If you live in Colorado and care about the future of our society, join this group of students, educators, and citizens, meeting on May 1.
Join the fight to reclaim our schools for learning and resist the corporate takeover.
RAVE: Re-igniting Association Values for Educators
BY PEGGY ROBERTSON
Welcome to RAVE. The RAVE caucus in Colorado has been created in a determined effort to unify Colorado through education and action as we reclaim and improve our public schools. We are parents, students, teachers, AFT members, NEA members and citizens of Colorado. We speak truth to action and we are clear in our goals to take down corporate education reform and bring authentic teaching and learning back to Colorado’s public schools. We recognize that federal mandates designed to privatize public education, along with corporate money and corporate ideology, have become the guiding forces within our public schools and many organizations that profess to support public schools. We, the citizens of Colorado, can reclaim our public schools as we organize as one and move forward with integrity and with students at the forefront.
To find out more about RAVE join us for our first meeting. We will meet at Yard House in Lone Tree on May 1st at 5:30 p.m. RSVP for the event here: RAVE May 1st Meeting and join us on FB here. See you soon!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good luck with this effort. We will lose some battles along the way, but we owe it to our country and our students to fight for this pillar of democracy. Thank you.
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When will you be opening a chapter in Upstate New York? Looking forward to watching this grow!
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Beth,
In NYC we have something similar called MORE. MORE was on the recent AFT ballot. And I think they will grow as well.
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I hope you can expose the absurdity of the Denver SGO requirements for teachers, especially the fact these variants of VAMS are junk science.
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Laura, all variants of VAM are junk science. See Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s great blog VAMboozled, where she debunks them all.
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I am a regular at VAMboozled and had my own de-bunking bibliography in 2011 for a paper (unpublished) called Report Cards from Hell on the Near Horizon.
Among the first VAM entries on my list were articles by the late Gerald Bracey in Kappan. One of the most memorable was his exchange with Wm. Sanders who helped migrate his algorithms into education based on scores from norm-referenced tests and guaranteed to produce a stack ranking of students and teachers.
I mention the SGOs here and on other blogs because many people do not understand that SGO/SLOs are a variant of VAM for teachers whose job assignments do not produce scores on state tests. I also think these measures are underrepresented in discussions and bibliographies critical of VAM, especially those that focus on the algorithms, sources of random error, and the like. It bears repeating that about 70% of teachers are detached from scores on state-wide tests, and that a lot of the literature on VAM has a focus on math and ELA, with less attention to science and social studies, and zip on anything else.
The Colorado movement announced today on your blog is especially important because the dreadful SGO process in Denver has been propagated as exemplary for other states, including my state, Ohio, where 50% of a teacher’s evaluation hinges on this nonsense.
In any case, thanks for the opportunity to elaborate.
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