A few days ago, I published a post on the blog of the New York Review of Books about the battle over teacher evaluation by test scores.
Unlike this blog, whose readers are mostly educators, the NYRB blog goes to hundreds of thousands of highly literate non-educators. So my challenge was to briefly explain Race to the Top and the bitter struggles over how teachers should be evaluated and by whom.
Please take the time to read this post, read the comments and–if you are so moved–add your own comment to help explicate the issues.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Outstanding article laying out the predicament in which we find ourselves. I was particularly touched by the illustration that leads the page. Students as parrots! Says it all. The teacher should have been a sheep to complete the vision of the future.
I believe that this is the end game of the WASP’s that control our government, and have the majority of the 1% wrapped up in the same group of WASP’s, to turn us into sheep. I think of how, right after the Civil War, the whites would give “credit” to the freed slaves. It was just slavery in another way. If we don’t know any better, we know when we are being taken advantage of. We are being taken back to robber baron days. It is the only thing I can think of. I have no idea how our government works. It is no longer required for schools to teach Civics. I don’t think that decision had anything to do with education, learning, the greater good. Some may think I am crazy, but we are 11 years into this. And all we see is our children – our future – are losing out. They cannot think for themselves. We teachers see it everyday.
“It is an effort by economists and statisticians to quantify activities that are at heart matters of judgment, not productivity.” Well said Diane. The technological advances over the last 20 years have created conditions that present a false notion where faster and more precise data gathering will be seen as better and the primary indicator of success.
Another wonderful article by Diane Ravitch that clearly lays out today’s real threat to public education.
Under today’s deformed standards, Socrates would be label ineffective because he believed that in order to learn one must be allowed to explore and fail.
Today’s new standards mandate that failure is not an option, ever. Every student and teacher must lockstep in unison through a common set of arbitrary deadlines and any deviations are deemed ineffective.
Race to the Top is not a race, it’s a death march for public education. Evaluating teachers via high stakes testing, is akin to executing those who can not keep up on this march, towards our new prison.
Teacher’s are barely hanging on to their most effective defensive weapon, collective bargaining. Let’s not kid ourselves, Cuomo, Bloomberg, and King are attempting to seize it. Once they do, we’ll be on that march and there will be no returning.
Well done! My only quibble: referring to the NYS commissioner as an “accountability hawk” implies that those who oppose the over-reliance on standardized tests that “reformers” like he, Cuomo, Bloomberg, and Rhee advocate are somehow NOT supporters of accountability. I those of us who oppose the over-reliance of standardized tests need to make it clear that we are not “anti-accountability”… I would call the so-called reformers “VAM hawks”.
Isn’t it ironic that the commissioner for public education for the state of New York sends his kids to private school where they will most likely rarely, if ever, be tested? Do as we say, not as we do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/nyregion/new-york-names-new-state-education-commissioner.html?_r=0
Diane, you say it so well. With enormous patience, you “pick up your pen” again and again, with logic and eloquence, to cut through the “reformers” mass media edu-propaganda. You shake their foundational arguments to the core because you truly put “students first” . I join with so many of the reform weary to simply say, ” Thank you!”
Thank you. I have come to realize that those who constantly boast about putting students first or kids first…….never do. Those who do just do their job.
So so true! Some have time to talk about it while creating catchy phrases, while the rest of us are busing doing it.
Many, many quietly and competently teach, guide and mentor every single day.
Praise the doers not the bloviators.
Linda:
Perhaps we need to invent a new saying: “Those who can, are teachers; those who can’t teach, bloviate about teachers.”
Feel free to improve as I do NOT think “cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”
🙂
I wish I could upload photos. There is a button that says:
Those who can, teach ; those who cannot pass laws about teaching.
OR
Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, wonk.
Comments on blog article are encouraging.
Diane still has not gotten to the heart of the matter of the problems with educational standards, standardized testing and “grading” in general. Wilson has proven that those practices contain at leas 13 sources of error, any one of which invalidates the process, that render the concepts invalid not to mention unreliable.
Now I know what my dissertation advisor felt like in trying for a year to get me to read “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues” by Andre Comte Sponville (a must read for all educators) and I resisted. I had heard enough about virtues from the nuns at the Catholic grade school and thought it to be just a bunch of pious religious nonsense. I realized how wrong I was after reading the book.
It seems that Diane can’t let go of her usage of tests and test scores and to throw off that albatross of educational thinking to move beyond it. She hints at it at times but I believe that she still doesn’t understand what Wilson has shown to be true, that using educational standards, standardized testing, and grading results in conclusions that are chimeras, ghosts, phantoms, sprites, duendes or as Wilson states “vain and illusory. (prove me wrong, please, Diane)
Duane–Unless I am misunderstanding your comments (& I know that you WILL correct me if I am wrong!), I have to disagree with you here. Diane has stated what you assert to be the crux of the matter time and again–that this is a “house of cards” which will surely collapse given the end of “standardized” (& we must always remember to put that word in quotes, for these tests are neither valid NOR reliable) tests and their fallacious usage.
In the response to the Education Week commentary about teacher pay I am composing, I too discuss the insulting nature of non educators having “the cure” for education. There is more here than just attacking teachers; it is about defunding public education. They want public money in private hands. Create a permanent division of class. It is digesting and a disgrace to America.
Several comments on the blog went through, but one was screened out by the moderator. I tried again, and that effort is still pending. I’d like to share it here.
I wrote,
Carl, I really want to get this information to you, because your past comments are insightful and show you are an actual college teacher with credibility. The comment moderator screened my comment, possibly because it contained a web link.
Therefore, I’m just going to lay out some facts about the specific corporate interests involved in data-driven “accountability” in New York. You can easily Google for a link to Audrey Watters’ excellent story, “News Corp Rebrands Its Education Division, But Is It Enough for Schools to Trust It?” I’ll paraphrase lightly.
Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp, and Fox News, made two important acquisitions in November 2010. He paid $360 million for a 90% stake in the educational content/assessment company Wireless Generation, and he hired outgoing New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to head his for-profit US education division.
The New York state comptroller voided a no-bid contract that had been granted to Wireless Generation, citing its association with News Corp following the phone hacking scandal, rather than Joel Klein’s glaring conflict of interest. The state did not, however, sever ties for the contract given to the Shared Learning Collaborative, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative for a nation-wide educational data infrastructure with software built by Wireless Generation. New York City is one of the pilot districts for that project.
We don’t need any percentage whatsoever of a computer driven “metric” to evaluate teaching and learning. The Big Data industry has invited teachers to negotiate with them over what other factors it might consider when it assigns a score holding us (and our students) accountable to their marketing drive. All we need to do is cede ultimate authority over our work to them.
Diane is so right to alert the general public, many of whom have no connection to public schools, about why teachers’ job security and pay should not be tied mainly to the performance of their students on tests they do not write. Colleges and universities have found this out too. Performance on SATs or ACTs used to be a definitive measure for acceptance to colleges and universities. That is until after years of use many of the elite institutions of higher learning found that these “standardized tests” written by corporations often were not predictive of success and now many rely more on other factors. Some have outright scrapped use of these tests. Now tests written by other for-profit corporations (not teachers) are rocking the pillars of universal free public education in every state. Diane points out how destructive it is to evaluate teachers when up to 40 to 50 percent of their ranking may be based on student performance on one annual test when the teachers have no control over who their students are or the material in the test. I retired from high school teaching in Connecticut before such testing could have scarred my reputation as a teacher, not because I was a poor teacher, but because at age 60 when I came to Stamford to teach, I was given ninth grade, the grade level that the existing teachers could avoid now that a new teacher was coming into the Social Studies department. In high school, the freshman age group is the toughest to teach. Especially the girls because many are not yet sure if they can be popular and smart. Freshmen are just one step beyond Middle School. Do you remember middle school? Most who think back on it recall that it was hell because our bodies were neither “child” nor “adult” so we did not now how to act. Is it fair to evaluate by testing students teachers assigned to freshman year in the same manner as those teaching seniors? Is it fair to evaluate teachers assigned to remedial level classes and those assigned to “college prep” or “honors” classes with the same tests? I hope the general public is smart enough to see how unfair this can be.
Diane,
You are one of the rare voices of common sense among those who write about ‘educational reform’. I don’t know what we (public school teachers) would do without your steady voice of reason. Thanks for writing this article…it is a keeper.
Parents should read this: “The kids are not alright, stop measuring them all the time.” By Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd. The site is BigThink.com.
Diane:
Having just researched the issue spoken with some Washington state legislators about the Fallacies of Over Reliance on VAM, I’m familiar with the critique of the Gates Foundation’s MET Report and the issue of “random assignment of students”. The stunningly unprofessional way the authors of the MET Report dispose of the issues surrounding “random assignment of students” makes their conclusions utterly useless. Yet those conclusions will be used by corporate/business reform bureaucrats to justify expanding the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
I notice you did not broach that topic at all and I infer that the topic is a bit too “wonkish” for your proposed audience. But, the fact that continued use of VAM to evaluate teachers, based upon the prerequisite of “random assignment of students”, would make it impossible for school systems to provide either remedial or advanced classes to students who qualify, it would make impossible offering music, foreign language, and honors classes, in reality it would make impossible much of what is currently both common place and extremely effective educational policy. Perhaps you can craft a paragraph that addresses the collateral damage that continued use of VAM will generate.
Students really do have the power to knock out Murdoch, Klein, Bloomberg, King, Gates, Walton etc….by simply refusing to take tests.
From a kindergartener to a senior.
Wonderful article Diane; as usual. Glad it reached many non-educators as you mentioned. The public outside of our field needs to hear the alarm bells too .
Without Your leadership American Education would be be flushed down the toilet and called a necessary “reform” for the nation. Stand tall Stand proud and know that you Dianne are saving this great republic from people who see profit above all else, and morality and honesty as a “thing of the past”.
Thanks,Ari. We must all stand together, not let uninformed people bully educators, and let our elected officials know what matters for kids and our future.