Barbara Madeloni, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst protested the field-testing of the Stanford-Pearson evaluation of her students. The New York Times wrote about her courage. She was fired (“given a letter of non-renewal”).
Please consider adding your name to the petition demanding her reinstatement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, bravo for Barbara Madeloni standing up to the educational parasite Pearson. Disgraceful for UMass Schl of Ed to not renew her in retaliation. I’m going to Amherst in November to give a talk and teachers’ workshop to support Prof. M and the Education Radio project she is part of. Please write the Deans at UMass Schl of Ed.
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The student teachers who refused to take the Teacher Performance Assessment is what made me start asking questions about the TPA. What I have found out makes me very very unhappy that NYS passed a policy requiring that all teacher education program students pass the TPA to be certified in NYS. I started asking about colleagues in Washington State about their experiences with the Pearson TPA and they are horrified at the scoring inconsistencies. It turns out that all the reviewers (deciding who is ready to teach) are paid piecework ($75) by Pearson and are trained on-line. So now my students in NYC classrooms, after student teaching for a full academic year will be subjected to one person at a computer in, say Montana, reviewing their TPA 15 minute videoclip and supporting 75 pages of written text. That one person at a computer will have the power to decide if my student teacher (a person I have watched teach at least 10 times and have formally evaluated 4 times in a 3-way conference, and have also evaluated through portfolio review and coursework) can be certified by the State of New York or not. This makes NO sense to me. And Pearson is a for-profit company. I think it is a disgrace and I applaud Dr. Barbara Madeloni for speaking out about the TPA and the corporations that are deciding the outcomes of public education. She really deserves her job back. And her students deserve a “giraffe award”: for sticking their necks out while the rest of us sheeple just go along like a bunch of lemmings.
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Isn’t change.org linked to student’s first. If I sign this petition am I automatically counted as a member of student’s first. Can someone please confirm?
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Yes, it is linked to StudentsFirst. Perhaps they do not know this and should be told.
see:https://dianeravitch.net/2012/08/15/change-org-did-not-drop-studentsfirst/
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We share your concerns about change.org and appreciate your bringing it up. We are looking at other platforms, in the meantime, we welcome signatures to this petition and will let you know when we have another platform.
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AIR, working for SBAC, is doing a small scale trial of computer based testing on Common Core Standards from October 15-Nov 2. Schools in every state have been selected; invitations were sent to DOE’s yesterday. People from each participating DOE have been asked to give supers a ‘heads up’ before selected schools get official letters. The assessment will take 60-90 minutes, are computer based, they will be checking the interface with the software as well.
Here comes more testing………
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…and more of our taxpayer dollars…dollars that could be better spent on teachers, supplies, roads, shelter, job training programs, mortgage re-fis, road repairs, tutoring, playgrounds and anything other than testing 1-2-3, testing 1-2-3….
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You ever wonder why kids don’t get much in the way of field trips anymore? This kind of stuff takes the money. Yet there is nothing like a good field trip to teach a child more than standardized test training could do all year.
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Do you have any idea what happened to the one student who argreed to participate?
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typo…agreed
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Academic freedom is not an issue if a university lecturer subverts government good faith efforts to comply with US treaty obligations, such as CERD.
However, it remains to be shown that any policymakers in Massachusetts take those obligations seriously. Justice Greaney’s reflections on Hancock are an example of serious reflection–but his thoughts aren’t widely adopted.
A more productive course would be to challenge Pearson’s contribution to the goals the United States is obliged to pursue:
“Dear Pearson, How have you helped policymakers, boards, administrators, and/or teachers meet their legal and ethical obligations to schoolchildren?”
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What is CERD? I have an idea but I need you to clarify.
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CERD is the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, see: http://www.state.gov/j/drl/hr/treaties/index.htm
The state department asked your governor to ensure teachers were familiar with that treaty, among others. See “U.S. Human Rights Treaty Reports: Memorandum for State Governors–Transmitted 01/21/10” at the link above.
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If academics, educators, researchers, scientists, and teachers don’t start pushing back hard, and real soon, their professions will be going the way of journalism — no one but corporate lackeys collecting paychecks and hordes of unpaid amateurs trying to educate and inform each other in their spare time.
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Too true, my friend. Too true.
Funny that I have been trying to sound the alarm to my friends in higher ed for years (‘ “when they are done with us teachers they will come for you all”) and I got (in addition to strange looks) all the reasons college professors simply cannot be attacked, devalued, outsourced, replaced by cheep scabs etc.
However, recently I am beginning to get questions about what happened to the once respected profession of teaching and how can we fight back.
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Look at the history of education reform some time–Our bastions of higher education have been on the corporate payroll for over a century. The rise of “platoon schooling”, regimented classrooms, seat hours, the reduction of teachers to the status of factory worker and the student to workpiece and product, etc. all stem from the likes of U. Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford, that carried the banner of business reforms for the likes of Andrew Carnegie and other tycoons who worshiped Fredrick Taylor’s industrial efficiency crusade.
Now, all that has to be destroyed in the name of the latest industrial fad–financialization, the reduction of all human activity into a laissez-faire capitalist economic model. In this game, the goal of business is to rake in as much money as possible, and our nearly half-billion-dollar national education expenditure is a fat, groaning cash cow aching to be milked.
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I guess they are in schools that do not hire adjuncts. They have been under attack for years and just haven’t noticed.
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What does it teach children???? What does it say about what it is we value in citizens–and whether we think teachers have the rights of citizens??? Shocking.
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Even more so, what does it teach college students who vote and who will very soon be out in the world teaching. Oh, here it is. Go to a school. Teach to the test. And keep your mouth shut. Then, after you get some experience and realize that something is wrong, leave before they fire you.
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