This is a comment by an educator in New Mexico:
My name is Tine Hayes. I have been teaching high school in Gallup NM for 14 years. I am dual certified in Fine Arts and Social Studies, and I am level three and National Board certified. This year more than ever in the past I am disheartened and distressed by the actions of the PED [state education department] and the attitude toward students and teachers offered by this department. Students are tested into total submission and teachers are disregarded and disrespected at every turn.
Our current educational climate in New Mexico is predicated on assumptions held by our governor and our secretary of education.
First, the success of a school and its students can be summed up by test scores. Second, a Value Added Model of teacher evaluation meaningfully provides a measure of teacher effectiveness.
I take issue with both of these assumptions. The issue of assessment has been at the core of the public education policy since the advent of NCLB. This law requires the use of decontextualized assessments to evaluate school performance. This test based evaluation system was and is a windfall for the test developers and resulted in massive bureaucracies whose job it is to evaluate, analyze and regurgitate test results.
Each year more and more focus has been given to testing, and each year less focus is given to the child being tested. I have sincere doubts about the value of high stakes testing, but I could see how it might provide some meaningful information.
Under Skandera the PED attaches value only to test scores. Although some other areas are given lip service in the school grading system, it is clear the PED only cares about the test scores. The PED claims to be interested in student success, but what they really mean is they want better test scores.
An examination of the Value Added Model indicates that it is a justification of test scores as the sole expression of the quality of teacher student interaction. Hopefully we live in a world where the success of a child is more multifaceted than a test score and the human experience of teaching is about more than performance on the NMSBA.
The data from test scores is specious. Millions of dollars every year are spent on the test itself, and then thousands of man hours are spent interacting with the data. New Mexico has changed tests and test vendors many times since the establishment of NCLB. The State assessment is modified and reworked almost every year since its inception, making it nearly impossible to gather meaningful data.
Next year it will again change to the PARCC assessment. At my high school it has been very difficult to collect and compare relevant data due to both these changes, and the limited number of students who are tested. With the new budget restraints placed on states and districts resulting from the economic downturn these costs are an increasing burden.
For example, the NMSBA now is 80% multiple choice and 20% writing. The reason is not pedagogical. It is financial. It costs too much to grade writing. At this juncture in GMCS only selected grades are given the NMSBA, because it is too expensive to test everyone. While financial restraints have made the tests questionably meaningful the PED continues to double down on the importance of the scores.
Meanwhile budgets get smaller every year, and students have to raise money to go on field trips or participate in extracurricular activities. We do not have the money to pay for gas to go on field trips or to offer vocational programs, but The PED signs contracts with private companies in the name of improving the tax payer’s return on investment in education.
Testing has, despite its questionable effectiveness, become the holy grail of our educational system, at the expense of student experience. This hypocritical misuse of tax payer dollars is intolerable. Students in my wife’s third grade class have to sell pickles and candy to pay for the gas and the bus driver to go on their field trips, yet the PED signed a two year contract with Teachscape, a California based company, for 3.6 million dollars.
Is sending millions of New Mexico dollars to private contractors out of state putting student’s first? How are New Mexico tax payers getting a good return on their investment?
The Value Added Model and the new system for teacher evaluation misses the point. Let me first say I believe the quality of the teacher is the main indicator of the quality of the student’s school experience. I am also keenly aware teacher quality needs to be improved. But once again the myopic PED turns to test scores.
Even the portion of the teacher evaluation based on the principles observation is really based on test scores. The principle is judged on how well their evaluations match the teacher’s scores. The value added model is essentially an academic justification for using test scores to judge the quality of a teacher. It tells us nothing we did not already know. Good teachers impact student’s lives. Good teachers improve test scores.
What the Value Added Model does not tell us is what makes a teacher good. And what it does not allow for is that good teachers were having a positive impact on student’s lives long before NCLB. The PED has embraced this model because it justifies their investment in test scores. The problem for them is that not all subjects are tested. Because they insist on using test scores to evaluate teachers the PED has to come up with tests in each content area.
Thus in order to judge the quality of a Physical Education teacher or an Art teacher, for example, the PED has developed a high stakes assessments in those content areas. The PED is wasting time and energy on a way of thinking disconnected from the student’s experience. I wonder how these tests make the experience of a student in Art or PE more meaningful.
At my school we do not have funds to support sending chorus to regional competition, but the state has the funds to develop an End of Course Exam for chorus. The decision to develop EoCs in electives is not student centered. It is anti-teacher. Skandera will tell you she is dedicated to giving teachers and principals the tools to improve. The tool she provides is apparently Teachscape. This tool serves no function except as a data warehouse for the teacher evaluation system. New Mexico just bought a 3.6 million dollar filing cabinet.
Law suits are being brought against the PED with regard to overstepping its authority, but legal arguments are narrow and specific in focus, and my concern is general. Skandera’s vision of Education in New Mexico is disassociated from the children. Data is currently more important than children and that is wrong and must change.
Please use your position in the New Mexico legislature to return the focus of education to students. Stand up for the children of this state and demand that decisions made by the PED reflect a truly student first approach.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reposting my comment here:
This is all very simple.
First, we have a problem…poverty. We don’t want to pay anyone a living wage (no matter how educated they are), so let’s say they’re not ready for career/college.
Second, make standards that are either so chopped up we can’t see the forest for the trees, or make them so vague we won’t see the trees for the forest. Then we can make up some tests and put them all “online” so none can every verify or validate anything. Put all of the control in a few hands to diminish any leaking of info. Since most teachers are so dedicated and compete tent, they may very well step up to the challenge. Don’t worry.
Next we can play with cut scores until we get it “right.” Then watch how many schools/teachers/parents/students “fail.”
The next step is very important. We don’t want to look too evil, so let’s pretend we are here to help. Who are these masked men? Meet the “Turnarounds.” That’s right, we have consulting groups who (despite they are made up of billionaires, hedge fund managers, etc.,) don’t need money (they are already stinking rich); they just ride in to help all of us slackers out of a seemingly impossible predicament.
The consulting groups get the fed $$ for “turnaround” and set up shop in the schools to create data, mine data, and feed the huge data monster that spews out “real research” about how schools fail because of inept teachers and administrators. (Oh, and don’t ask questions about where the $$$ goes, because none seems to know).
Finally, after the $$$ has all disappeared, the “turnarounds” say they have a solution to this problem, “shut the school down.”
Now we have created a need for a new school. Where will we get the $$$? We will get it from the taxpayers. Oh, and we won’t have our schools beholden to any of those rules and regs. That didn’t work before. That’s a problem too. Let’s just wing it.
Now we have what we wanted the whole time…a citizenry who are uninformed, uninterested, unprepared, and certainly undeserving of a living wage. Yabadabadoo!
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Right on, comment. Ybadabadool is right.
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The value added model of teacher evaluations is disgraceful for evaluating our teachers. Here is an example. I am a math teacher who has never had a negative evaluation until now and I am a minimally effective teacher according to the system. My principal almost cried when she gave me my evaluation. She told me that it is not reflective of my teaching at all and that she sees what I do in the classroom. I have emailed Matthew Montano and asked for my data sets, but he has yet to reply other than to ask where I teach. They gave me 15 out of 70 possible points for SBA scores. How is that even possible? That makes it seems like all of my students are failing! I had very good scores for our district. For two years, I have been the poster child for growth in my district and now this? I missed 4.75 days of work and scored only a point higher on attendance than a social studies teacher who missed 12.5 days of work. I work in the after school tutoring program and I am on the leadership team for MC2 Common Core math implementation team. I am a SAT team member. I was head of the math department until this year when I stepped down to work on my dissertation for my doctorate in Organizational Leadership and Instructional Leadership. I keep stats for volleyball and basketball and I coach Track. They are not even using scores for this year and this is my evaluation for THIS YEAR? They are using scores from two and three years ago, when I was a first year teacher. My scores weren’t even bad then! How is this legal to evaluate someone on something from years ago? How is it legal to evaluate employees using different standards? Teachers who teach subjects that are tested are evaluated using SBA scores while other teachers are not? I work hard and strive to differentiate and rarely sit down while other teachers who don’t teach math hand out worksheets daily and are scored as effective teachers. Can someone explain that to me? My evaluation depends on students in a poverty-stricken and drug-riddled community? I think I need a new career and fast.
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This article is TOTALLY ON POINT. I hope that all states will soon REACT to this nonsense so that teaching can be returned to teachers and students can once again find learning joyful and meaningful. Unfortunately, my county in MD is still totally supportive of every “data-driven” reform being issued from the “corporate heavens”! As a specialist, I too will have to quantify the creative process and be reduced to planning lessons in which I am clearly able to produce “creative measurement” for non creative people who are not in a classroom setting or even in a school setting for that matter and want to see numbers! The author states, “Thus in order to judge the quality of a Physical Education teacher or an Art teacher, for example, the PED has developed a high stakes assessments in those content areas. The PED is wasting time and energy on a way of thinking disconnected from the student’s experience…”
The sad part is that in order for an art or PE teacher to succeed under these “reforms” the goal will be to produce lessons DISCONNECTED from the content area experience. So instead of delving into using paints to experience what happens when colors are mixed from the get-go.. students will be given a sit-down not-so-hands-on quiz for measuring their baseline of color knowledge (one lesson wasted), then their next class they will probably be given something to look at with primary and secondary colors and asked to copy it (with only primary colors on a palette) and maybe on the third lesson it might actually resemble an actual art lesson. This is not how I would ever teach this. But guess what… these students only get about 4 lessons a year anyway (and the lack of art in my county’s schools) is a subject for another time. As an art teacher, I could have let them delve in and experience what happens when primary colors are mixed from the very first lesson and my eyes (watching students), my brain (reflecting on what I am seeing my students doing, my mouth (conversing with students as I circulate) is WHAT I NEED TO KNOW IN ASSESSING MY STUDENTS. And guess what, they get to actually experience the making process from the get-go. No data can tell someone how hard a student has tried even if the “product” looks less than average… no data can tell how little a student has tried even if the “product” looks stellar (in the latter case imagine how much further a student could go if they REALLY tried.. but numbers don’t reflect these issues – HUMAN TEACHERS DO)!
The author continues, “At my school we do not have funds to support sending chorus to regional competition, but the state has the funds to develop an End of Course Exam for chorus…” This is “THE DATA DRIVEN TOP-DOWN CORPORATE ED REFORM” tragedy inflicted on students trying to learn and teachers trying to spark learning in students.
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Once you implement this it is going to have a high effect on the children. Teachers are going to “teach to the test” instead of implementing good teaching-teaching that prepares students for real world situations. The education system is not a factory….I feel like sometimes we put these children in the makeshift classrooms and push them out. By that I mean we push them out unprepared. All because we are teaching what they NEED to know to pass the test. In addition-once teachers pay is based on student performance, teachers will lose the passion for teaching and take the measures into their own hands or test booklets.
Don’t get me wrong I believe that teachers do need to be assessed and evaluated. How about schools provide highly qualified administrators that will have a presence in the schools and leadership that will focus on student achievement.
Finally-please stop comparing teachers to welders. Nothing against their profession but they don’t have 25 students who are part of their daily profession.
As Marian Wright Edelman said “a nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the future”. I’m not a teacher in New Mexico but I stand for children across the nation.
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Rebekah,
Please contact Marian Wright Edelman and tell her both her sons are deep into the movement to privatize schools, take away teacher autonomy, and ignore poverty. One, Jonah, is head of the nefarious Stand for Children, which is an ally of the hedge funders’ DFER. The other, Josh, used to work for Rhee but now works for the Gates Foundation.
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Diane, thank you for stressing the fact that Edelman’s sons are not supporters of public education. Every time I come across the video of Jonah speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival about what his organization, Stand For Children, did in Illinois to weaken public education it gives me energy to go on and fight the privatizers. Thank you and I hope that you are getting better every day.
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“. . .teaching that prepares students for real world situations.”
Ah, Rebekah, you hit on one of my pet peeves-the concept of “real” world versus what, the unreal world? For a child the school world IS the “real” world. That “real” world out there, outside the school house walls is what is “unreal”. The life of the child is the “real” world of classmates, classes, teachers, etc. . . .
I certainly don’t teach to “prepare students for real world situations.” I teach so that they may utilize their learning and knowledge in whatever way they see fit in their life whether within the school house walls or away from the school. And that life outside the school house walls can be quite tedious and less than fulfilling at times. I counsel my students to enjoy life wherever they find themselves because every minute of it is “real”. When it isn’t “real” you’re dead.
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My biggest problem with the testing is we’re spending buckets of money and time on it, and the results, the collected data, is useless, because it’s used POLITICALLY to push an agenda.
This is Bob Somerby on the DC test scores. When these scores came out everyone from the Washington Post editorial board to Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee misled people because they have a very specific POLITICAL agenda:
“Editorial board cheerleads/misleads about those test score gains: The Washington, D.C. public schools recorded good score gains on the 2013 NAEP.
In yesterday’s featured editorial, the paper’s editorial board got its pom-poms out. They did some of their familiar cheerleading for “education reform.”
They also offered a misleading picture of score gains in D.C.
This is the way the editorial began, headline included. Much of this is technically accurate. Much of this is misleading…
That editorial tracks score gains back to 2007, “when the reforms began.” This truncated history lets the editors get their pom-poms out.
The gains since 2007 have been pretty good. But below, you see the average scores in Grade 8 math for D.C.’s black kids dating to 2000, the first year in which scores are available…
But score gains were being recorded before the watershed year of 2007. The board should stop playing cheerleader in this arena and start behaving like journalists.”
It doesn’t matter what the data says. Politicians, media and people who work for reform orgs are completely in the tank for this specific version of reform, and they will use any data collected to justify their POLITICAL agenda.
Why should my child take part in this political campaign by Duncan, Rhee and the Washington Post? None of this stuff is being used to help HIM in any way. If the scores come in low it means more privatization and further damage to his public school. If the scores come in high it means…the same thing.
These folks are captured. Whatever the data says, they’ll use to justify their favored approach, just as they did with the DC scores this week. Again, why should I pay for that and how does my child benefit from the weeks he’ll spend on these tests?
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/
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File open records requests for royalty payments made by Teachscape to those who created the intellectual property commercialized by Teachscape.
Without tax funded state and federal contracts, Teachscape would not exist.
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“A pretty remarkable story” was the apt summary by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who joined D.C. officials in celebrating the results of the 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).
Give me a break. Duncan is out campaigning for Michelle Rhee (again).
This is how reformers in Indiana used the NEAP scores politically, to attack their opponent:
“Ritz and the teachers unions have one objective – undoing the reforms of the Mitch Daniels and Tony Bennett era. Rolling back these reforms means ignoring the simple truth – that they are working,” wrote Cam Savage, Bennett’s former communications director, on the Capitol & Washington blog.”
If scores go up reforms are working. If scores go down we need more reforms.
Why would my kid volunteer as part of what is clearly a political campaign pushing a specific version of reform that revolves around test scores? Why would I pay for that?
http://indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact/2013/11/07/indiana-posts-huge-gains-istep/#more-27126
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A few additional thoughts here…
PED, under Hanna Skandera, has been MIA in terms of support to school districts, especially the sped department. I believe currently there are 6 administrative positions vacant so trying to get an answer to a question is virtually impossible. PED is virtually a revolving door of employees. The frustration is echoed in districts across the state when I visit them.
Skandera hasn’t bothered to visit Gallup or other outlying school districts. I was in Gallup schools just this past Thursday. If she bothered, Skandera might learn about students who live in homes without electricity, indoor plumbing/heat, or water. Thirty seven percent of the 48,000 households on the Navajo Reservation lack electricity, 48%% lack indoor plumbing, and 80% have no central heating system. If she bothered to pay attention, Skandera would learn that 65% of the households on the Navajo Reservation are at or below the poverty threshold, with a per capita income of $6,124.
She would learn of families with generational cognitive and physical disabiities due to the massive Church Rock uranium spill in the 1970’s that rivaled Three Mile Island, and that most folks haven’t even heard about. She would learn of the cognitive and physical defects/problems endured by people who live in the 4 Corners region due to massive coal processing plants that belt out toxic waste, virtually uncensored. But none of that will matter when it comes to data and VAM.
She would learn that 85% of parents in low-income households did not finish high school, that 37% of them do not have year-round employment, and that 30% of New Mexico’s children face hunger or food insecurity. Oh wait a minute, Governer Martinez’s appointed Head of Human Services stated that no one in New Mexico goes hungry, except maybe some of the Navajos on the rez when weather is bad and they can’t get to the store.
Expending our state’s precious little funding on out-of-state vendors is now de rigeur. A recent mental health “audit” from the Boston-based Public Consulting Group (PCG) shut down most of the state’s providers. The company’s audits are often unreliable and their findings have been called into question. Our Attorney General’s office has had a dickens of a time getting any concrete info regarding the audit. In the meantime, Governor Martinez has contracted a multi million dollar deal with several AZ mental health firms whose execs will be paid $300/HOUR to facilitate the transition. Thousands in need of mental health support are no longer getting services…
Skander still has not been confirmed as the Secretary of Education – our legislature keeps postponing the vote. Under our state constitution, Skander is ineligble as she has never taught in a classroom. What is truly ironic is Skander received her post grad degree with Angela Valenzuela, one of our field’s premier advocates of social justice. Angela told me they scratch their head wondering what happened to Skandera, then sums it up with one word: MONEY.
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Many teachers and parents beginning to realize the harm done and are standing up. Martinez and Skandera are aggressively playing some kind of “victim” card, and dragging kids into the media storm. You can’t engage these two people directly, which is why the test refusal movement is so important and will be successful in New Mexico: http://nmrefuse.weebly.com
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I would dearly love to see the type of $ info referenced in this post translated with all facts & figures to bar chart form for my state. Admin lingo. Cost to taxpayers of NCLB, RTTT, CCSS, VAM teacher evalns, in a format which shows cost-per-pupil distributed between admin & teaching over the yrs since about 1999 (with a separate bar for costs at state DOE level if they are not part of cost-per-pupil). Measured against, say, NAEP, perhaps PISA results. Might shake things up in a hurry!
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I’m a special education teacher in New Mexico and I took this year off teaching, for medical reasons. The choice was made easier by the new teacher evaluations. Since my students have significant disabilities, they can not take the state tests. 50% of my evaluation would then be based on how the regular education students, who I do not teach, scored at our school. 25% of my evaluation would be based on my principal’s view of how I contributed to that score (God knows how that we be, since I do not provide instruction to any of the students who take the test). So 75% of my yearly evaluation would have been based on test scores of students that receive no instruction from me. How could this possibly be an effective indicator of student/teacher performance in my classroom?
All this does is provide an incentive for teachers to work with the wealthiest, highest performing schools, while disincentivizing teachers from working with special needs students or in high risk or low income settings.
I have no problem with being evaluated or critiqued as a professional, but it needs to be done with some semblance of common sense.
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Hi, this is a great letter, there’s a typo, should be principal not principle, it appears twice… I’m going to forward, but wanted to fix typo first. Thanks! Tracy
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Tine has summed this up beautifully. As one of the school-based administrators (principal) who is asked to enforce this program, I am sickened by what I am seeing in New Mexico. The idea that we can quantify teaching is frightening and unrealistic. The insult is compounded by the fact that the actual infrastructure being used to quantify teachers and principals is not fully developed. It is like repairing a plane mid-flight (or perhaps building it mid-flight). The sheer quantity of time being devoted to both testing of children and evaluation of teachers is stunning, as well. As someone who is in my teachers’ classrooms frequently and gives feedback a lot, the new system has actually tied my hands and forced me into a rigid system that does not allow me to coach my staff on matters that I feel will make high-leverage changes in their instruction. Rather, I am stuck trying to shepherd them through the new system, because frankly I built this staff and want to keep them. This means ensuring that they are successful in the new teacher eval system, which has required hours upon hours. And yes, the toll on children is that they are spending hours on testing. Seriously, Skandera is having our 4th and 5th graders take an end-of-year art and PE test. These two new tests have nothing to do with student learning and everything to do with teacher measurement.
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My original post is still awaiting moderation for some odd reason, so I am going to try this again…
A few additional thoughts here…
PED, under Hanna Skandera, has been MIA in terms of support to school districts, especially the sped department. I believe currently there are 6 administrative positions vacant so trying to get an answer to a question is virtually impossible. PED is virtually a revolving door of employees. The frustration is echoed in districts across the state when I visit them.
Skandera hasn’t bothered to visit Gallup or other outlying school districts. I was in Gallup schools just this past Thursday. If she bothered, Skandera might learn about students who live in homes without electricity, indoor plumbing/heat, or water. Thirty seven percent of the 48,000 households on the Navajo Reservation lack electricity, 48%% lack indoor plumbing, and 80% have no central heating system. If she bothered to pay attention, Skandera would learn that 65% of the households on the Navajo Reservation are at or below the poverty threshold, with a per capita income of $6,124.
She would learn of families with generational cognitive and physical disabiities due to the massive Church Rock uranium spill in the 1970′s that rivaled Three Mile Island, and that most folks haven’t even heard about. She would learn of the cognitive and physical defects/problems endured by people who live in the 4 Corners region due to massive coal processing plants that belt out toxic waste, virtually uncensored. But none of that will matter when it comes to data and VAM.
She would learn that 85% of parents in low-income households did not finish high school, that 37% of them do not have year-round employment, and that 30% of New Mexico’s children face hunger or food insecurity. Oh wait a minute, Governer Martinez’s appointed Head of Human Services stated that no one in New Mexico goes hungry, except maybe some of the Navajos on the rez when weather is bad and they can’t get to the store.
Expending our state’s precious little funding on out-of-state vendors is now de rigeur. A recent mental health “audit” from the Boston-based Public Consulting Group (PCG) shut down most of the state’s providers. The company’s audits are often unreliable and their findings have been called into question. Our Attorney General’s office has had a dickens of a time getting any concrete info regarding the audit. In the meantime, Governor Martinez has contracted a multi million dollar deal with several AZ mental health firms whose execs will be paid $300/HOUR to facilitate the transition. Thousands in need of mental health support are no longer getting services…
Skander still has not been confirmed as the Secretary of Education – our legislature keeps postponing the vote. Under our state constitution, Skander is ineligble as she has never taught in a classroom. What is truly ironic is Skander received her post grad degree with Angela Valenzuela, one of our field’s premier advocates of social justice. Angela told me they scratch their head wondering what happened to Skandera, then sums it up with one word: MONEY.
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“The principal is judged on how well their evaluations match the teachers’ scores.” Thank you for pointing this out. I wonder how widely this part of the numbers game is known. School systems are penalized if their teachers’ scores from observations are a certain level above or below test scores. I’m a special education teacher. My scores are largely based on how many of my disabled students are proficient or advanced on grade-level standards.
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The sad thing about all of this is Governor Martinez’ campaign promise was to bring the
Florida model to New Mexico. She also promised that teachers would have a “robust” and bold evaluation. She has kept her promises. As a volunteer with the Albuquerque Teachers Federation (AFT), I along with countless volunteers called our members and knocked on their doors everyday for six months and numerous teachers voted for her anyway. Not exactly sure what they were thinking, maybe that our claims were make-believe. ATF also wrote a bill that included a fair, reasonable, and research based teacher evaluation. It passed both the House and Senate (thanks to countless lobbying from AFT-NM and ATF). However, the Governor went above the law and made it her rule that NM would have this punitive and gotcha evaluation. ATF has a lawsuit that will be heard on Nov. 20- stay tuned.
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Diane, thanks for re-posting my comment, I wrote this as a letter to the New Mexico Legislature. I have sent it out to all senators and I will send it to all house reps. I appreciate the thoughts and comments.
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