There will surely be an appeal, and more rounds of litigation.
But for the moment, there is good news. A county judge in Wisconsin struck down the law promoted by Governor Scott Walker to strip most public sector workers of their collective bargaining rights.
All those trying so hard to drive a stake in the heart of unionism must be in mourning. For now.
I received an email from a parent who is also an educator in Chicago. She wondered about the identity of a group called Education Reform Now, which placed ads in the local media undermining the teachers’ strike. ERN is part of a group called Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers who support charter schools, privatization, and using test scores to evaluate teachers. It is interesting that the charter schools they promote are often (depending on state law) exempt from test-based evaluation. Oh, and 88% of all charters are non-union.
She writes:
Greetings Ms. Ravitch,
I write this letter to you with both excitement and disappointment in my heart. I am sure you are well aware of by now of the strike/battle over the fate of our children and public education that is currently taking place between the Chicago Teachers Union and the City of Chicago. I write this letter not as an educator, but as a parent with children in the public school system here in the city who is infuriated that my children, other children and tax paying citizens are having their civil rights infringed upon through the bullying tactics of our mayor, CPS and big business moguls of this country.
I have been extremely active in the process of fighting against the unfunded longer school day put upon us by the mayor, fighting for an elected representative school board and now walking the picket lines and taking information to the streets and the people regarding the issues that the union is truly bargaining for for our students and teachers. My children have been in the streets along side me as well. I have utilized this opportunity as a teaching moment because I understand the importance of teaching our children, our future, true democracy in action.
My excitement comes from not just the part I play in the process, but more importantly the role and witnessing of the process by children. We talk about the importance of providing a comprehensive education to our children and that we are a “democratic society”; but based on what I am witnessing now brings me to what has has me disappointed and incensed.
Yesterday I watched a television ad paid for by Education Reform Now Advocacy that ran on our local ABC station channel 7. The ad blared carefully selected quotes taken from stories in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune against the union, the teachers and the strike. It ends with the narrator quoting from the Sun-Times that “a deal is within reach, all CTU has to do is grab it”.
The content from both media outlets is based off of mis-information that is simply not true. This is a strike that is, in fact, long over due. Contrary to what the city wants everyone to believe, this is a strike to take back the fate and control of our children’s education. The city and big business are combining efforts and dollars to dismantle the union, and to pit parents and communities against teachers and our children so that they can continue to create standardized testing factories. They aim to turn our students into consumers of a privatized, on-line product that produces data and dollars so that the rich can continue to become richer.
This is both disgraceful and disrespectful and therefore, I am making a plea to you to support our union, our children and the people of Chicago by helping to shed light and expose the bullying tactics of big business in their continued attempt to dismantle unions and privatize education in this country during the time of our fight.
Thank you in advance for your attention and support! Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.
In Solidarity,
Tonya Payne
Parent/Educator
A reader points out that value-added assessment is fundamentally flawed. It is unscientific and lacks validity and reliability. It will narrow the curriculum and promote cheating. Yet Race to the Top has pushed it, Secretary Duncan lauds it, and almost everyone (except education researchers) thinks it must be right, because…everyone is doing it. But it’s wrong. No other nation is doing it.
VAM continues to strike me as unscientific. As a science teacher I am continually astounded by the lack of scientific integrity when these methods are employed to personally, and professionally, evaluate teachers.
The validity of such methods are the first red flag. VAM uses the philosophy of economics which should be a crushing blow right off as economics is as soft a science as they come with a myriad of “lurking variables” ready at any given time to destroy the ability to measure any one variable, i.e. teacher effect. I cannot believe more science and math teachers, alongside mathematicians (I know Ewing stepped up) and scientists, have not come out in disgust over these methods. Of course, they have somewhat, but their voices cannot overcome billions of dollars acting as carrots to states under RttT and ESEA flex to adopt these policies.
The reliability of VAM, which has come under fire, really is moot. If a process is not valid, then questions of reliability are meaningless. I laugh when I read that VAM is unreliable, because real scientists know that if a process is invalid, reliability measures are meaningless. Economists are not real scientists.
If VAM were used as a diagnostic, then it would be acceptable, but it cannot be used as a diagnostic as its only purpose is to employ punitive measures. The VAM empire knows this, including SAS. VAM is not designed to help kids learn – it is designed to fire teachers under its own invalid measures measured solely on test scores.
The “multiple measures” of teacher evaluation are meaningless. Administrators will be biased concerning a teacher’s past VAM scores and will be scolded for not matching scores under the premise that they are not good evaluators (this is already being documented in HISD and in TN). Now, we have just placed more power in the hands of administrators to relieve themselves of whatever teachers they wish.
What good is a “projected score” to teachers? Teachers can do nothing to remedy a student who may not make “growth”, because there is no way to know who will or who will not make growth. No teacher-made assessment gives teachers a clue as to what students will or will not grow. A teacher may have a students that earns an A+ on all their assignments from the teacher and may still not show growth because they may have also earned A+’s from their previous teacher also. It used to be, at least with “proficiency”, that a teacher could figure out what students needed help and zero in on those students in order to attempt to get them to reach proficiency, but what are teachers to do with “growth”? How do teachers measure whether a student will or will not show growth? It is an impossible target.
I believe that target was made impossible for a reason. Just as NCLB was designed to show schools as a failure, so too, in 10 years, will reformers look back at NAEP, PISA, and TIMSS outcomes, and declare that teachers are failures.
You can bet that state mandated tests will increase as teachers rush to teach to the test, teach THE test (for those who can see or get their hands on them), or downright cheat.
May the best test prep. teacher or cheater win and hold their job and barely feed their families to do what they love. Good luck.
Arthur Goldstein, veteran English teacher in Queens, New York, is tired of all those meetings and all those consultants, all those well-paid traveling professional developers who waste his time with the latest Big Thing. Until the next Big Thing comes along. He wishes they would leave him alone and let him teach.
Well before the current crisis over value-added assessment, this ad hoc group warned that there were many reasons to doubt the value of test-based evaluation.
Since that report was published there have been many more demonstrations of the invalidity of student tests as a measure of teaching quality.
In time, it will be clear to everyone who cares about education that this is not a good way to judge teacher quality.
Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has taken the time to read research.
This is especially important because the Trib has been hostile to the CTU strike.
I am especially pleased that he read Gary Rubinstein’s careful dissection of VAM in New York City.
Gary’s posts should go viral.
He shows that VAM doesn’t work.
It is meaningless.
Richard Rothstein explains that VAM is an unproven methodology with negative consequences for the quality of education.
Rothstein says he is not surprised that Chicago teachers oppose its use. He wonders why other teachers have not gone on strike for the same reason.
It has not worked anywhere.
It narrows the curriculum.
It relies too heavily on tests that were not designed to measure teacher quality.
The teachers are being used as guinea pigs for an unproven methodology that will harm education.
The Gates Foundation, on its blog-site called “Impatient Optimists,” responds to Anthony Cody’s searing critique of the foundation’s support for market-based reforms.
Please read Anthony’s post, then the Gates’ response.
Also read Anthony’s post about poverty, and Gates’ response.
I think it is shameful that the foundation’s representative begin by questioning whether Anthony believes that poor children can learn. This is the standard reformer tactic to anyone who raises the issue of poverty as an impediment to learning. They would have us believe that being hungry and homeless is just an excuse for bad teachers; that it doesn’t matter if children can’t see the front of the room, can’t hear the teacher, because they have never been screened for vision and hearing. No excuses!
To say this to Anthony Cody, who taught for nearly 20 years in the public schools of Oakland, California, is especially shameful. Do foundation executives who sit in plush headquarters in Seattle have the authority to impugn his bona fides?
Read the exchange. And ask yourself why the Gates Foundation has the moral authority to define the nation’s education agenda. Its two hobby horses right now are teacher evaluation and charter schools. It has spent hundreds of millions to find the magic formula that would identify those “bad” teachers and put a “great” teacher in every classroom. Now school districts across the nation are dancing to Gates’ tune, and no one knows whether the arcane mathematical formula designed by economists and statisticians really do produce “great” teachers, or even identify them. One sure result of this endeavor is that many millions will be–have been–diverted from instruction to testing and building data systems to tie test scores to teachers.
As for charters, study after study shows that they typically get the same results as public schools. Study after study shows that many charters exclude ELLs and special education students. There are some with high test scores, some with low test scores, but on average they don’t get better scores than public schools. The reason that Gates insists that they ARE public schools is because they are not. They are privately managed schools receiving public funds. Getting public dollars does not make them public schools. They are part of a larger movement of privatization, to remove an essential public institution to private control. No wonder the Wall Street crowd loves them so, regardless of results. No wonder the for-profit sector is growing.
Thanks to Anthony Cody for persuading the Gates Foundation to go public. They had nothing to say on the subject of poverty and in this post, they demonstrate that they continue to neglect its effects on students’ ability to succeed in school.
A reader comments in response to a post complaining about the quality of teachers:
I am one of those people with an elite STEM degree.
I have volunteered at school as a guest speaker, a parent-chaperone, and occasionally given a lesson in an afterschool program.
I am nowhere near as good as the professional teachers, and nowhere near skilled enough to be more than an occasional Other Interesting Adult. It would be a travesty to put me in a classroom.
I’ve been a ‘rocket scientist’ and I find that to be quite a bit easier.
I support our teachers: they do a job I do not have the skills to do.
Marcus Winters recommends using value-added assessment to get rid of “ineffective” teachers. His paper was published by the conservative Manhattan Institute, which regularly issues his and others’ critiques of unions, tenure, seniority and any kind of job protection for teachers.
Many studies–and practical experience–have demonstrated that value-added assessment is unstable, unreliable and inaccurate. A teacher with a high rating may have a low rating the next year. The National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association published a joint paper warning that VAA says more about which students are assigned to the class than about teacher quality.
And then there is the problem that there is no district that has been able to demonstrate that VAA actually identifies ineffective or effective teachers. When New York City published its value-added ratings, the allegedly “worst” teacher in the city taught immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class as they learned English. As Linda Darling-Hammond and others have warned, value-added assessment will encourage teachers to shun the students with the highest needs and gifted students. Neither will produce the expected gains.
It is interesting and curious that Arne Duncan’s favorite innovation happens to be the favorite solution of the right to find and fire “ineffective” teachers.
I will never understand why the rightwingers are so devoted to high-stakes testing, which is known to produce narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the test, gaming the system, and cheating. What’s to like? Maybe they like it because it gives them a club with which to bash teachers, their unions, and public education.
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