Ed Johnson is a longtime critic of test mania in Atlanta and in the nation. He was one of the few people who was not surprised when Atlanta’s nationally acclaimed superintendent Beverly Hall was ensnared in a cheating scandal. When test scores become the measure of everything, they assume far too much importance.
In this letter by Ed Johnson (posted on Audrey Beardsley’s blog VAMboozled), Johnson rips into Raj Chetty and his much-hyped touting of testing and VAM.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting fact: Atlanta does not have anything that would be recognized as a union, is a right to work state and contracts are with the district and are given out annually. The tremendous pressure put on teachers by their administrators to do the wrong thing and falsify test scores would have been nipped in the bud if there had been union protection. Systemic abuse of power in that district meant that administration couldn’t necessarily fire you ( if you had tenure) for not going along with their illicit immoral program, but they sure as heck could remove you from a school and assign you duties and schools that would make you want to leave the system. If you were a new teacher, they had you over a barrel for three full years until due process rights kicked in.But, by then, you would have already been complicit and forever on the hook for acting in a way that should definitely make you lose your license.
I keep shaking my head- the powers that be know that test score corruption risks, they know that vam is ridiculous and it strikes me that as long as ed deform controls any portion of the message that public schools are bad/ public school teachers are bad then they actually can score a win for the 1%. Looking at all the media analysis and the research out of Yale about point of views around evolution and climate change, it doesn’t matter if you know something is rational if it doesn’t fit with your world paradigm then you will reject it. How many people in power actually went to public schools or public/ less elite private university? More importantly, how many of those are not in the power circles of the 1%, either beholden to them for their campaign finance, or their social cache. It is like a bad case of the 1% wannabes destroying public education because they want to be one of the cool kids.
People believe what narrative fits with their world view and as long as the mass media are beholden to the 1% and politicians are beholden to both, public schools are going to be tarred with a terrible brush. This country is one that I do not even recognize any more and it makes me harken for the dark days of Reagonomics where the moral outrage for ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches did make people stand up and question the policy makers about public school idealogy, Now, the types of people who are vying for office would make the National Enquirer look like the New York Times and the NYTimes looks like a paid to highest bidder sycophantic rag.
If the testing machinations weren’t already exposed as a terrible thing to do, if test scores as metrics for teacher evaluations weren’t already exposed as a terrible thing to do, if union protections and due process rights weren’t already exposed as a public good and if equitable funding for education as a national priority wasn’t already exposed as a common good then I really don’t know what will.
We have a president who makes the appointments to the ed department make the EPA/ Watts debacle look like Watts was the best man for the job. I have lost faith in our politicians ( low bar), in our supreme court and most of all in our president- I actually find him the biggest most disgusting sell out of them all- and unless our priorities change, he might just be the best thing we can remember for public ed in the years to come.
The minute due process rights get taken away in Georgia is the time that I contact every teacher that I care about in the state and actively encourage them to walk out of their jobs.
I don’ t dare do that before then because as a right to work state, they would lose their jobs. There aren’t enough tfa to fill all of those jobs. Even if the boards of ed are loaded with tfaers now.
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This is my third posting on Vergara. *Unfortunately for those that find them tedious, I will be posting at least two more. Too much material to cover even in three postings.*
For the links to the documents to which I will be referring, go to my 2nd posting on this blog, 6-25-14, “Adam Bessie: How the Vergara Advocates Framed The Narrative.” VD = Vergara Decision (i.e., the 16-page judge’s decision) and CT = Chetty Testimony (of 1-30-2014, AM session)
The letter by Ed Johnson accessed by the link in Diane’s posting takes some of the burden of explanation off me. For the viewers of this blog who are not members of the numerati (my tongue-in-check ad hoc equivalent of literati) like myself, let’s look at a prime example of the mental firepower that Dr. Raj Chetty brought to bear in an entire morning of question.
Let me start by getting us off the thin dime of warped nano-thin definitions and perspectives that characterize the accountabully variety of charterite/privatizer thinking. Let me honor the late Gerald Bracey by quoting from his list of personal characteristics that he felt were ignored by the test -‘em-till-they-drop crowd because they are “exceedingly difficult to assess”:
creativity critical thinking resilience motivation persistence curiosity endurance reliability enthusiasm empathy self-awareness self-discipline leadership civic-mindedness courage compassion resourcefulness sense of beauty sense of wonder sense of humor honesty integrity
He follows a page later with this comment: “[T]hese are valued qualities, things that count in life much more than test scores and qualities for which tests do not or cannot exist or qualities for which tests are only seldom used (e.g., creativity and critical thinking).”
(READING EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED, 2006, pp. 104 and 105, respectively.)
Using the Find feature in VD and CT I came up with only one result for one of the above 22 items: reliability, the term being used in its psychometric, and not general, sense.
Simply consider the heroic school staff of Newton—and others before and since—that exhibited so many of the above in abundance. Where would we be without such individuals with those characteristics? And don’t we want schools where the staff possess, exhibit, model and encourage such traits in their students?
Ah, but when you’re a numbers/stats hammer of the edueconomist variety, the whole world looks like a numbers/stats nail…
I include the four excerpts from CT where he uses the word “ultimate” (all direct quotes). “Q” and “A” stand for “Question” and “Answer.” Brackets mine.
1), ’[I]n my opinion — and I think many [10] others would share this view — the ultimate goal of education is not to improve students’ performance on standardized tests. … – – of education is not to help students performance on standardized tests, but, rather, to improve their longer term outcomes that we ultimately care about as a society, such as their well-being, how much they are earnings [sic], whether they are attending college, social outcomes like teenage pregnancy, the neighborhood they are living in and so forth. (pp. 9-10)
2), Q Do you have an opinion on the cumulative effect of all these various outcomes on students? So you’ve talked about retirement savings, earnings, college, college quality, neighborhood. … [61] … A My opinion is that we see improvements in all of these outcomes and I see them as very different proxies for a measure — the ultimate measure of a student’s success or well-being, livelihood, what I see as the goals of education, the fundamental goals of education. (pp. 60-61)
3), Even though the test score impacts do fade out, we do see sustained long-term improvements from teachers 20, 25 years later. So while there is fade-out in test scores, there is no fade-out in the outcomes of ultimate interest such as earnings. (p. 65)
4), So another way to say this, just the simple idea that value-added ratings might capture teachers who are effective at teaching to the test rather than actually helping students learn in the long term. The ultimate definition of student progress. And as I’ve described this morning, our analysis of long-term impacts directly addresses that concern. It shows that, in fact, if a student is [81] assigned to a highly ineffective teacher, you see that that student is doing significantly worse on a wide variety of long-term outcomes of interest. (pp. 80-81)
Extremely narrow utilitarian thinking—ya think? John Tukey, renowned polymath, had a word or two to say about this way of thinking: “When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right thing.” (cited in Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn,THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION, 2013, p. 147)
CAVEAT: Do not be confused by the seeming claim in the first quotation that Dr. Chetty thinks standardized tests are of little importance. Ed Johnson is correct; following the lead of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is just another example of rheephormer word salad.
I stop here for now.
TO BE CONTINUED
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