Tennessee was one of the first states to win a Race to the Top award.
Tennessee was the birthplace of value-added assessment, which was developed by agricultural statistician William Sanders in the late 1980s. Sanders knew how crops can be measured by yearly growth, why not learning? If they don’t grow as expected, it’s the farmer’s fault, right?
Tennessee is a model now for other reasons. It has been taken over by the corporate reform philosophy, and teachers have no right to bargain collectively, as this reader laments:
In TN, we can thank our legislators for completely eliminating collective bargaining last year. Given the state’s love affair with Achievement Districts (think charters and state-run schools to replace low-scoring schools) and TFA (Kevin Huffman is the Commissioner of Education after all and TFA-ers hold a number of positions at the Dept of Ed), we don’t work in an environment that values career teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not that Tennessee teachers are working in an environment that doesn’t value their career service, it’s that the state schools have been taken over by TFA ideologues and privateers. The contempt shown career educators follows directly from that.
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So true. I just moved here and have been shocked at how quickly teachers are running toward their chains. When the union representatives must speak in hushed tones, you have a problem. When the union representative in a neighboring Alabama school can stand and deliver member info at a designated time during full faculty meetings, and you can’t–you KNOW you have a problem.
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NC is closely behind. Legislation on killing tenure and merit pay was put off, but it will reappear soon. Charters are growing bountifully as the cap was lifted recently. VAM is now king – all subjects are now tested to see how good we are at teaching to the test.
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It’s time for people to band together and file lawsuits against the existence of charter schools.
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So, you’re tell me that value added methodology got its start measuring improved crop growth? Simply add more fertilizer and the crop grows better? VAM was invented to measure improved crop growth? I’m left with the image of spiking students’ drinking water with the educational equivalent of fertilizer.
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VAM is a rewind to Taylorism – controlling processes around manufacturing in order to improve output. The problem is, which politicians simply don’t get (or they do and just ignore in order to further their agenda), education is NOT manufacturing. John Dewey understood the importance of this concept. Education is about producing a person, not a data point. The U.S. has historically produced innovative and creative students, but I don’t believe we will in the future with VAM rearing its ugly head.
VAM may work well in agriculture, but that system has its basis in the natural world in which laws and theories tend to work based on predictable patterns. Humans are anything but “natural” in the sense that they do not abide by predictable patterns – and even if they do in some ways, those patterns (test scores) should not be used to judge the ability of a person (teacher) to influence, or not influence, the people (students) involved in a highly social context. I can understand analyzing data in order to improve a social context as a diagnostic, but using data to drive social output has a myriad of unintended consequences. People wind up doing things within that “social context” to simply fulfill a predetermined mandate, not to further the good of the people within a “social context”.
As a result teachers will teach to the test, or teach THE test. I just watched The Finland Phenomenon again last night, and it was a sullen reminder that we are going down the WRONG path. They do NOT treat their students as data points, and they want them to grow up as responsible adults. Of course, Finland students are highly motivated and come from homes where there is very little poverty, and if there is poverty in a child’s home, the schools have significant resources in an attempt to cope.
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Very good points. Taylorism indeed! I know there are many sources on it, but here’s one I’ve been citing recently.
Au, W. (2011). Teaching under the new Taylorism: High-stakes testing and the standardization of the 21st century curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(1), 25-45. doi:10.1080/00220272.2010.521261
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“the educational equivalent of fertilizer.” We already have that, it’s called Adderall and Ritalin.
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I KNEW the tests were something–they’re fertilizer, of the old-fashioned kind, if you get my drift.
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I get your odor, I mean “drift”.
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Standardized tests are made from USDA 100% pure grade AA bovine excrement!
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Huffman struck me as an uptight buffoon in the video in which he was interviewed for the impending disciplinary action against Nashville schools for its board turning down Great Hearts.
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Very inexperienced
Diane Ravitch
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Diane, I think you’re being unreasonable. Two years teaching experience is clearly enough time in the classroom to develop the expertise and general wherewithal to direct an entire state’s education policy, especially when those two years were spent as part of TFA, making those two years tantamount to 30 years of experience and a rich understanding of pedagogy and educational research.
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“In TN, we can thank our legislators for completely eliminating collective bargaining last year. TFA-ers hold a number of positions at the Dept of Ed), we don’t work in an environment that values career teachers.”
It’s so sad that in Tennessee career educators who know something are dissed and dismissed, while career Reformers who know absolutely nothing, who add nothing to the debate, who have yet to be successful in any of their reforms are venerated and beatified. If one were to calculate their VAM score it would probably be in the negative range. In my humble opinion, “the real takers” in our society are the reformers. They are taking our money, our voice and our children’s future. And this will make us better how?
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I had the displeasure of attending an event in Nashville where a bunch of business leaders served as “experts” on an education forum. The things I heard were ridiculous. Kevin Huffman said that although there are those who say there is a difference between business and education, “There is no difference between business and education.”
Callahan’s “Education and the Cult of Efficiency” (1962) sounds too much like today. Taylorism is a century old; we’ve moved past Bobbitt’s “scientific” curriculum making; the cognitive revolution was several decades ago… I could go on and on… The likes of Huffman know nothing about the history of education in America, and they make no attempts to learn from this history.
Huffman even proclaimed at this event, “Data is (sic) neutral and not political.” He suggested this is why we can always rely on data. Such a statement is either naive or disingenuous. While data are useful, there are also limitations. When I am defending my research, I would never get away with such a simplistic statement as his.
I’m wondering if Rothstein has been able to run falsification tests on the Sanders VAM as he did others… Sanders’ VAM is proprietary so I doubt there would be easy access to the statistical formula in order to conduct independent research.
Anyway… I’m always baffled by people with no credentials in education who consider themselves experts, are appointed to educational leadership positions, and pay NO attention to the history of education. Huffman acts like a “know-it-all” with his entire two years of teaching experience (under TFA of course).
Another speaker told the people at the event that they are all educational experts. Some people with no degrees or certifications seem to consider themselves experts, while also claiming education majors have easy classes. How can they claim to know this? I’ve been in the habit of looking up degrees of people like Huffman, Rhee, Duncan, M. Spellings, etc. We are all stakeholders, but people like this have no business working in the education profession without knowledge and proper qualifications.
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I am in the midst of trying to get data from Sander’s crew. “Proprietary” it may be, but if it is data pertaining to student achievement, then the state departments ought to release the information on request.
And the formula has been public for some time, it is not a very complex formula for Sander’s VAM because it doesn’t account for any “confounding variables”. The historical scores of each student act as a “blocking agent” and supposedly block any confounding variables such as SES or ELL status.
If you provide me with a personal email address, I can provide you with the best simulation I have involving Sander’s work. Although, there are several out there that a Google search will uncover, this one comes directly from Sanders.
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ME,
I would be interested in your work. My email is dswacker@centurytel.net . Thanks in advance!!
Duane
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