Regular readers may have noticed a flurry–one might say–a deluge of comments by a reader who signs as “Virginiasgp.” SGP stands for “student growth percentiles.” He believes with a religious fervor in student growth measures for evaluating teachers. He also says that he has worked in the U.S. Navy on a submarine. Another reader who signs as “NY Teacher” offered Virginiasgp some ideas about the deficiencies of test scores for teacher evaluation:
VAsgp
Apparently you think it’s a great idea to run public schools like the Navy runs its nuclear submarine fleet. Well thanks for the inspiration man. You really are a hoot-n-a-half on this. Shear genius. Now let’s take your fantabulous idea and put it to work for the Navy.
Don’t worry, I am highly qualified to help the US Navy mainly because I have zero experience with nuclear submarines. At least we’re square on the experience piece. Well, here goes – my suggestion . . . no, make that my insistence!
We must run the Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet just like a high needs, impoverished urban, Title 1 public school. As chief submarine Officer, please understand that there will be a few simple changes to protocol.
1) Your evaluation will be based on the ability of you and your crew to navigate a detailed, three dimensional attack course. You evaluation will be based on precision of tracking , speed and acceleration control, and stealth. Numerical data will be assigned to each of these three variables. I’ll even give you one of the newly commissioned, Virginia class ( SSN-774) nuclear-powered fast attack submarines. Seems appropriate Virginia.
2) Your crew will consist, instead of the usual adult Navy volunteers, 7th and 8th grade students from the worst performing middle school in the Bronx. Don’t worry, we will give them the same 5 week crash course that a TFAer would get and – you get to teach them! The U.S. Naval Submarine School New London in Groton CT works for me.
As the chief submarine Officer you must ensure that all systems run smoothly. That means you are responsible for your crew of youngsters and their jobs:
1) Operating a nuclear reactor and nuclear propulsion system
2) Maintaining on board weapons systems
3) Managing atmosphere control and fire control
4) Driving the vessel and charting its position
5) Operating communications and intelligence equipment
FYI/Heads Up:
On any given day or at any given moment, any one or more of your teenage crew may . . .
Be highly distracted and completely inattentive
Refuse to follow orders
Give you the one finger salute
Text and snap chat incessantly while on duty
Be very loud and boisterous
Ask permission to go to the bathroom – every 40 min.
Fight and argue with each other
Argue with you
Sleep on the job
Be absent from duty – some chronically
Disrupt crew meetings
Report for duty under the influence of illegal substances
Express their inner drama queen
Hang out in small groups and completely ignore you
Frequently exhibit silly, irrational, or bizarre behaviors
Forget most of what you taught them in the 5 week’r
Laugh when you yell at them
Stick chewing gum into electronic ports
Complain incessantly
Kind of tickles your innards knowing that your Naval career rests on the whims of a crew of mostly dysfunctional adolescents, doesn’t it?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Brilliant!
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How sad people who want to use faulty statistics in an area they know nothing about can sing the praises. Mathematicians have already proved how unreliable these measurements are. Take a 4th grade teacher that has a gifted class. The students scored at the highest percentile on the 3rd-grade test and do the same on the 4th-grade test. The teacher is a fantastic teacher, but his VAM score will show little to no improvement and hence will receive a low rating. The margin of error has been proven by mathematicians to be +/- 30 points. That could mean the firing of a very good teacher. We need to find other measurements, like PAR, that don’t use test scores. PAR seems the only thing out there that’s fair and balanced since due process rules are retained and any teacher in doubt will either be given assistance the following year or fired by the school. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/education/06oneducation.html?_r=0
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“Mathematicians have already proved how unreliable these measurements are.”
Mathematicians?!?!? I don’t need no stinking mathematicians (sorry MathVale) to tell me how COMPLETELY INVALID the rating schemes of VAM and SLO/SGP are.
Those educational malpractices are based on an epistemological (theory of knowledge) falsehood: That the teaching and learning process is “measurable”. Start with a falsehood and one is guaranteed to end up with an INVALID PROCESS such as VAM, SLO/SGP causing much harm not only to the teachers but to the most innocent of society, the children.
Don’t need no mathematicians to point that out!
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If this tirade was meant for me, sorry I am not going to read it. One doesn’t have to be a teacher to know VAM is invalid. But this is for the pols and the media who believe anything from the Reformers is a good thing.
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No, schoolgal it was not meant for you but as a general condemnation (with a little humor) of the VAM-SLO/SGP pseudo “measuring” of teacher effectiveness
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Ha ha. I liked your post. I WISH I was a better mathematician.
But yes the flaws in VAM being applied to teaching should be obvious. I think most classroom teachers already know this and just go through motions. Sadly, I think Reformers know VAM is a farce, too, but won’t or can’t admit it.
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To understand why we don’t need no stinkin mathematicians (again, sorry MathVale) read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted seminal treatise on those epistemological and ontological falsehoods, errors and fudgings involved in the processes of making, using and disseminating the results of educational standards and the accompanying standardized testing. Read the entire study as my summary doesn’t do it justice: “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.
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In computer science, Wilson’s #6 is phrased as “garbage in, garbage out”. In other words, the premise of the VAM tests as a measurement of learning is invalid on so many levels, some as crushing contradictions, that the results are useless. The insanity is the Reformers doubling down. It is what I said before about measuring temperatures during a Miami summer and the thermometers consistently measure a precise -20 °F. The Reformers applaud and say that proves Miami is freezing over in July. When questioned, their response is complaints of why everyone doesn’t listen to them and new laws forcing everyone to wear goose down coats.
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Spot on!
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Reblogged this on Saving school math and commented:
In response to the last point – Maybe it does, nowadays.
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Brilliant commentary NY Teacher!
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That’s funny!
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The HEADS UP list shows the total reality of what teachers face daily in the classroom, because it fits exactly with what I experienced for thirty years as a classroom treacher.
But I think NYTeacher missed the fact that this brain dead Navy vet would probably mandate all those children/adolescents represented on that list be torn from their homes/parents against their will and sent through 13 weeks of brutal Marine Corps boot camp hell to cram “GRIT” down their throats so they would be ready to tackle VAM with success or die trying.
And to make sure parents complied peacefully when their children—even preschoolers as young as age two—were forcefully dragged from their homes and sent to MCRD in San Diego or Camp Lejeune in Louisiana to be bullied by drill instructors for thirteen weeks, I’m sure that idiots like Arne Duncan and Governors Cuomo and Scott Walker would be more than willing to force minimum mandatory sentencing laws through their state legislatures that would send those parents to prison for life without parole. In fact, it is a safe bet that the private-sector, for-profit prison industry in the U.S. would be behind that law 100%, because it would fill empty beds and boost profits.
In fact, I’m sure that Navy vet would be okay with never letting the children—who did not demonstrate that they have the obedient do-as-your-told grit that VAM requires—never get out of book camp until they demonstrate that they are dutiful robots that never complain and work 16 hour days seven days a week to get those test scores up so the White House and Congress can go on national TV and brag about the U.S. being #1 on the international PISA test while the suicide rates of teachers and children continue to climb.
And if that Navy vet doesn’t think I know what I’m talking about when it comes to Marine Corps book camp, I am a former Marine and Vietnam Vet. I’ve been there, but I volunteered. No one forced me to go to boot camp and I was out of high school when I went. I wasn’t eight years old.
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Now, Lloyd, we were having such a constructive conversation on Gary Rubenstein’s blog. Why so hostile to a fellow vet?
Btw, I am E/I NTJ on the personality scale so “obedient” is not a common term applied to me. I got along well with my CO but I’m not sure “obedient” is the first word that would emanate from his mouth either. In fact, there’s a judge in Loudoun County who sanctioned me for trying to attempt to get the courts to have LCPS reveal the truth. My daughter has about the same personality as I do and I’m sure she’s going to be a handful in class for her teachers.
It’s interesting that you would disparage Professor Duckworth’s research on GRIT. Something tells me that nearly every single professional athlete, singer, actor and artist would ascribe much (or most) of their success to it. I seem to recall some progressive teacher-types on here claiming we need more art/music in schools these days. Maybe we should provide arts/music curriculum but as soon as the student has gets just a tad bit tired, we can give them back their XBox videos again. Yes, I’m quite sure there is nothing to this GRIT thing….
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Virginia, this is your 4th comment. No more today.
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The problem is that “Grit” is most used as an excuse to perpetuate structures that make it extremely difficult if not impossible for most people to succeed. It also encourages single-mindedness in pursuit (stick with one thing or you wont make it), a compliant mindset (a gritty person copes with the system, rather than questions it), and an abrasive personality (do the best for yourself, and if others fail, they are simply not gritty enough.)
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Grit like self esteem should be acquired naturally and voluntarily and not artificially and/or through force!
Using VAM with the goal to instill grit in children is another stupid idea that only fools fall for.
VAM is no different than the movement that swept the country back in the 1960 that lasted for several decades to instill a false sense of self esteem in children, and what did we get with that idiocy, a generation of narcissists who don’t like to take chances because they don’t want to risk failure.
After all, why risk failure when you are already perfect!
VAM is just the latest magic pill that promises to miraculously solve everything, and when this latest, false magic pill promise doesn’t work, then the autocratic zealots who forced it on the country will punish everyone else.
If you are such a free spirit who is difficult to control, then why do you want to force VAM on everyone else?
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@Lloyd – I would not say that ‘grit’ “should” — but rather CAN ONLY — be acquired naturally and voluntarily, but not artificially and/or through force. I include in ‘naturally’: parental role-modeling, and perhaps patient and gentle parenting techniques. Teachers can provide an assist by modeling perseverance, and perhaps additionally through patient and gentle pedagogical techniques.
Therefore I must argue the idea that the ed-movement of the ’60’s & ’70’s that sought to instill self-esteem somehow produced ‘a generation of narcissists who don’t like to take chances because they don’t want to risk failure’. The pedagogy of that era simply followed a parenting trend that was a backlash pendulum-swing to rigid bougeouis mores of the previous half-century.
We must divest ourselves of the grandiose idea that public-school teaching methods somehow ‘produce’ generations with specific character traits like ‘perseverance’ or ‘narcissism’. Research consistently suggests we have a ‘14%’ influence; even common-sense tells us our impact could be no more than the 25% of their time spent with students.
The argument between the ‘self-esteem’ ed-movement and today’s no-excuses/ ‘grit’ movement echoes a longstanding [foreign-languages, my field] argument re: ELL.
At one extreme we have ‘bi-lingualism’ (a CA creation) wherein newcomers to English get a half-day learning curriculum in their native lang & a half-day learning curriculum in English. In the ideal, the curriculum is identical & thus twice-learned– but that means ELL’s take 2x the time to progress through curriculum. Typically, some half-measures are used in order to prod ELL’s a bit faster through the curriculum, albeit with below-average grades. The plus is time to bring ELL’s to a higher literacy w/in their own language, w/reasonable hopes that that eventually translates to higher literacy in English. The minus is students struggling along with below-par grades, perhaps needing an extra 2yrs or so to graduate.
At the opposite end of the spectrum we have ‘sink-or-swim’, where newbies to English are plunged into an all-English curriculum. This is how it was done for immigrants from time immemorial up to the ’70’s. So you will have plenty of naturalized & 1st-gen voters [now well into their 60’s] on board: why should we spend our taxes coddling new immigrants when we got there without? Of course what they forget is that plenty of their peers (perhaps 50%?) dropped out early, unable to graduate hs in English– but because economic times were booming in the ’60’s, were able to support families via trades where you could get by with partial English and a 9th-grade education.
The rub: today’s ed-policies dictate that ‘all students’ (including ELL) shall graduate ‘on time’ with the same curriculum: achievement shall be evidenced using the same curriculum-aligned assessments. Sure, you maybe can get ELL’s into an IEP that allows them extra time to complete the test. But simultaneously, in most states, you’ve cut the IEP and the ELL budgets to the bone, which means your ELL’s did not get any time to make the transition to English. Meanwhile regardless, test scores will be used to declare schools with large nos of ELL’s ‘failing’.
We teachers must stick to a reasonable middle pedagogical road despite the cultural winds that buffet us.
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The self-esteem movement and the pressure from that movement was almost exclusivity from parents—not all of the parents but far too many. That pressure eventually caused administrators to apply pressure on teachers to make those parents happy.
From the research I’ve done on the self-esteem movement it was mostly focused in the white middle class culture in the US.
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Here’s something from CBS on the damage caused by the self esteem movement.
“My personal gag instinct has now been reinforced by reams of genuine psychological studies indicating that high self-esteem (whatever that may be) is not the fount of nirvana and low self-esteem is not the root of all evil.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/self-esteem-who-needs-it/
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Does Virginiasgp receive payment or other favors from Education Post?
http://edushyster.com/a-better-conversation/
Is he/she working for some other philanthropy, foundation or think tank?
Can we get a yes or no?
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love it!
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Let me set one thing straight: I did NOT pay Diane to provide this publicity! Btw, thank you very much Diane. I do think opposing views “liven up” the debate, don’t you think?
For folks interested in getting more information:
1. Here is my Facebook page showing why VAM is so critical:
2. Here is my Twitter feed where we acknowledge schools/districts with low SOL scores but HIGH growth. These are the “miracle workers” of disadvantaged kids.
3. Here is a YouTube channel where you can see the analysis of the released SGP data from Virginia.
4. Here is a Google Drive folder where you can play with the data yourself as well as see all the briefs and analysis.
Now, I think your readers will really be interested in my efforts to “out” charter-school plants in disguise. You see, ,the chairman of the school board in my county just happens to have worked for Dennis Bakke of Imagine Schools’ infamy for the last 17 years. A few years back, he decided he would get on the school board and surprise, surprise, push for charter schools! Imagine Schools even canvassed Loudoun in 2010 to gauge interest. The odd thing was Chairman Hornberger NEVER disclosed his relationship with the Bakkes and Imagine Schools. From my reading of the Conflict of Interest Act, that’s a crime
So I took matters into my own hands when my Commonwealth Attorney, who is more interested in persecuting honorable principals than rooting out corruption, balked at even investigating. In this Google Drive folder, you will find my pleadings in CL-94902 in Loudoun County Circuit Court in which I ask for a judge to declare Chairman Eric Hornberger in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act and refer him for prosecution. See the exhibits for all the juicy details including tax returns of Bakke’s organizations and Hornberger’s attempt to avoid answering FOIA requests.
Can’t I get just a little love for that? Btw, Hornberger’s attorneys want to sanction me for trying to root out corruption. “Imagine” that!!!
Free that little birdie!!!!
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VAM is not critical. It’s an invalid measurement. And to press on the matter will hurt many good teachers. If we were able to review all Pearson tests, which we are not since the Pineapple disaster, we would find many questions and answer choices invalid. Yet you want to use these tests that no one is allowed to review to set the standard of a school?? That’s like being arrested and sentenced without knowing the charges.
Here is an excellent example of VAM working against a good teacher.
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The article cited is very comprehensive. It is a lot better than saying that VAM is junk science.
Thanks
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Raj,
VAM is junk science.
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Sorry, Raj, but VAM/SGP ARE JUNK SCIENCE!
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No one bothers to mention that the tests are normed after the kids take them, which automatically invalidates them. The state decides the cut scores after they over analyze the results, which is biased. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. As we speak, they are still pouring over the results and figuring out how many kids, teachers, and schools should fail this time.
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Raj,
The article does say VAM is junk science.
From the article:
The numbers lie, the formula lies and it has an absurd margin of error that takes up half the entire scale. And nobody seems to understand that lying full-of-junk formula with 32 variables (compounding each other’s inaccuracy.)
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Good point Susan. And recently the new NY commish Elia appeared to be clueless about exactly that.
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“The Fractal Errordactyl”
VAM is like a fractal
With err at every scale
A fractal errordactyl
That’s preordained to fail
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SomeDAM Poet, I guess the “errordactyl” must be pretty scary, huh? That’s why unions will do anything to keep VAMs out of the hands of parents!
If VAMs are useless, why not ask our states to let the VAM data be free? Everyone can ignore it just like you suggest. Or better yet, maybe parents will finally demand that ALL children have effective teachers. And we can grow our economy by an additional $40T over the next 60 years.
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Gosh, Virginia, if VAM scores are released, flaws and all, everyone will want to be in the “best” teacher’s class. Can he or she hold it in a stadium?
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That’s what they do in college. Or especially at Stanford’s MOOC courses.
Oh well, I’m over quota for today. Funny how there is not a quota of giving out “Effective” teacher ratings in Virginia. According to VDOE, every single district has over 99% rated as effective. Imagine that!
Sorry I’m over my (truth) quota for the day. Adios.
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Some people don’t get poetry — or elementary school science.
Or get out much, for that matter.
Pterodactyls went extinct — just like VAM is bound (and determined) to do.
Once the public understands that good teachers (as judged by principals, parents and students) are all too often being rated poorly by a method that is basically a crap shoot (click)–as they are starting to do — VAM is as doomed as the pterodactyl.
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The pterodactyl had a pretty good run.
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Good point. I never thought about the dinosaurs that way before. They appeared on the earth about 200 million years ago and survived for 135 million years before they faced the extinction event that doomed their existence.
How long have modern humans been around—you know the two legged mammals who seem hell bent to exterminate themsevles?
Fossil evidence suggests that modern humans evolved in East Africa around 200,000 years ago, since fossils more than 150,000 years old are known from Ethiopia and Kenya. However, genetic data from recent African populations suggests that other regions may also have been important.
Let’s see, 200,000 years versus 135 million, and I think it is arguable that the dinosaurs didn’t pollute the environment or force their children to take high stakes tests.
I’m laughing.
Is there a way we can send all the corporate education RheeFormers back in time to the age of the dinosaurs and watch to see who survives. I wonder what a Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurs Rex would do when Bill Gates bribes Arne Duncan or Cuomo to rank and yank them.
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VAM is junk science. No, wait, that is insulting junk science. Some of my best friends are junky scientists.
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“Can’t I get just a little love for that?”
Brian, I already gave you a high five for that work. My suggestion to you is just to tone it down a notch or two, go about pointing out and demanding answers to what is happening in the conflict of interest. Again I applaud you for that.
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You’re on a misguided crusade, like many others, if not a modern-day witch-hunt.
Your truth is not the real truth, and certainly not the truth of the veteran teachers who have been in the actual ed trenches.
You’re wasting your time here. Tend to your own business.
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Reply to Brian, not Duane.
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I for one welcome your anti-viewpoint, for it forces lazy thinkers to up their game. This is why I peruse, as often as I peruse Diane’s blog, google-news’ articles on education, common core, school choice, and standardized testing. We in the trenches need to understand the viewpoints of those who seek to hold our feet to the fire with methods that seem to us illogical.
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Not my experience here. I don’t think there are too many lazy thinkers or bloc viewpoints.
The opposing views coupled with ad hominem attacks that occasionally appear do not liven up debate or force lazy thinkers to up their game as much as creating unnecessary tension and forcing people into contortions as they debate and defend against truly stupid and disingenuous positions that have little to do with anything at all, let alone the real issues at hand. I think people should deal with deep anger in more constructive ways, more constructive for themselves mainly. And we are neither therapists nor virtual punching bags.
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Thank you, Akademos.
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@ akedemos
“I think people should deal with deep anger in more constructive ways, more constructive for themselves mainly. And we are neither therapists nor virtual punching bags.”
My point is simply that we need to listen to conservative viewpoints, which are eerily similar to our own viewpoints. They tend to be against top-down [fed-promoted] curriculum and associated assessments. We progressives go along because we understand education to be an effort to free students to think for themselves– yet we see that top-down fed intrusion on local pedagogy shuts down academic freedom. While they (the conservatives) worry that fed-govt-guided education works against their local cultural mores.
My personal viewpoint: you cannot dictate regional cultural mores. The fed DOE’s mandate is only to step in when local mores prevent local kids from getting equal access to the average ed available in that area,
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You posted a motion that you filed for sanctions against defendant’s counsel. I don’t see any motion by defendant to sanction you. Can you post it? And can you post defendant’s opposition to your motion to sanction his counsel? Always interesting to hear the other side of the story, I’m sure you’ll agree.
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Uncanny timing!
Just flew in on a pterodactyl?
That’s just what this blog is for, free legal advice.
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Done. In the pleadings, numbers are mine (1,2,3) and letters are theirs (A,B,C). Note that I may skip a number if it was insignificant (notice to set a trial date) but I generally post everything online. I’m pretty much classical liberal (libertarian) and believe all the evidence helps me out.
Here are 2 other cases although you might not be so favorable:
94775: school board has been accused of having “blocs” that favor certain neighborhoods over others in boundary disputes. I found them slandering me and using the school system to “investigate” me – a private citizen. How is that even legal but that’s another case. Anyways, I discovered that officials of public bodies cannot meet in pairs if that constitutes a “quorum” of a committee. And they can’t “meet” over the phone. So if 2 board members (of a 3-person committee) call each other, they have violated all sorts of FOIA rules and shall be assessed a minimum fine of $500 for 1st time and $2000 for each time thereafter.
93308: this was a composition of issues, namely (a) Loudoun hid a major brief that showed our kids were less likely to believe math was important to their careers than average US kids. That’s shocking in affluent Loudoun, considered Silicon Valley of the east. That PISA exam also showed that Loudoun high schools performed worse than EVERY industrialized country on an apples-to-apples basis. (b) Same SGP request was made to Loudoun as to VDOE. Note that unlike other states that follow the law, Loudoun hasn’t even given SGP/VAM data to teachers to inform them on student growth much less used it in evals. Districts don’t even download it. (c) Asked for emails to Hornberger to prove he was lying in public when he said he had “no idea” what SGPs/VAMs were or how they should be used in Loudoun. (d) Asked for teacher salaries to prove Loudoun officials were lying about not giving raises. LCPS wouldn’t give me the salary data even though it’s required by law. (e) Asked how much Loudoun was paying to intervene in my VDOE SGP case. Loudoun wouldn’t respond. After the trial, they claimed they had made a “verbal agreement” with attorney who had already drafted multiple pleadings and made appearances in Richmond. Yet there was no legal services agreement, no invoices, and no documentation whatsoever about 3 months after they intervened. Really?!
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“Loudon Clear”
The school board is conspiring
In twos (and maybe ones?)
To keep the schools from firing
The dumbest of the dumbs
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Should be “Loudoun Clear”
Apologies.
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No “Loundoun Calling”?
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From the Washington Post:
“A Loudoun County parent has sued state officials to force the release of evaluation data for thousands of teachers across Virginia, making it the latest in a series of states to grapple with whether such information should be made public.
Brian Davison has pressed for the data’s release because he thinks parents have a right to know how their children’s teachers are performing, information about public employees that exists but has so far been hidden. He also wants to expose what he says is Virginia’s broken promise to begin using the data to evaluate how effective the state’s teachers are.
‘I do think the teacher data should be out there,’ Davison said. ‘If you know that you have a teacher that’s not effective . . . is it fair to ask a parent to put their student in that teacher’s classroom?’”
And from another blog about virginiasgp/Brian Davison:
“Therefore, I call upon all of the participants in online discussions on this web site to completely refrain from responding to Virginia SGP and his indeterminant “sock puppets” for a period of one week, seven days following the publication of this letter. Do not post on his co-opted threads. If he invades new articles, I suggest making a final post of, simply, “I regret that I can no longer participate here until further notice.”
Let’s see what happens.”
Or this from the LeesburgToday:
Judge Jeanette A. Irby ruled that the school system did not break the law in any of those cases.
“The court finds that there were no violations,” she said. She noted that in many cases Davison’s requests were difficult to follow, “almost intentionally so.”
In addition to ruling in the school system’s favor, Irby sanctioned Davison $500 for actions in court, where he represented himself. She described his conduct as a “total disrespect of the process.”
“I find your behavior throughout this to be very inappropriate,” she said.
The fine is related to Davison subpoenaing 21 people, including every School Board member.
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Duane, you realize that I am appealing that case right? The reason the Judge sanctioned me was because she (1) ruled that I did not properly serve all of the respondents in the case (including the school board) and then (2) was unreasonable in issuing subpoenas to the school board to show up to testify. How does that work? She claimed I never told them I was planning to question the school board even though they were listed as respondents on the petition?! I had provided 55 exhibits and intended to question multiple witnesses on 8 different charges. Opposing counsel and I initially agreed it would require a full-day trial. The judge initially gave me just 1 hour to make my case! One hour! Finally, she relented and gave me a couple more hours the following week but I barely had time to get just the core docs in. In her ruling, Judge Irby literally made up facts to support her ruling. Both LCPS and I agreed they had never provided any salaries in my FOIA requests at trial (I wanted to use it to find out whether teachers were getting raises). The exhibits also demonstrated LCPS never gave me salaries. But in her ruling, Judge Irby claims LCPS gave me 3rd and 4th grade salary data!!!! How does that work?! When judges can literally make up facts, we are in big, big trouble!
Oh, as for the Chairman of the School Board who “forgot” to tell everyone he worked for Dennis Bakke, I wasn’t even allowed to question him. I think the judge’s exact words were “I can’t even imagine how he would be relevant to what you’re trying to prove”. About a week after the trial, LCPS provides this document showing that Hornberger tipped off LCPS they had better stop hiding this brief given at an actual school board meeting or else they would be hammered in court. Even then, it’s against the rules for a school district to say “we don’t have your document” when the author of that very (compromising) document was part of the response!
Give me a break. Btw, LCPs also has lied about how much they pay their teachers and “no raises”. LCPS gave out raises in 5 of the last 7 years and at least 2%+ every time (they denied this until I started issuing FOIA requests). If teachers are looking for a great position in a growing district (over 600 new hires per year), come to Loudoun. I’m going to fix it real soon.
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Thanks for the update!
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Señor Swacker: no contaba con tu astucia/he didn’t count on your astuteness.
That Mexican superhero of yesterday, El Chapulín Colorado, would be so proud!
😃
Over five years (and counting) on ed blogs and it strikes me how much the “thought” leaders and enablers of self-styled “education reform” don’t just show an obsession with bright shiny numbers (no matter how massaged and twisted and tortured to serve predetermined ends) and snappy but vacuous slogans but they literally don’t seem capable of understanding just what happens on this and many other blogs—
People question, debate and argue over the assumptions, goals and effects of same.
The complicated mathematical machinery behind the designing, producing, pretesting and scoring of standardized tests is not of paramount importance. Better to ask, let’s say: who, what, when, where and why. For example, whose interest is served by a multibillion-dollar testing industry? What, if anything, does standardized testing measure? When has it ever proven successful—and under what conditions (e.g., subject matter, skills, people tested)? Where can that success (and one has to be open about what “success” means) be found? Why is standardized testing considered so important that it is allowed to crowd out meaningful and genuine learning and teaching?
I know I have just scratched the surface—and others may have another way entirely of putting it.
Apparently comments on threads like this one has the old Greek warming up to you again. Last time down at Pink Slip Bar & Grille he casually remarked that you were a “found man.”
When I looked quizzically at him he got a little annoyed—that I didn’t remember one of the many quotes he likes to remind us that he came up with first.
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
But that’s not a bad one, I must say. Next round of ouzo on me.
😎
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And a round of Slivovitsa after that on me! And I’ll invite the band:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=tightropetb&p=slevovich&type=11409_062215
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In order for VAMs to work you have to believe that economists have devised a way to mathematically isolate the teacher input into student variation — even though the best estimates we have top it out at 14%. So variation among students’ test scores are like an onion and a VAM promises to carve away every bit of the onion that isn’t the teacher. Great promise — doesn’t work in practice. In practice, VAMs are plagued by enormous standard errors and instability when applied to single teachers’ classrooms. If proponents had limited their use to entire schools or districts over a three year period, they’d might have had a tool that would have let us locate places that need further study to see what they are doing well or what they need assistance with. Unfortunately, they oversold their tools — a bit like saying a minivan can take you to the moon and back.
SGPs are even worse — yes, they are stable, but since they don’t even pretend to control for all of the inputs that are out of teacher control, it turns out they are just as likely to measure the poverty characteristics in a district as they are to measure what teachers are doing.
So by all means — advocate for making a lot of data public, but don’t pretend you have a magic tool for stack ranking teachers when your tool is completely inadequate to the task.
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See this post by Bruce Baker
“as a tool for inferring which teacher is “better” than another, or which school outperforms another, SGP is worse, not better than VAM. This is largely because SGP is simply not designed for this purpose. And those who are now suggesting that it is are simply wrong. Further, those who actually support using tools like VAM to infer differences in teacher quality or school quality should be most nervous about the newly found popularity of SGP as an evaluation tool.”
“SGPs, unlike VAMs are not even intended to “infer” that the growth was caused by differences in teacher or school quality. Briggs goes further to explain that overall, SGPs tend to be higher in schools with higher average achievement, based on Colorado data.”
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IF teachers are not extinct by then….teacherexosaurus?!
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Clever.
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Bernie Sanders may not be saying, currently, what many of us want to hear him say about education but, I’m convinced that a man who understands the corruption of Wall Street, will be persuaded by evidence. Tomorrow is the launch of his campaign. At BernieSander.com, the top of the page, there is a link to input a zip code and find an event to attend from 7:00-9:00. One of the most Republican counties in the U.S., Warren County, Ohio, has an event planned, at the Democratic County Headquarters. 60 people signed to attend, which is…. well…..unheard of. IMHO, the more support for Bernie, the louder the message for change.
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…well, it tickled *my* innards to read this! Love it! 😄
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Having taught with a couple of career military, I would like to point out that in a school the only authority the teacher has is what she creates. Up against middle-school students these former military who had no previous experience with youngsters aside from recruits, could not maintain any discipline. There is seldom anyone to back the teacher up. It is all about the teacher gaining respect; you can’t just order it.
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I think we are in agreement on this. Can’t tell you how many times I wished I realized teachers had no authority in elementary school. Once you figure that out, the game changes.
Teachers can get respect by being admired by students (want to aspire to be like them) as well as demanding it. I’m not talking about expecting compliance because of statutory authority. You don’t seem to understand how much military personnel are taught about leadership. One may have statutory authority but they will often have little control if they only use that. Just as a coach needs his players to be willing to run through a wall for him, any leader/teacher needs the same. They acquire that respect by demonstrating they care and by showing an understanding about the students reality/hopes/fears. Everyone has buttons.
Sorry to say that charisma matters but it does. You do realize that VAMs/SGPs measure that respect, right? Do players slack off for a coach they respect? Do students “mail it in” on a test for a teacher they respect? The answer to both is a resounding no. Getting kids to try is often most of the battle. And it is won by great teachers. How is that for some military cliches….
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But you know some teachers are great with certain kinds of students, and not so great with others, and it often has little to do with teaching skills. We then get into lots of human complexities.
For you to assert, ‘You do realize that VAMs/SGPs measure that respect, right?’ is willfully ignorant.
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This is the guy:
http://rdj999.blogspot.com/2015/04/ruling-brian-davison-v-lcps-foia.html
I hate giving him any free publicity, but as you can see, this guy is a running joke, even in his own community. I have invited this gentleman to my school to check out how actual functioning public schools operate and he’s not interested. Irrational teacher bashing is easier than actual critical thought.
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Speaking of legal briefs, check out this motion from VDOE. Apparently they are scared stiff about your good friend Prof John Friedman coming down to Richmond to testify. I guess the NEA couldn’t get any of its bloggers to come down to testify in response.
Maybe VDOE and LCPS wouldn’t be so nervous if they didn’t fundamentally misunderstand what SGPs are. I’m still hoping Diane will make a special appearance in court on Friday, but given the recent surgery that may not be possible.
Oh, and get well soon, Diane!
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Once again, economists can’t even prognosticate about the economy: savings and loan, housing bubble etc…Why should anyone listen to them about education? The only thing they know is profit and greed. They use pseudo trappings of science to disguise behavioral assumptions operationally defined and given rubric values from scores fit into the bell curve. Teachers are asked to flatten an impossible curve. Do you know how tests are revised and changed? Questions that too many answer correctly are dropped and higher discriminators that few answer are added until the appropriate mix is found. This is all assumption! Cut scores are now set to ensure 70 percent failure on SBAC/Parcc tests. It is a rigged game dressed up in math, just like Phrenology pretended to be science. Maybe you can debate Dr. Baker. Your responses to his findings show you have a problem understanding what is wrong with SGP and VAM scores. They are consistently invalid and do not measure what they purport to measure.
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Old Teacher, some of the norm-based tests do act as you suggest. However, tests like the NAEP are designed to be consistent over many years. Thus, we can compare any state’s standardized tests against the results of the NAEP for an accurate baseline.
The truth of the matter is that there are some great teachers and there are ineffective teachers. Under the old evaluation system, administrators and principals could not truly distinguish either. And, truth be told, as long as everyone received a raise, they simply didn’t care.
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Virginiasgp, you just reached your limit of 4 comments. No more today.
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“Under the old evaluation system, administrators and principals could not truly distinguish either. And, truth be told, as long as everyone received a raise, they simply didn’t care.”
The old evaluation system WORKED better than VAM ever will. Most if not all administrators and principals know exactly who the teachers are who need the most help and most if not all of them do CARE.
I taught for thirty years and worked with about 10 or more principals and a lot more VP’s and everyone of them cared—even the jerks. Teachers who were burned out received help and support. The very few who did not improve were moved out one way or the other, because there is a process called due process (It is not tenure which doesn’t exist k-12. Tenure is a term used to identify full university professors that have a lot more job protection that any teacher k-12.) that follows a step-by-step plan that leads to either improvement or job loss.
I saw it happen and heard about it happening in other schools not only in the district where I taught but through friends and colleges who taught in other districts.
Your baseless opinion is duly noted and ignored. Your thinking is full of BS. You have a right to your own opinion and thinking, but labeling “everyone” as simply not caring or knowing is exactly what the RheeFormers want fools to think as they fool as many people as possible to achieve their agenda that has nothing to do with teaching children and everything to do with profits that lead to fat bank accounts.
Even the two witnesses for the prosecution in the Vergara trial only guessed that 2 to 3% of teachers were “incompetent” and said they said it was based on a guess. Now we have results flowing in from across the country using even the flawed VAM and are discovering that 97% to 99% of teachers are competent.
At all the schools where I taught during those thirty years, everyone knew who the 1% to 3% were and I never saw one of those teachers stay. Administration used one of two methods to get rid of them.
1. the steps outlined under due process
2. make their job so difficult that they leave on their own. To do that, they would assign the 1) to 3% five preps in five different subjects in five different classrooms meaning the teacher had to plan five different lessons for five different subjects every day and move between classes every period. I saw one teacher who persisted for three years as she dragged her material from class to class in a little red wagon she towed behind her. Then the district assigned her to three preps in one high school and two preps in another so she had to use her lunch period to rush across town from on HS to the next. She was also on track through due process rights to eventually lose her job or improve to keep it.
The local union chapter never protested because that local was run by teachers who knew this teacher had to go. When she went to the union for help to keep her job, the union leadership denied that help, because the administration knew she was one of the 1% – 3%. No one knew how she managed to get due process rights in the district because she transferred from another school in the district to the high school with that job protection.
She eventual quit and left teaching and get this, she didn’t teach any of the subjects that are tested. She taught electives and still the administrators knew she wasn’t a good fit for education.
And people who think like you are willing to punish and destroy 100% of the teachers to get at the alleged 1% to 3%.
After the Vergara trial based on that guesstimate of 1% to 3%, I used that number to figure out how many of California’s teachers were probably incompetent or more probably burned out and discovered that there were more schools in California than the number of alleged teachers who might have been incompetent or burned out meaning hundreds of schools must not have even one teacher who should find another profession.
Here are the numbers based on the guesstimate of the prosecutions witnesses in the Vergara trial:
There were 295,093 teachers in California’s public schools in 2012-13.
1% = 2,951 (rounded up)
3% = 8,853 (rounded up)
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp
There are 10,366 public schools in California K-12 (this does not count the 1,125 charter schools in the state where VAM isn’t used to discover the alleged incompetent teachers. I wonder how the corporate Charters identify the teachers who have to go.
Do they use an owege board or a fortune teller with a crystal ball?
In fact, how do all those private schools—you know, the ones where Arne’ Duncan’s and Obama’s children attend—-that do not use Common core or VAM figure out who the teachers are who should go? Do they use the same method that public schools have used for decades—methods that work?)
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‘VAMmer’s Roulette”
The data are invalid
For doing what is done
A random statty salad
With Russian roulette gun
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Diane, I’ll be sure to post updates on case CL14004321 after court is adjourned tomorrow. Be sure to have your readers check our Virginia SGP’s Twitter Feed for the latest news. Hey, maybe the names of the best and brightest teachers in Virginia will be posted on there soon too!
It’s time to set that little birdie FREE!
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Yet another indication that the claims we hear from the usual suspects have nothing to do with reality.
That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket (by George Anders)
“MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in a recent book, The Second Machine Age, that today’s tech wave will inspire a new style of work in which tech takes care of routine tasks so that people can concentrate on what mortals do best: generating creative ideas and actions in a data-rich world.”
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2022 some 1 million more Americans will enter the workforce as educators. Another 1.1 million newcomers will earn a living in sales. Such opportunities won’t be confined to remedial teaching or department store cashiers. Each wave of tech will create fresh demand for high-paid trainers, coaches, workshop leaders and salespeople. By contrast, software engineers’ ranks will grow by 279,500, or barely 3% of overall job growth. Narrowly defined tech jobs, by themselves, aren’t going to be the answer for long-term employment growth, says Michael Chui, a partner at McKinsey Global Institute.”
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I found this list on Forbes:
Here is NACE’s list of academic majors, showing the percentage of student applicants who had at least one job offer by the time they graduated:
Computer Science: 68.7%
Economics: 61.5%
Accounting: 61.2%
Engineering: 59%
Business Administration: 54.3%
Sociology/Social Work: 42.5%
Mathematics/Statistics: 40.3%
Psychology: 39.2%
History/Political Science: 38.9%
Healthcare: 37.8%
>>>>>>>>Liberal Arts/Humanities: 36.8% <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Biology: 35.2%
Communications/Journalsim: 33.8%
English: 33%
Environmental Science: 30.5%
Education: 28.9%
Visual & Performing Arts: 27.8%
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/01/22/the-college-degrees-that-get-the-most-job-offers/
Then there was this from FORTUNE magazine:
Important as it is, a college major “isn’t destiny,” he observes, adding that the research shows that “the top 25% of humanities and liberal arts graduates earn more than the bottom 25%” of people who major in some kind of engineering.
http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/choosing-a-college-major-read-this-first/
So, as usual, what we hear from a RheeFormer is diarrhea of the mouth with no substance.
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