The following notice was sent to all teachers in Florida from the State Commissioner of Education, letting teachers know that their names and evaluations will be released to the media. Most teachers do not teach tested subjects and grades, so their ratings are based on the test scores of children they never taught.
This is Junk Science at its worst, another front in the battle to destroy public education and dismantle the teaching profession. No matter how many esteemed researchers say this is wrong, judging teachers by test scores–anyone’s test scores–is the battering ram of choice for the corporate reformers.
The only way to stop this juggernaut of destruction aimed at our nation’s teachers is to refuse to give the tests–not one teacher but entire schools.
Here is the letter:
As many of you know, we at the Department of Education have been fighting for you and for all teachers in an effort to maintain the confidentiality of teachers’ names and their individual value-added data.
We took on this fight because I believe the teacher-principal relationship for professional development is supported when evaluation information has a period of protection. Your work and dedication have helped to create a bright future for our state and our children, and I want to support that work in any way that I can.
Recently, the department – and our co-defendant, the Florida Education Association – lost a lawsuit filed by a news outlet to gain access to teachers’ individual value-added data. This data is calculated on behalf of school districts to complete their teacher and principal evaluations.
Later today, the department is providing these data, as required by the First District Court of Appeals, to the media who have requested it. We expect this information will be posted online and individual teacher names and value-added data will be publicly available.
The department will not post this information on its website, but is presenting answers to frequently asked questions and other information to the public at http://www.fldoe.org/profdev/studentgrowth.asp.
As a former teacher, I know that teaching is hard work. And, I’m confident that teachers in Florida are among the nation’s best in helping students succeed.
Growth in student achievement is an important part of an educator’s evaluation in Florida, which is the way it should be. As important as growth in student achievement is, our evaluation systems also include evidence of other important and essential aspects of teaching.
Despite being compelled to release this information after mounting our best legal efforts to protect the confidentiality of teachers’ information, we remain encouraged and feel that we have an opportunity in front of us.
We are encouraged because through this information, we can celebrate the achievement of Florida educators – the teachers who have led students to success in their classrooms, as well as the programs that trained those teachers, the school and district leaders who supported them, and the families and communities who trusted them.
We also feel we have an opportunity because when we look at the data, we can see where we should allocate our resources and attention to continue improving.
While releasing these data as a public record is not our chosen path to increase its usefulness, we will make this an opportunity to improve communication and understanding about what these data can – and cannot – tell us, and how they support better decision-making when analyzed in combination with other information about teaching and learning.
And, that is what we as professional educators are all about: improving teaching and learning. Until every teacher in every child’s classroom in every school has all the support and expertise necessary to add maximum value over the course of a year, we cannot rest.
Our work together on this will not be slowed. We do this work with the support of Governor Scott, whose budget proposal includes a record amount for Florida’s schools including over $8 million for the express purpose of providing the professional development school leaders need to improve student achievement. And, we do so with the support of our State Board of Education that is constantly focused on the best policies to help teachers and students succeed.
I look forward each day to our continued work to ensure Florida’s students receive a high-quality education so they may succeed in college, career and life. Thanks again for all you do each and every day.
Sincerely,
Commissioner Pam Stewart
Florida Department of Education
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Love how she notes she’s a former teacher…
yes!
“Until every teacher in every child’s classroom in every school has all the support and expertise necessary to add maximum value over the course of a year, we cannot rest.” No, ma’m. Until you stop spewing such ridiculous baloney, you should not be allowed to rest.
The only possible hope here is that Florida parents and citizens will see ratings that are at odds with what they know about local teachers. “How can Mrs. Peabody have such a low rating? She’s awesome! This rating system must be totally screwed up.” But that’s a slim hope indeed.
It’s been my experience that a great number of parents are clueless and only worry if they feel little Johnny is being slighted in some way.
Diane says “The only way to stop this juggernaut of destruction aimed at our nation’s teachers is to refuse to give the tests–not one teacher but entire schools.” Indeed!
That’s the line that caught my eye.
You’re getting there, Diane!! Love to see this endorsement of such a “radical” solution.
I look forward to see the day when Diane will come out and say we should refuse to “grade” students.
One lesson to all: if you collect data using public funds it is likely that you will lose a FOIA request. Therefore, the best way to avoid the publication of statistics ranking teachers is to not collect them to begin with. Individual teacher evaluations are confidential. Aggregated ratings and rankings are probably NOT.
is to not collect them to begin with.
yes yes yes
This just about sums it up.
http://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/if-other-professions-were-evaluated-like-teachers/
It is indeed an outrage that the results of such numerology will be published for all the world to see.
from the Reformish Lexicon:
value-added measurement, or VAM. Means for enforcing the reduction of the complex, unquantifiable, humane enterprise of teaching and learning to a number intended to measure the extent to which a teacher
a) has effectively narrowed his or her curricula to the bullet list of “standards”;
b) based his or her pedagogy on extrinsic punishment and reward;
c) robotically parroted his or her canned scripts;
d) modeled for his or her students proper obsequiousness to superiors; and
e) identically milled his or her differing students to specification, via test preparation, thereby inuring them to the performance of meaningless tasks and preparing them for the low-wage service jobs of the future.
Syn: Vacuity-of-curricula-and-pedagogy Acceleration Mechanism.
See data-driven decision making and technocratic Philistinism.
data-driven decision making. Reformish numerology
more here:
cx: the auxiliary “has” should precede the a, b, c list, of course
The ed reform governors are polling poorly and it’s re-election time.
“We do this work with the support of Governor Scott, whose budget proposal includes a record amount for Florida’s schools including over $8 million for the express purpose of providing the professional development school leaders need to improve student achievement. And, we do so with the support of our State Board of Education that is constantly focused on the best policies to help teachers and students succeed.”
Kasich in OH, Corbett in PA, Scott in FL, Snyder in MI. They’re all re-discovering their deep, deep commitment to public education and offering a hand in cooperation! Just ignore the prior four years of bashing public schools and teachers.
I have a feeling Brownback in Kansas will be joining them in this purely political effort here shortly:
By a 59/31 margin KS voters think public schools are under funded, and they want state Supreme Court to step in: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2014/02/brownback-extremely-unpopular-trails-for-reelection.html … …
I grieve for the good teachers who will be publicly shamed by this:
Gee, I thought that Ms. Volk was a great teacher, but she only got a “Satisfactory!” Maybe I should ask to have my child transferred. Or, better yet, perhaps the school could fire Ms. Volk and all the other experienced teachers at the school and replace them with pimply adolescents from TFA.
Pimplism. Some perfectly good people have pimples. Having pimples does not necessarily correlate with substantive vs. chronological immaturity.
I’m shocked a liberal would betray such an irrational bias based on physical characteristics.
You are the first liberal in the country to betray insensitivity toward pimply youth.
Shame on you.
Liberal? Harlan, what do you know of my politics? Nothing.
Irrational basis? If it’s shameful to think learning and experience qualities that one should look for in an educator, then this is a badge of shame that I will wear proudly.
When NY and LA pulled this crap, I saw the writing on the wall. Everyone: your state is next. We are falling like dominos. I sincerely hope we don’t have another suicide over this like we did in LA.
This absurdity has every chance of backfiring just as it did in NYC, and we have to help make that happen. This will not stop those who favor VAM from continuing their bald faced lies as was the case after an analysis of the results in NYC showed that they were completely random. And when I say random, I mean that even when the VAM there apparently got it right and properly described a teacher in a way that closely correlated with reality, it was still by accident. http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/ AND http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/more-on-the-utter-stupidity-of-nycs-value-added-machinations/ Flori-DUH has the potential to be an even greater idiocracy since they are generating fake numbers for teachers by judging them on the test scores of students they never taught in subjects they have no connection to. Please let the lawsuits for wrongful termination begin. Once again we may be treated to the spectacle of shills like Bill Gates claiming that VAM results should not be used to shame teachers, a pathetic diversion from the fact that VAM barely qualifies as snake oil.
Nicely put. There oughta be a law against patent medicines that make you worse. Sue for false advertising.
The group FSOSO has asked that you not compare/equate VAM with a perfectly fine placebo.
“Growth in student achievement is an important part of an educator’s evaluation in Florida, which is the way it should be.”
This is a classic reformer mantra. It sounds simple and straightforward; it makes sense to every politician and stakeholder who lives in the world of standardized testing. Unless you control every factor that affects teacher quality, it is NOT “the way it should be.”
Yup. There’s quite a bit of Reformish spoken in that letter.
“A clueless electorate is a corruptable one.” Frank Bruni, NYT 5.12.13
The Robber Barons and Wolves of Sesame Street are making sure a large chunk of the electorate stays clueless by keeping the message as simple and misleading as possible.
A short snappy slogan is much easier to repeat and be heard than a long rebuttal that the average American will never take the time to read.
For instance, the Nazi’s kept their slogans simple when they scapegoated the Jews.
According to the Nazis, “Democracy was a Jewish invention.”
According the Nazis, “the Jews were engaged in a conspiracy for world domination.”
It’s very difficult to defend against short, easy to repeat slogans with another slogan.
Another lie was one the Catholic Church repeated for centuries. That the Jews killed Christ. Anyone who reads history instead of listening to slogans knows this isn’t true.
Here’s your (false) syllogism, Lloyd.
“All effective propaganda uses short memorable slogans”
“The Nazis were effective propagandists”
Therefore: “All those who have effective propaganda are Nazis.”
NOT!
There’s a name for that example of flawed logic too. You’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say that. You twisted my words out of context but I shouldn’t be surprised considering the source.
On second thought: I’m so glad you admit that what the Koch brothers spew out is propaganda.
Here’s the definition of propaganda:
information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
And that’s exactly what the Nazi’s did. Stalin did it too and so did Mao.
Bird of a feather flock together. Harlan, would you fly in the Koch brother’s flock?
Bob Shepherd: “Reformish” indeed!
As always, KrazyTA here to lend teaching staff everywhere a hand by providing an English-to-English translation of the first four words:
“Growth in student achievement” = Rise in test scores. [short version]
“Growth in student achievement” = Focusing an inordinate amount of attention & resources on the bubble kids (to the neglect of everyone else) so that they make a school’s and a school district’s meaningless & misleading high-stakes standardized test scores rise, thereby saving your jobs and sparing me from public embarrassment and shaming by non-educators who don’t subject their own children and their teachers and schools to this punitive hazing ritual. [long version]
“Growth in student achievement” = If y’all buy into this you’re suckas! [The latter used only when the leaders of the “new civil rights movement” of our time speak to each other in private, as when they meet up while touring their children’s schools like Harpeth Hall and Cranbrook and Delbarton School and Spence School and Lakeside School, etc.]
Helpful hint: “achievement” and “performance” are stock-in-trade terms of psychometrics. We should not let meaningful terms like “teaching” and “learning” be displaced by others that are all too often misleading.
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We need to come up with a few of our own slogans to counter theirs and then flood Twitter, Facebook and the Blogosphere with them until they go viral and become a permanent meme.
I suggest short slogans that focus on the Robber Barons and Wolves of Sesame Street designed to rip off the invisibility cloak they depend on to distance themselves from so-called reform movement they control with their wealth.
Once there are a few snappy, each to remember slogans, then the strategy would be to repeat, repeat, repeat endlessly through every popular social networking site. And every slogan should have a link to more in-depth info for those who actually read more than twenty seconds a day.
And there are people who read in the US. It’s estimated that in the US alone there are 65 million avid adult readers. That means they can sit still to read something longer than a six work slogan but even then every link should lead readers to a information post with less than 400 words. Keep everything short and the message will spread. Make it long, and many readers will get twitchy fingers to surf away from the page.
Lloyd Lofthouse: “rip off the invisibility cloak they depend on”—
Much said in few words. An instant classic. Why?
Because the self-styled “education reformers” can’t stand transparency, openness, the light of day. And it’s why such heavyweights in the charterite/privatizer ranks—Michelle Rhee and David Coleman come to mind—commit a Rhee Flee when they are forced to contemplate even the faint possibility that they will have to have a discussion, publicly & openly & fairly, with Diane Ravitch.
Thank you for your comments.
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well said, Krazy!
How about making it “true” as well as short?
Beat me to the punch again. That was the next line that caught my eye. Pure edudeformer claptrap.
Have to lol
This court case smells similar to the one in California designed to do away with due process for public school teachers.
This is just another frivolous law suit designed to destroy the foundation of the public schools. The Robber Barons and Wolves of Sesame Street have discovered another way to subvert democracy.
I’m sure the information this law suit calls for doesn’t apply to private sector schools of any kind—-only public schools run by democratically elected school boards.
A sure sign of discrimination. Public school teachers are being targeted just like the Jews were when the Nazi Party was climbing the ladder to political power. The Nazi party was founded in 1920. It’s rise to power started in 1925 and was complete in 1933. The Jews didn’t start to really suffer until 1933 and it just kept getting worse. It’s dangerous to let a few people (I’m thinking Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, etc) have too much power.
Why hasn’t an appeal been filed along with an injunction until the appeals processes is exhausted?
You can bet that these law suites are being filed in jurisdictions where there are judges friendly to the robber barons.
Lloyd, presumably it was a lawsuit based on Florida’s freedom-of-information law, requiring the disclosure of “public records.” Not sure the Nazi analogy is helpful in this context.
The Nazi analogy may not be helpful in this context but the methods the Nazi’s used may be used as a warning.
Do you really think the Robber Barons of public education and the Wolves of Sesame Street won’t use any legal method available to achieve their goals even taking advantage of the freedom of information act.
It’s called subverting the democratic process to disseminate deceiving propaganda.
The Freedom of Information Act may also be used for evil purposes.
Do you apply the same criterion to President Obama and the Democrat party?
I didn’t think so. Kochs=Nazis.
Real nice meme, Lloyd. Just untrue.
There’s plenty of evidence that indicates the Koch brothers are tyrants who have no respect for democracy, the government, or the people who elect each President and Congress.
As far as I’m concerned, decades of evidence supports the opinion that the Koch brothers and Hitler’s Nazi’s would get along just fine. They’d understand each other.
Or the sons would do what daddy did to make more money.
Do you know where the Koch wealth came from? The father—who built the family fortune, not the brothers who fought each other in court for ten years for control of the company after daddy died—went to Soviet Russia and worked for Stalin (Stalin!!!!!) to help the USSR build an oil industry, and he came back with that blood money (tens of millions) and bought up oil leases across the US. Today Koch industries is the second wealthiest privately held company in America—a company that’s paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for violations of environmental law by polluting the air, earth and water because the Koch brothers were unwilling to spend the money it would take to clean up the industries they own.
So the Koch fortune came from helping America’s enemy during the Cold War.
The Nazi party started the war on the world by claiming that Germans living in Poland were being mistreated and even killed. Therefore, the Nazi Party declared that this was a just cause to invade Poland. It turned out that the Nazi Party created the misinformation themselves and repeated it often enough for most Germans to believe it to be true and we all know the very sad end result of that propaganda. The 1% understand their history well and know if they say public school teachers and schools are failing often enough without debating weather this fact is true, then people will believe it to be true. For years, parents rated their local schools in a national survey by a highly regarded organization and indicated year after year that their local schools were doing a good job of educating their children! So, the 1% knew what had to be done and they did it. Now, all we have to do is sit back and wait to see what comes as a result of segregating students by socioeconomic levels and moving more money from Public to Private schools.
The enemies of public education have NOT succeed everywhere yet. In fact, they have only made small gains but this has made them bold and they are rushing forward now think they have won.
But they haven’t won yet.
For thirty years, they struggled and lied and ran their smear campaigns repeating the same misinformation to mislead the public and they only started to show some success in their war after Bush and Obama and then these robber barons decided to stop going to the electorate and instead started spending really serious money to get politicians elected to office who they would own and then those reps would ramrod their so called reforms through and get them enacted.
To do this, they have had to corrupt the system. Other wealthy men in the past have done the same thing and they usually end up getting slapped down and some go to prison once the slow Constitutional wheels that represents the balance of power in the US starts moving.
The turn around may come through the courts or a future Congress or President. Don’t give up the fight. It’s a long way from over.
Edward H. Haertel’s report on VAM, linked to by Dr. Ravitch, above, is well worth reading AND SHARING WITH YOUR LEGISLATORS.
Agree – excellent paper.
Rather nauseating how she turned 50% of the email into an infomercial. First the bad news, now we gloat over the cause of the bad news. Yup – Pammie is on the side of teachers alright. After all, she was one.
Diane and others are working on the issue of rhetoric for the public, press, and others who wish to stop and reverse the present race to demolish public education. VAMs are “junk science.” It remains important to call out the names of individuals and organizations who are intent on profiting from public education
The preemptive rhetorical strikes of Rhee and her supporters create “abstract portraits” of teachers as selfish monsters through the clever meme of putting “students first.” The policy of “parental choice” rests on economist Milton Friedman’s “free to choose” propaganda campaign, launched with the aid of his wife Rosa, in a 1980’s video series and a book.
Not many people seem to be aware that USDE has awarded grants to the American Institutes of Research for the purpose of finding and paying PR subcontractors to frame messages that will help ensure states and districts comply with RTTT requirements. Participants in this multi-pronged campaign work under the umbrella of the “Reform Support Network.” One subcontractor’s recommended that states and districts try to induce compliance/buy-in to the RTTT agenda by means of “teacher SWAT teams” that can be deployed for teacher-to-teacher communication at key junctures of the implementation and redesign of evaluation systems.“ See Reform Support Network. (2012, December). Engaging educators: Toward a new grammar and frame-work for educator engagement. Author. Retrieved from www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation…/engaging-educators.pdf p. 9.
A related campaign from an otherwise respected academic institution tries to explain and justify value-added estimates and growth measures with the analogy of a gardener influencing the growth of an oak tree. This explana-tion, presented in a slick Powerpoint, seems innocent enough. The developers are fully aware that VAM scores, presented as if these are a measure of “growth,” may gain credibility by virtue of a longstanding association of teaching with nurture and with concepts about students’ multi-faceted development and growth.
This oaktree analogy and “growth” imagery for VAMs only works as an instrument of persuasion if you ignore the fact that students, unlike trees, have the capacity to think and act independently and they are influenced by an array of people, events, and beliefs not confined to teachers and the school. See Value-Added Research Center. (2012). Teacher effec-tiveness initiative, value-added training oak tree analogy. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Re-trieved from varc.wceruw.org/…/Oak%20Tree%20Analogy%20with%20notes%20- %20Bush.pptx
Rhetoric for the public press? How about truth for the public press? Of course, the public press is not much interested in truth any more, in general. How about this for a meme: Compulsory State Education For All. Do you think it will sell any better in the future than it’s been working so far.
Where’s your proof to support your opinion that compulsory eduction isn’t working? If you are going to make a claim, back it up with valid evidence that can’t be refuted.
The Reform Hypocrisy
We demand data driven instruction
and, YES we have NO DATA to support the validity of the CCSS
We demand data driven teacher evaluations based on test scores
and YES we have NO DATA to support the validity of VAM
We claim that CCSS will improve student’s critical thinking skills
and YES we have NO DATA to support this claim
We claim that critical thinking skill are essential for college and career readiness
and YES we have NO TOLERANCE for critical analysis of CCSS/APPR/VAM
Well done summary.
From the Reformish Lexicon:
technocratic Philistinism. Replacement for antiquated values of humane teaching and learning, scholarship and research; another name for the Reformish faith.
Dianne,
I live in Florida. It will become a personal mission of mine to have EVERY teacher cancel their subscription to any newspaper that prints this junk. Doctors receive Medicare dollars. I want them to have all malpractice suits listed under their names, Then I want the records listed of all Judges who have repeat offenders on the streets. Now lets go to the state attorneys, police, etc. Let the lynching begin.
Bill Gates…………how about showing us how it is done. YOU are the expert, right? You are now a philanthropist. Lots of time to talk the talk. How about walking the walk? One year. Inner city. No entourage. Live our life. Bring up the scores. Arnie? Michelle? Oh wait you tried. Never mind. Joel? Oh, we will have someone “coach” you all day so we know you’re not cheating.
The Tea Party IS the real revolution. Join.
Yep, this Tea Party is the real deal:
Let me know when Florida, Los Angeles, and New York City publish the job ratings of doctors, firefighters, police, and lawyers. Oh, and don’t forget the legislators.
exactly! well said, Diane!
Let me know when dentists are evaluated and public humiliated based on the cholesterol levels of people who are not even their patients.
And let me know when the USDA sits still and even encourages such nonsense.
And let me know when dentists around the country remain compliant and complacent in the face of such madness.
“Let me know when dentists are evaluated and publicly humiliated based on the cholesterol levels of people who are not even their patients.”
LOL
Loved it! Loved it! Loved t!
So true, it made me laugh.
That is exactly what the so-called reformers are doing as they rob the US taxpayers who fund public education in the US.
Now, there might be a law suit in how tax payer dollars are being used to support private sector schools without the tax payers having any say in where their money goes.
Wasn’t that the main reason why the Founding Fathers launched a revolution in the 18th century against the bloody British Empire?
In California the public schools are funded mostly out of property tax. Forty cents of every dollar and if any of that money is being sent to private sector schools, I have no idea. No one tells the tax payers. We just assume it all goes to the public schools that most or our children attend.
OK, maybe I’m going to get flack for this. We’re talking about Florida here. The place where people run for cover when they’re in trouble with the law (when I was a kid, our local appliance distr. stole from his clients & ran there; just a few yrs ago a friend ran there after fingering his partner in a food-distr scam perpetrated on public schools).
I am from NJ. Every single family I know who has relocated to Fla had his kids immediately boosted to the next grade– their ps system is a full year behind our curriculum.
The ed news from FL is not all bad. They were one of the first states, 10 yrs ago, to set up a system whereby advanced hs students could co-enroll in the state college sys & earn freshman college cred as they completed hs. Their Disney-assoc. arts-tech colleges are top-notch.
But– it’s FL: they ranked 42 out of 50 states in per-pupil spending in 2011, before Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature cut about $1.3 billion from education funding. Is it surprising that they’ve opened the gates to unmonitored, unaccredited charters receiving public $? That they buttress their anti-public-school position [read: ways to defund ps further] by publishing biased, junk science VAM stats on their teachers?
Two things.
(1) Harlan Underhill is back, so let’s all agree to ignore his goofy left-right dichotomization of everything.
(2) My first thought was, releasing this data is the best thing that can happen. If people in my town saw my bad rating (and I would get a bad rating, most likely), they would know something is messed up with the system. Of course, in large communities and for new teachers, that wouldn’t work.
It became clear after my very unscientific analysis of about twenty other teacher VAMs at my school, that I could possibly be the worst teacher at my school according to VAM! The few other teachers who were also on the negative side of the VAM formula, had not so coincidently instructed many of the same students. Should we assume we were a crappy bunch of educators? Or that we just had the misfortune of instructing a crappy group of students that year? Or perhaps, just maybe, the FLDOE’s $10 million algorithm is complete crap?
Hire a lawyer and take the system down!