The politicians won’t rest until they can fire more teachers. John King is their man. He has the system that mo one undestands but that is guaranteed to find some teachers to fire.
The politicians know that if they fire a bunch of teachers, it will surely lead to higher achievement and will close the achievement gap. The fact that it has never happened anywhere doesn’t faze them. What has evidence got to do with it? The important thing is to fire enough teachers to satisfy the politicians.
I have said it before and I will say it again: evaluating teachers by test scores is junk science.
When Sidwell Friends and Fieldston and Exeter do it, then we will know it has merit. Until then, it is politically motivated nonsense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are a number of differences between public and private school personnel policies. Should we conclude that unless private schools adopt public school teacher certification requirements that those requirements are politically motivated nonsense? Due process in termination is politically motivated nonsense? That seems to be the implication of Dr. Ravitch’s argument.
I think the implication is that well-to-do families provide enrichment experiences and social guidance/opportunities that would make the “teachers are no better than fairly smart babysitters” model adequate for private schools. In public schools serving the population more exploited by economic and social ignorance (or unwillingness), we need experienced and dedicated educators with deeper understanding of what is needed to serve a more challenging student population. To reduce the worthiness of dedicated and gifted educators who can’t work on “autopilot” to standards and tests is clearly wrong.
Right, because everything Sidwell and Fieldston and Exeter do is best, except when it doesn’t illustrate the point I’m making.
The scores are unstable. with wide swings from year to year … what % of the “ineffective” ratings in year one will also be “ineffective” in year 2 on state tests? What % of teachers will be “ineffective” on their Student Learning Objectives for two consecutive years? I suspect under 1% will be rated “ineffective” on both the 20% categories for two consective years .. on the 60% principal observations … assume the same 2.6% as this year … could turn out that less than 2.6% receive “ineffective” ratings under the new system … it would be quite an embarrassment.
We have rounded the turn where Creeping Corporate Fascism pulls out the whips and turns into Galloping Corporate Fascism.
The only sardonically amusing aspect of the whole spectacle is watching the Pseudo-Libertarian Corporate Shills contort themselves into knots of unwitting self-parody as they connive with the con.
“the Pseudo-Libertarian Corporate Shills”
Are those the same as “the Pseudo-Libertarian Vichy Corporate Shills?
I’m not sure what they’re drinking … there may be something in the water … but it could be too much Perry,eh?
Perry,eh?
That’s a great one Jon!
On these new evaluations, you act as though everything being equal, test scores indicative of good teaching. Too many other factors come into play such as how students are assigned and to which teachers, changes in scores from year to year. If anything is pretty clear with test scores, they change year to year and usually not positively. Even school wide, a 40 point increase one year is very seldom followed by another 40 point increase. But, blame the teachers. After having been rated with this new evaluation in LAUSD, administrators will find something to use to get rid of teachers. Whether its test scores or biased observations, the deal is in. We better get ready collectively, legally, for the fight.
Yes, Jon, it is just hysterical. It would be even funnier if I were retired, living in Costa Rica, sipping Pina Coladas and reading about America’s decline at the pool bar. It isn’t fun being in the actual country when it goes down. This isn’t my grandmother’s America in the Great Depression either. We just have a lot of low I.Q. people (fault of the teachers, of course) and lots of guns. Yes, there are “some” smart people left, your humble blogger included, but not enough to make a kind of Last Stand at the Alamo, if you get what I’m saying. The last thinkers and readers would be quickly subdued by the masses, similar to Piggy in “Lord of the Flies.” Many of the intellectuals left (book-reading folk) also tend to be old and feeble and are dying away quickly….The situation in America doesn’t look very promising, and I spend my time tending my vegetable garden. Gardening and Farming are very practical skills for the future.
“We just have a lot of low I.Q. people (fault of the teachers, of course) and lots of guns. Yes, there are “some” smart people left, your humble blogger included. . .”
Wow, my sarcasmometer must be broken this morning. I’ll have to take it in and have checked when they open up at 8:00.
If it isn’t broken can you say “Pseudo-libertarian liberal shill”? With such an elitist attitude no wonder there are “not enough ‘intellectuals left (book-reading folk)’ to make a kind of Last Stand at the Alamo, if you get what I’m saying.”
Yeah, I think your sarcas-o-meter is broken.
It is nonsense, but it has a greedy reason: charter school where teachers are paid peanuts with little to no benefits and no job security. Fear is the motive also. I’ve witnessed it in the Denver Public Schools where firings are pandemic, fear is pandemic and education is the ultimate victim. What is especially sadistic in that administration, is putting “DO NOT REHIRE” on the sacrificed teachers. By putting this illegal label on the victims, it sentences them to a nation where their career is totally destroyed. Jon labeled the entire planned destruction well: “Creeping Corporate Fascism” that is destroying what remains of the middle class. Now HALF the country is ranked in the “poor” economic designation. WAKE UP! The “Prism” spy system is beyond any imagination of Orwell. And, it encompasses more the the US…its reach will encompass the globe. Go to “ExplosiveReports.com and read what the corporate media and Congress, including Obama will never tell you!
You know I went to see “Superman” today, and at the end of the movie, the entire theater erupted in clapping and wild applause. The movie was a complete moronic , computer-generated mess. I looked around at the glazed eyes. Some of the teenagers clapping and hollering were probably my students. They were busy clapping and shouting with their parents with their super-sized soft drinks, popcorns, and yes, even nachos. Now my job security depends on these people who eat nachos in movie theaters and clap at the end of “Superman.” It was just a little epiphany I had this afternoon as I was thinking of test scores and teachers. How much of intelligence and I.Q. is genetic, and how much is teachable? It is something to think about.
I’d laugh if this weren’t true!
Good Point
“How much of intelligence and I.Q. is genetic. . . ”
I.Q. is bullshit.
I.Q. scores are prescriptive. When you look at the test numbers you can determine whether a child will be able to do well in academic areas that are currently being assessed in schools. Making a statement that I.Q. is bullshit is a bit simplistic.
No, it’s not simplistic. Have you done any research into the development, history, usage and the many fallacies involved in the whole concept of “intelligent quotient”? It is one of the most egregious educational malpractices out there and always has been.
I’m about a third of the way through Peter Sacks’ STANDARDIZED MINDS. One of the early chapters traces the development of I.Q. and intelligence testing. It originated with the eugenics movement. Read the book for a more thorough description – it’s well worth reading for many other reasons as well.
Right, tests were the first attempts at systematic methods for identifying mental retardation and mental illnesses.
Dienne,
Thanks for the suggestion!
Another good read on the history of standardized testing is Nicholas Lehmann’s “The Big Test”.
And I’m sure that you, John, have plenty of it by your eitist claptrap posts today.
John, I really hope my sarcasmometer is broken. If so apologies, if not then no apologies.
Even nachos?! This is an outrage!
Jon, I couldn’t agree more! All one has to do is watch a tad bit the mind rot on “The History Channel!” The networks couldn’t keep my bird interested! Of course “Sweet Pea” has a larger vocabulary than about half the population, isn’t feed junk food, isn’t obese, can hold a better conversation than a lot of the apathetic, gum smacking,
ignoramuses that take up space and don’t give a rip what the government does to infringe on his/her rights. They probably don’t even KNOW what rights their forfeiting! But, hey, as long as they can roost on their couches, watch the endless, brainless “Star” competitions, nothing else is of any consequence. they are cannon fodder, mentally, for any Fox News idiot. At least inTthe ’60’s college kids, and others protested a war that Kissinger refused to settle a year or more earlier, just so HE could be the Golden boy. And it’s been downhill ever since then!
Is there a referendum style process whereby D.C., N.Y., Philadelphia, Chicago et al can get rid of mayoral control. In California it is State Constitutionally illegal. Mayor Villaraigosa, King Tony, found that out the hard way through the courts even though they were warned about the illegality of the process. Mayoral control does not work and is anti our form of representative government. Too much power in the hands of know nothings who do not really care about education it is only a vehicle for other ideologies and profits.
And now they are moving the goal posts. They have changed the scoring rubric to make it easier for students to fail the English Regents. Coincidence?
http://atthechalkface.com/2013/06/15/creating-artificial-student-failure-in-new-york-nysed-nysut/
Creating Artificial Student Failure in New York @nysed @nysut
Upon what are these evaluation schemes premised?
That the teaching and learning process can be evaluated via rubrics (quantification) and student standardized tests (quantification) which are supposedly based on “standards” which attempt to break down a complex human activity, the aesthetic activity of teaching and learning, into discrete bits of information-constructs-that when they are supposedly measured supposedly tell us something about the supposed inherent traits and capabilities of the students and by extension the teachers, schools and districts.
Folks, until the vast majority of educators break out of this way of thinking (that the teaching and learning process is amenable to quantification) nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change and we will continue to be caught up in the edudeformers web of deceit. Kill the beast at the heart, rip out the heart of the edudeformers agenda by resisting, by denying the validity of these quantification schemes, these pseudo-scientific machinations that are educational standards and standardized testing upon which the evaluation schemes are based.
Open your minds and heart to an education, to a teaching and learning process that is free from the pernicious sorting and separating of students that educational standards and standardized testing entail and demand. Open yourselves to an education for all that is free of false judgements of students’ capabilities and help allow the students to grow within and grow out of their current state of being and to learn to acquire the, as so well put in the Missouri Constitution’s rationale for public education, “. . . knowledge and intelligence . . . essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people. . . ”
Anything less is a failure to do our duty as public school educators as per the Missouri Constitution in speaking of the duty of government (and public school educators are the government):
“That all constitutional government is intended to promote the general welfare of the people; that all persons have a natural right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry; that all persons are created equal and are entitled to equal rights and opportunity under the law; that to give security to these things is the principal office of government, and that when government does not confer this security, it fails in its chief design.’ Missouri Constitution Article I, Section 2.
To be continued. . .
Continuing. . .
“Kill the beast at the heart, rip out the heart of the edudeformers agenda by resisting, by denying the validity of these quantification schemes, these pseudo-scientific machinations that are educational standards and standardized testing upon which the evaluation schemes are based.”
The way to do so is to understand just why these pseudo-scientific schemes are false and invalid. Wilson has done just that in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 . (You all knew I’d work this in but it bears repeating and is especially meant for the new readers of this blog. And yes, Jim Morgan, perhaps much to your dismay, I will keep posting this “post modern verbose” writing.)
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking. 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 we are lacking much information about said interactions.
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. This 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 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. As 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 shit-in shit 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 measures NOTHING as the whole process is error ridden and therefore invalid. And 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.
For what it’s worth – please read my personal experience getting observed on a bad day in a tough school year.
http://missrimbus.blogspot.com/2013/06/wherein-author-completely-choked-during.html
Untruth repeated often enough have a way of becoming truths. See this Washington Post editorial. http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/rss.jsp?rssid=4223335&item=http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rating-us-teaching-programs-could-spur-reform/2013/06/18/440a7d14-d859-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_mobile.mobile&cid=-1&fullSiteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fopinions%2Frating-us-teaching-programs-could-spur-reform%2F2013%2F06%2F18%2F440a7d14-d859-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html&wpmsrc=nl_opinions