The District of Columbia has suspended the use of test scores as part of teacher evaluations, a practice which was the hallmark of Michelle Rhee’s tenure as chancellor of that district and which led to the firing of hundreds of teachers.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson said the district needs time to phase in new Common Core tests.
“Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced the decision, saying officials are concerned it wouldn’t be fair to use the new tests until a baseline is established and any complications are worked out.
“The District has fired hundreds of teachers under the system, which was put in place by Henderson’s predecessor, Michelle Rhee. Test scores make up 35 percent of evaluations for those who teach students in the tested grades and subjects.
“Last week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation joined the two largest teachers’ unions in calling for a temporary halt to evaluating teachers based on Common Core tests. The foundation has spent more than $200 million implementing the Common Core standards nationwide.
“The U.S. Education Department has not backed the idea of a moratorium, which is also being considered in New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced a bill on Thursday that would remove test scores from teacher evaluations for two years, and a handful of states have delayed using test scores to make personnel decisions. But no state that already includes test scores in evaluations has committed to pausing the practice.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No great news here, evaluations are being thrown under the bus to enable the survival of common core. this will a give fig leaf for the unions support of common core.
So is there an attorney group willing to step up to the plate and start a class action suit for all of the teachers in the US who have lost their jobs due to flawed evaluations. They should not be the victims of this flawed, unjust, and inappropriate attempt to get rid of teachers?
I think of how they must feel in all of these too little, too late attempts to appease the teachers, when thousands? have probably already lost their jobs.
A note to Diane,
I honestly don’t know what I’d do in retirement if I didn’t have your daily blogs. If I wake up at 5:00 a.m. I’m upset that I have to wait until 6:00 or 7:00. Where do you get your energy? Thank you for keeping me informed, entertained, and ‘beyond frustrated.’ Until I die, I will be waiting for all of this to go away. One day I’m up, then down, feel hopeful, then lost. Keep up the good fight. One day I want us all to feel 100% victorious.
Stay healthy and well. God bless you.
“So is there an attorney group willing to step up to the plate and start a class action suit for all of the teachers in the US who have lost their jobs due to flawed evaluations?”
I am baffled as to why the lawyers are so silent on this issue?
We cannot afford the high priced attorneys our opponents have on board.
Of course its time to suspend this practice – because the Vergara lawsuit (new plaintiff’s of course, once “they” grease some palms) is coming to a state near you. Once they eliminate tenure and LIFO, they will find an entirely new way of canning real educators, and bringing in the scabs.
The appr is the full employment act for lawyers
So. . . they realized there would be no teachers left?
Right out of Washington’s back door. I’m sure they will be paying attention. I’m not sure it will make a difference elsewhere–but will remain hopeful.
Hey. in this country, money talks and people jump. Thus spoke BillaGatestra,
Gates call to suspend high stakes testing for two years is nothing more than a strategic move to avert a massive public relations disaster of the kind that would permanently poison the waters for all high stakes testing and their associated teacher evaluations. Do not think for a nanosecond that there has been any change whatsoever in Gates support of VAM for use in high stakes decisions. The only thing this means is that Gates has realized that teachers do in fact already have a massive workload and cannot possibly implement any CC$$ curriculum and be held accountable for it during implementation. In other words, it has finally dawned on Gates that you really can’t build the plane while it’s in the air. That is the only significance of this announcement. If confronted on this position, Gates will reavow his full support for VAM, CC$$ and all the rest of the toxic mess he has funded and driven from back rooms and board rooms.
Correction: I should have said “evaluations based on high stakes testing” It appears that even though the testing will be of no educational value due to not being aligned with the curriculum, it will still go forward. My guess is that they will monitor “progress” in some fashion as a way of deciding when to reimpose the high stakes aspects on teachers.
Possible excellent litigants:
* special ed. teachers;
* teachers whose students haven’t mastered English but who must be tested in
English nevertheless;
* well-known expert teachers who have a year of slower students;
* Parents, teachers, and students upset over tests which are biased culturally, socio-
economically, by gender, which have ambiguous questions with more than one
correct answer, which test content not yet taught, etc.
Todays tests penalize more than teachers and include whole schools and school districts which also could sue.
If those negatively impacted by testing get together, the pockets of testing companies will not be deep enough to pay for all the damages they have wrought.
VAM is such a sham. For my 3 year average, I turned out to be “expected growth” in my VAM sham. Get this. These were my results for my 3 years individually stated:
Year 1 (ABOVE AVERAGE Value Added) Year 2 (INEFFECTIVE Value Added) Year 3 (ABOVE AVERAGE Value Added) all averaged out to be “expected growth” over a 3 year average……
Did I do anything differently for Year 2? Actually, I did even MORE. Many of my students that year were troubled, in the court system, and my class was interrupted frequently due to probation officers being at my classroom door to talk to my individual students. I had to attend many meetings with parents, probation officers, and discipline meetings. My classes for Year 2 were HUGE! I taught the biggest class of my teaching career, along with the fact that this class had a high percentage of very troubled youth. On top of that, I got into a very different thing that year. I had 14 students move in from January on, and I had to take responsibility for their learning on my linking for VAM sham. Yes, almost of all of my move-ins were troubled.
You really have to listen to this part closely. When I was doing my linking for my VAM sham this spring, our secretary gave all of the staff a print out of students who moved to and also left our school system. I got sick to my stomach as I read over the print out. At least ten (10) of my troubled students who had decreased my VAM sham had MOVED OUT of our school! Some of them were online in our computer school and some had simply moved out of our town. The next grade level teacher of my subject did not have these same troubled kids dragging their test scores down. Now, does that mean that I am a poorer teacher than the teacher that follows me? He will never have to teach these troubled kids. The high school will probably never have to teach these kids. They are now getting their education in a different way. But, they were there at that given time in my classroom and my VAM sham suffered for it. I would be “let go”, but the teachers following me (in grade level) are safe.
There are far too many variables in VAM for it to be an accurate measure of a teacher’s effectiveness. Even though I was measured to be “ineffective” that year in my VAM sham, I still had 88% of my students pass the state test and earned a point for my school district. It is ridiculous that a teacher gets marked down in VAM sham when the student earned a 452 the previous year, and then the student earns a 448 for the current year. Yes, that drop of 4 points says I should be fired and let go – and that I am not doing my job. Hey, maybe the test was harder…or maybe it did not accurately measure the curriculum (many times many concepts are missing from the test.) Or, maybe my student just didn’t feel well as he/she took the test and lost 4 points. It’s all gotten ridiculous and silly. I am thankful that I do not have many more years to teach. I love my students and I love to teach, but as we all know, it is not enough anymore. The rich people are after my low salary, and eventually teachers will not even have enough money to raise a family and buy a home. That time is already here.
ST,
“. . . my class was interrupted frequently due to probation officers being at my classroom door to talk to my individual students.”
After that happened once I would have been in the principal’s office letting him/her know that it was a total breach of ethical and educational practices and that it wasn’t going to happen again. And that any further such interruptions would be met with a “Get the Hell out of here, come back before or after school.” And that I expected full backing from the principal.
“The District of Columbia has suspended the use of test scores as part of teacher evaluations”.
So when are they going to suspend the use of test scores as part of student evaluations/grading?
What?? Why shouldn’t students be held up against a “standard” using a standardized test as the main component?
Because the educational standards and standardized testing process is so rife with error that it render any results completely invalid.
To understand why read Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And this error 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 logical 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 crap in-crap 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 attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” 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.