive actions allow criminals to behave with impunity, and make no mistake about what is happening to teachers is CRIMINAL. Karen Horwitz wrote the book about WHITE CHALK CRIME, YEARS AGO…. oh, you haven’t heard about it? What a surprise?
http://www.whitechalkcrime.com/wcc/
Another Florida teacher’s story http://timmonstimes.blogspot.com/2015/03/pay-for-performance.html