Yesterday, the New York Times published an editorial vigorously agreeing with the Obama administration’s plan to give ratings to colleges and universities and agreeing with Education Trust that federal aid to colleges should be tied to those ratings. EdTrust was and remains one of the strongest supporters of NO Child Left Behind, having helped to write that abominable law.
On principle, I oppose the ratings game and believe it will turn into NCLB for higher education, with incentives that undermine the mission of the institutions as they get caught up in the numbers game. How will colleges measure the “value-added” of courses in philosophy, ancient history, art, and music?
The Times apparently doesn’t read its own stories. It doesn’t recognize that students are discouraged not by a lack of information but by the crushing debt they incur. Why don’t we have low-cost or free public colleges? The Times has reported in the past about how states have shifted costs from the public to students. Why is this not a more pressing need than data?
When the Times says that the U.S. has among the lowest college graduation rates in the developed world, it should have mentioned that one nation with a much lower rate is Germany, the dominant economy in Europe. What does Germany know that we don’t know?
If the Times thinks that getting a higher college graduation rate matters, why not propose ways to reduce the cost to students? The greatest barrier to college access and completion is affordability, not lack of data.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the many topics that need to see the light of day, EdTrust is one of them. You note that they helped write NCLB–more importantly they invented a great deal of the marketing materials (PPT’s etc…) that made sketchy claims, or slanted data to justify the early implementation. They certainly presented themselves as “Honest Brokers” and this needs investigation.
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The NY Times also forgot to mention that in South Korea with one of the highest college graduation rates in the world, the number of students who can’t find jobs is almost half of all graduates.
Skip College Is Top Advice for World-Beating Koreans: Jobs
“This is the price South Korea is paying for its education fervor and social pressure on everyone to want the same jobs,” said Sung Tae Yoon, an economics professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “The problem is not the lack of jobs, it’s the lack of quality employment and the lack of flexibility among job seekers to consider options beyond the conglomerates.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-11/skip-college-is-top-advice-for-world-beating-south-koreans-jobs.html
And PBS said this of the US:
27 percent of jobs in U.S. require at least an AA degree versus 47 percent of workers have an AA degree or higher.
Editor’s Note: It’s no secret that, like the rest of Americans, college graduates are struggling to find jobs. Are there just too many of them over saturating the labor market? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it would seem so: only 27 percent of jobs in the U.S. require at least an associate degree and the ranks of under and unemployed college graduates are likely to grow over the next ten years.
By comparison, the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that 47 percent of workers have an associate degree or higher.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/many-college-grads/
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Clearly we have expanded the number of college graduates way beyond any sensible level. We need more college graduates like we need a hole in the head.
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Utah’s state governor (who, ironically, doesn’t have a college degree!), wants to have 60% of the adults in the state with college degrees by 2020. I would REALLY like to know where those jobs are going to be.
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Where will those jobs be?
Wall-Mart and McDonald’s for poverty wages. The Walton family is waiting for the college graduates who will be stocking the shelves of Wall-Mart stores.
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Obama’s Race to the Top 100 percent college and/or career ready mandate for every American 17/18 year old must be deleted. No other country sets such goals in stone that come with Machiavellian punishments for teachers in only the transparent public schools while allowing private sector Charters to be opaque with an envinroment ripe for fraud.
No more hard push toward college. A soft approach for those who don’t need remedial classes, and the option of vocational training geared to local job needs—jobs that pay a livable wage. And offer an option where a conflicted child who hasn’t made their mind up yet, may take both tracks as long as their literacy skills are grade level or above.
The focus in public schools starting in early childhood education programs as young as three and no later than four should be literacy that leads to a love of reading. If every child reach sixteen with a love of reading, that is a win, win by itself.
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University of Cincinnati’s President Ono has refused a raise/bonus for the last two years. But, of course, the basketball coach just got a contract of over $2 million per year I believe.
Priorities. Sports. Profits. Outrageous. The few gain. The rest lose. Students go in debt to get an education to graduate to a job market that kicks them in the gut. Often their parents are looking for jobs, too, since Ohio has abandoned the middle class.
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Chritopher Jencks explains how the “rates” are counted at the high school level as to who is a “graduate” and who isn’t and who goes to college . I would assume that the colleges have a similar reporting error because of a lack of definition that can be standard or shared across . Robert Scott explains the “attrition” rate well. I’ll try to capture what he said and what Chris Jencks is saying and give details. I know Chris Jencks said you can’t really compare MA to Texas because of the geographic distances from homes to colleges making it an unfavorable comparison for TX but I haven’t gotten his words correct here so I don’t want to make a mistake in misquoting him. I assume that the rankings on the colleges that are produced won’t be any better than the
NCTQ (Kate Walsh) rankings of teacher preparation colleges.
If the Times thinks that getting a higher college graduation rate matters, why not propose ways to reduce the cost to students? The greatest barrier to college access and completion is affordability, not lack of data.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
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citing Robert Scott:
“The 31% number cited in the story and in my presentation this week is an attrition rate. That is, taking the number of ninth grade students and then counting the number of graduates four years later. This includes students who graduate early, remain in school as fifth year seniors, transfer to home or private school, or even those that unfortunately pass away. Further scrutinizing this number over time shows that the attrition rate started to rise in the early 1990s and peaked in the late 1990s. It has gone down every year since then. The overall discussion centered on what was happening in the Texas public school system during the rise and fall of the attrition rate. During this period standards were raised considerably during a time of increasing numbers of economically disadvantaged students and English-language learners.
The other slide I showed was the National Governor’s Association graduation rate calculation. This calculation was part of a compact agreed upon by all 50 governors. I pointed out that not all states had begun reporting using this definition, but that among those that did, Texas had the fourth highest graduation rate behind Iowa, Vermont and Virginia. The numbers for Texas are 79.1% completed high school (on-time graduation rate), 1.5% received a GED, 8.9% remained in school and 10.5% dropped out.”
I take Robert Scott at his word; I don’t think the people writing for newspapers understand any of this.
I’ll look up the Chris Jencks quote about going on to college…
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What World Does the NY Times Editorial Board Inhabit?
It’s Duh Matrix, Neo …
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We’re in danger of losing our senses of humor. You ask: “How will colleges measure the “value-added” of courses in philosophy, ancient history, art, and music?…” Give it some Second City thoughts. How about “Entrepreneurship under Alexander the Great”? Or “Product placement and profits in ‘War and Peace”? Or “Shakespeare as capitalist — the rebuilding of The Globe…”
These guys have been getting away with this nonsense since the first box of Wise Potato Chips found its way into the hands of Egon on “Ghostbusters.” This was as inevitable as the current glamour “CEO” on the cover of the current issue of Fortune. We live in mindless times…
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How will colleges measure the “value-added” of courses in philosophy, ancient history, art, and music?
The qualifier here must be “public” colleges and universities, since these “useless” courses and others will continue to be offered in elite private institutions.
These courses will be cut in public universities unless the departments that support them offer persuasive evidence that these courses and the students who take them,find great jobs, join the ranks of the economically advantaged, and contribute to the economy of the state. The bottom line is the bottom line.
Our national endowments for the arts and humanities should be offering paths to sustain such studies, but they are also struggling to survive from bottom line thinking.
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The NYT WYT Ediotors write what they are paid to write and I for one am done paying to read it.
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The New York Times considers itself a national — or international — newspaper, but after all it is based in New York City. Evidently the editors are oblivious to the fiasco that was the Bloomberg administration’s school grading system.
My wife and I found an excellent school through this system. When the DOE gave a grade of “D” to our son’s future elementary school, some parents wrote an oped decrying the absurd rating (based exclusively on test scores and applied to an integrated, progressive public school that refused to take standardized tests seriously).
We decided a school that attracted such eloquent, dedicated parents was right for our family, and our son has completed three happy years there.
Obama may have some magic formula that will generate meaningful “grades” for colleges, but more likely families will find his rating system useful only by inverting it.
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“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~ Albert Einstein. We should remember this when discussing giving ratings to colleges and universities. The numbers Education Trust and the Obama administration are counting don’t tell the truth. One “truth” is that more students are foregoing a degree in favor of “just in time training”. Degrees should not count and neither should the number of years in college count.
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And of course we have to ask who is doing the counting.
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Germany knows that not every person can, should or must go to college. They also do not view college as an avenue to add more years to extend high school. Germany has had for decades highly organized, certified and regulated vocational apprenticeships for many students who do not attend college. Germans expect those who are capable to participate and complete such programs for job preparation and job searches. Employers expect certificates and will not hire uncertified workers.
Having no vocational skills, learning only on the job and winging it I s not part of the German expectation and culture. Preparation, skills, competency and maintaining skilled labor. Universities have their important place, but higher education is highly academic and respected as such.
US has always talked about implementing similar apprenticeship programs. Our push is for most to go to college and sort out who completes college, continues or finds other avenues. Now, under our new leader Herr Gates, college expectations are either poo poo’d altogether or mandated to be completed in 4 years, get a good paying guaranteed job & provide high marks for the college they attended.
Hard to predict where Gates’ Greed leads our US society. He will be leading us for a looooong time.
BTW, Germans have learned lessons about one person having all the power and following him blindly. Question everything, and then some!
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This is from way back in 2000, but in an interview, the late Earl Shorris explained why a college education in the humanities is more practical, as well as more important, than job training (http://masshumanities.org/s00_stth):
Kristin O’Connell: The basic concept of the Clemente Course is a radical one. Given the overwhelming problems faced by the poor, most programs designed for them have focused on practical goals, like developing employment skills. What is the rationale for offering a course in Plato and Shakespeare for people living in poverty?
Earl Shorris: I’ve argued that the humanities provide the most practical education. If we can stipulate that knowing is better than not knowing, then the comparison is between education, as in studying the humanities, and training, as in learning to operate a computer or mop floors or pull a tooth or make out a will. We can start from the simplest kind of training, that is, training to repeat the least complex task, which might be mopping floors or repetitively entering numbers into a computer. Such work is poorly paid, with little or no chance for advancement. Historically, the poor have been trained to do such tasks as a way of maintaining a low cost labor force. During the industrial revolution, an ethic (Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is the best description of it) developed that kept the poor “happily” at their labors.
Training for complex tasks, such as dentistry or engineering, is more demanding, but nevertheless training, in that it teaches the student to do something that has been done before: pull a tooth, build a bridge, and so on. Compare even that kind of training to education in the humanities—philosophy, art, history, literature, and logic, in Petrarch’s formulation. The distinction is between doing and thinking, between following and beginning. Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish student of the humanities, with no formal training in astronomy, quite literally turned the universe inside out. Few ideas in modern history have had more influence on scientific thinking than the Copernican Revolution. Similarly, Descartes, whose method is at the base of technological activity, was not himself a technologist or even a scientist; he was a philosopher. If America is to remain a leading nation, it will do so because of the humanities, not because of training, even of the most sophisticated kind.
Let’s apply that practicality to a person living in the second or third generation of poverty. If one has been “trained” in the ways of poverty, left no opportunity to do other than react to his or her environment, what is needed is a beginning, not repetition. The humanities teach us to think reflectively, to begin, to deal with the new as it occurs to us, to dare. If the multi-generational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking—reflection. And that is a beginning.
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Wow, what a treasure you shared here! Shorris’ observations are so simple, so clear, so true.
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The middle class kids are having a horrible time getting a college education. I have talked with many parents about this. The Parent Plus loan is very hard to get, especially if the parents have had any financial setbacks at all. Without the Parent Plus loan, middle class students cannot fill the gap. The tuition is so high that a part time job throughout the year and summer does not even begin to fill this huge gap. I know of middle class kids who are faced with stopping their college educations to work a full time job for the whole year to raise cash for tuition. There is nothing else they can do. To add insult to injury, these middle class kids cannot get away from their parents’ damaged financial information until they are 24 years old! These middle class kids can fight in a war at 18 years old, but they can’t get a student loan on their own because they need a cosigner, which they cannot get because of their parents’ damaged credit history. A lot of times this damaged credit history is due to poor health, loss of employment, and factors beyond anyone’s control. These parents are proud, working class people, who are paying taxes for the socially disadvantaged kids to go to college. No one is there to pick up the pieces for their kids.
Honestly, I have a unique viewpoint on all of this. Obama is trying to eliminate the middle class all together. If you take away our public schools and take away the college educations from our middle class kids, the middle class will fade away. Think about it. The time is already here. To spend millions of dollars to rate colleges with value added is another example of the incompetent administration that Barack Obama has shoved down our throats. They have smart middle class college kids who cannot get ahold of any money to go to college. I cannot wait for January of 2017. Silly Obama and silly Arne Duncan will finally be gone. The sad thing is that we will all suffer with their horrible policies for years and years to come.
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Democrats are awful on education and republicans are worse. Where is the viable choice?
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Are you running for office?
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As the costs have shifted from the state to the student, the editorial board should examine how “tax incentives” are offered to corporations at the expense of public services.
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Seems to me that the “ed reformers” are idiots if they think that recent high school students will willingly apply, get accepted and pay loads of money to go to colleges that resemble data gathering and test taking factories which limit free thought and better yet … GO INTO ENORMOUS DEBT TO DO SO!
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The current brand of “so-called” education reformers , which includes Arne Duncan , Obama , gates, and the Broad foundation somehow think that the “corporate model” , with it’s bottom line ” profit motive” is and should be the driving force for education , business, science, and a whole myriad of activities. Woe is the nation that falls for such foolishness. Herein lies the path to oblivion and the collapse of everything that made this country great. Wealth comes from creativity, not profit. Creativity , in the arts and the sciences, resourcefully applied by an engaged population, creates the earth that makes nations and society’s wealthy. The Gates’ and the Broad’s could never have made their billions without the mathematical , scientific, and technological breakthroughs of the past 60 years. These breakthroughs were nourished by government funding, national laboratories,federal grants to universities and a decently educated and well paid population. Beware of the current round of “greed driven” reformers who wish to privateze and corporative the very structures that made our country rich,productive, and wealthy in the truest sense of the word.
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I love and admire the logic behind Gloria 41488’s written analysis (gloria41488
June 26, 2014 at 2:08 pm).
Human Beings are the medium between Heaven and Hell, between Sainthood and Devilish mind/action, between noble and snobbish lifestyle. Therefore, to maintain humanity as human being is the utmost difficult because it is very easy to slip down more than to climb up.
If education system cannot provide a decent appreciation and protection of “Due Process” for teachers in Primary, Junior High and Senior High school, I must say that USA will lose its status as being leader in democracy as soon as public education vanishes in thin air.
I hope that I will not live long enough in order to avoid being eye-witness of history which repeats itself, regarding “poverty causes serious crime; human lives are worthless; cruelty and physical strength are supreme in justice.”
It is extremely sad and frustrated for being as Teachers to be bullied by bunches of clown around! I have solution which is the unity in all education organisations. Back2basic
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Very nice post! I totally agree with you. It is a very sad time to be a teacher. I’m relieved to almost be at the end of my career, and I would never allow my children to become teachers. They’ve seen everything I’ve gone through over the years, and neither one wanted to repeat my exhausting years for low pay.
I honestly believe that a huge reason for implementing all of these ridiculous policies for public schools is that they want to discourage anyone to enter the profession. Within ten years, I think there will be a shortage everywhere. Charter schools and online companies will easily take over then. I also believe that a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree will no longer be required.
It is so sad that they want to take away continuing contracts and due process from teachers. Schools have been able to build cohesive staffs which stayed together, much like a family. I have taught fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, and mother and sons. It is so special to tell them that they are so much like their parent at that age. Public schools will become revolving doors, firing teachers for no just cause.
My husband and I both have had careers in education. Honestly, it is hard for two teachers to be married. We had a hard time getting the down payment for our house years ago, and neither one of us was able to earn overtime for all of the extra hours we invested. But, years ago we felt appreciated and that we were truly making a difference. Times have changed, so much for the worst. Teaching is now disrespected and viewed more as a service than an art. Teachers are viewed as outputting good test scores much like serving up a hamburger and fries. Our children are suffering at the hands of the greedy testing companies. Thank you for your wonderful post.
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Since higher education is the next big untapped resource for standardized testing companies to make huge profits from, since those tests are not typically administered to college students, don’t be surprised if this administration mandates standardized testing in every college course and to qualify for graduation.
Today’s politicians have no qualms about determining the course of education at every level, including stripping ALL teachers of their autonomy within the classroom, for the sake of increased profits for their corporate sponsors. And they could do it by dangling Title IV (federal financial aid for students) above the heads of every college, whether public or private.
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I agree, but that mandate will only apply to public supported community colleges and four year state universities.
The fake education reformers will not go after colleges like Stanford or Harvard. They will go after UCLA, Berkeley, UC San Diego, etc.
The private universities will be ignored, and there will probably be an explosion of private sector, for profit Charter colleges that are opaque in everything they do but paid for by the taxpayer,
In fact, TFA will start to pump out college professors—who only have BAs—with an additional five weeks of training that includes a certificate that says they are great experts in their fields. It’s easy to print certificates that claim wonderful things that are not true.
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I don’t know how they could just ignore private colleges, since Title IV applies to all schools that accept financial aid. But, they might try to make an exception with new legislation.
From what I understand, they are already using TFA to teach at the charter “graduate schools,” like Match and Relay. That’s where they prepare teachers to use ONE pedagogy, based on Behaviorism, that of the drill sergeant teacher for no-excuses military style charter schools like KIPP. Many of those TFAers may have just earned master’s degrees, because in a lot of districts, they must be enrolled in a master’s program in order to be allowed to teach in their own classrooms (and that job is considered their student teaching –even though most are not being supervised by college faculty in that placement.) I’m not sure if they ever have to actually graduate from grad school though.
Anyways, I did recently see a proposal for legislation to change the requirements at charter “graduate schools,” so they would not need to have “professors” with ANY advanced degrees. Usually, regional accrediting bodies want professors to have the degree their students are seeking, but this would allow people without MAs to teach master’s students. They are seriously dumbing down graduate education –in order to promote charter school expansion!
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Cosmic Tinker, You are right on the mark. I’ve been saying this all along. Everything will be “dumbed” down for the charter school movement. We will see the day, I’m afraid, that people will be teaching school with very little education. It’s here.
One of the things that the rich politicians are saying now is that a teacher’s years of experience and his/her level of graduate work (master’s degree) means nothing. I could not believe this when I first heard it. They even had the guts to say that a teacher does not improve after five years of teaching. So silly and ridiculous! They have to get people to believe this, so they can fill their charter schools with extremely low paid teachers – which gives them more money to pocket. It’s all sad, and it’s here as we speak.
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“They even had the guts to say that a teacher does not improve after five years of teaching. ”
Well, if the only measure of “improvement” you use is student test scores is that really surprising? Probably what they should deduce from the data is that it takes five years on average to reach an equilibrium between teacher factors and all the other factors that influence student performance. It says absolutely nothing about the influence any one teacher has on any one student.
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There is, of course, no law that requires faculty at colleges and universities to have a terminal degree in their field. NYU or Stanford could, if they wished, hire faculty with no degree at all.
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There might not be a law, but colleges risk losing regional accreditation (RA) if they dumb down their faculty, and RA is the most important kind of accreditation for colleges in the US in general, as it’s necessary for being seen as credible to employers of graduates, the public at-large and the government.
Accreditation is necessary for students to be eligible to receive federal financial aid under Title IV. If the college is accredited by another qualifying accrediting body, as many programs within the college typically are, such as by specialized accrediting agencies for specific kinds of training, like the American Bar Association for colleges that train lawyers, that accreditation just applies to the specific program, or to free-standing schools without other programs, not to the college as a whole.
It’s possible these charter “grad schools” will be coming up with their own accrediting body, no doubt lauded by the Department of Education regardless of how dubious they are, so they don’t have to be affiliated with other colleges, but they may have trouble being regionally accredited.
http://www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/index.html
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So what if they lose regional accreditation.
There are lots of students that have no need of federal financial aid. Just hire cheap labor and charge $42,000 a year like NYU. Remeber, for private schools at least, it is all about the money.
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RA matters a lot to students, because employers want to see transcripts from RA schools. I worked at a college whose RA was rescinded, due to senior management issues, and the school lost most of its students as a result.
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So what if it matters to students?
Student choice can not guarantee quality, right?
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Who cares what you think, TE? I don’t and I’m not playing your game.
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No one need care.
If they have children of that wish to chose a college or university though, they would be well advised to heed your advise and attend one where a large proportion of the faculty have terminal degrees.
Of course in primary or secondary education, unless you can afford a private education for your children like our host or some of the other frequent posters, you must depend on regulations to ensure the quality of teachers..
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Sad Teacher and 2old2teach: Have you seen, “The Master’s Degree Effect?”
http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2012/02/29/02effect.h05.html
Just ignore TE when he disputes it. (I’ve been down this Möbius strip loop with him before…)
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I think that a teacher having a masters degree and students scoring unusually well on standardized tests are likely to be correlated. After all, teachers with graduate degrees are more likely to be teaching in well funded suburban schools and more likely to be assigned to teach academically advanced classes.
What would be interesting is to see what happens when the researcher tries to control for these factors. Here is one paper that does that: http://www.nber.org/digest/aug07/w12828.html
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Thanks, Cosmic Tinker. I really appreciate your comments. I am almost at the end of my teaching career, but I will never regret getting my Master’s degree. I graduated with my Master’s degree at the end of my 5th year of teaching, and I earned 30 hours beyond my Master’s degree (called Master’s plus in my district) at the end of my 11th year of teaching. I remember that I had to take out a bank loan each time, and I was still paying on my student loan for my Bachelor’s degree. I have continued to take college classes as I’ve grown older. I am still proud, to this day, of my Master’s degree. My school district made a big deal out of it, and they were proud of me in 1990 and then again in 1996.
I never thought I would ever witness such a disrespect of teachers. It is all so sad. It was a very respected profession when I went into teaching. I felt valued and very appreciated. As I am getting close to retirement, I am appalled at how the rich politicians look down on my Master’s degree and my years of teaching experience, as if these two factors mean nothing.
I am smart enough to know that this is a plot to take over our public schools and our roles as career educators. They are now in the process of dumbing down education from PreK – College. I think it is so ironic that all of this (along with the incompetent Obama administration) is coming from a gentleman who never finished his Bachelor’s degree himself – Bill Gates. I hate to tell him, but our kids can’t just fall into billions like he did – without some sort of higher education.
I am grateful for Diane’s blog. Talking about all of this insanity does help. Thanks again for your comments.
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Well isn’t that quaint. Dueling research from the US DoE vs economists. The economists’ research is based on the junk science known as VAM. Economists like Hanushek et al. have been trying to convince politicians to stop paying teachers for “graduate degrees that have budgetary costs” and to use VAM predictions since the early 70s.
I would trust the actual NAEP scores from the U.S. Department of Education over a working paper by economists using VAM any day.
And, no, I have no interest in arguing about it with the “teachingeconomist” that has an obvious bias.
Nothing to see here. Moving on.
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Not a Public,
The graph presented is not really good research. How much do you want to bet that the average teacher with a masters degree has more years of teaching experience than the average teacher without a masters degree? Is the graph that CT presented showing you the impact of a masters degree OR is it showing you the impact of teacher experience?
Any thoughts about the distribution of teachers with masters across schools and states? A little over 67% of all teachers in Massachusetts have a masters degree while on 27% of all teachers in Louisiana have a masters degree. Does CT’s graph just show us the difference between students in Massachusetts and students in Louisiana? Does it reflect the difference between urban and suburban schools?
To do statistical analysis you have to worry about the details.
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Yes, TE, and if you are going to use statistics to make decisions about teacher quality we all know how high quality the statistics need to be. (sarcasm alert)
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This is not a decision about any individual teacher, but one of public policy. Schools exist to teach students. It is important to find the most effective ways to teach students. I am surprised that teachers would think that search unimportant.
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You don’t know what DoE researchers controlled for because they took those pages down. (Yes, I recall reading them when they were up a couple years back.)
To do a statistical analysis, you have to stop using unreliable Voodoo VAM and cease claiming that agricultural predictions based on estimated corn growth are applicable to children and supercede students’ actual test scores.
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All I can see is the graph presented by CT. It shows that students who have teachers with MA degrees get a higher average score on a standardized test than students of teachers who do not have MA degrees. If there is any more to the analysis than that it is certainly not clear from CT’s post.
Why do you think that examining a students score on one standardized test is a better indicator of the quality of a specific teacher than examining the change in score on a standardized test over the period that the student is actually being taught by that teacher?
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Really, guys, ignore TE. He knows nothing about VAM. If he did, he would know that researchers do not compare the actual test scores of individual students over time with specific teachers. William Sanders, who created the model, admitted this when queried at a conference I attended. They are using estimates based on predictions. In my book, that’s at least two steps away from reality.
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Only two steps?
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CT,
You might want to read the description of the data used in the article I linked to.
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TE, You might want to read the actual working paper, not a summary of it, which describes how they used VAM.
Lloyd, I said “at least two steps,” but I really think it’s way more than that.
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“Way more than that”
Yes, the surface of another star, in another galaxy, in another universe.
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AND in another dimension…
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TE nothing in that paper is contrary to what I proposed as a way to look at teachers effects on performance.
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That paper does argue that the “Master’s Degree Effect” linked to by CT is incorrect and comes from a poor attempt at controlling the other factors that are correlated with student performance and teachers having graduate degrees.
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Did you read the actual paper, not the summary at the link provided? It’s based on VAM.
Click to access w12828.pdf
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No, the working paper does not specifically argue against the statistics provided in “The Master’s Degree Effect” because that paper came out in 2007 and the DoE statistics are from 2005 through 2011 NAEP scores.
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Vitorino,
There are no useful statistics about the impact of teachers with masters degrees on student learning provided by “the Master’s Degree Effect”.
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Hopping in here to say that for years and years, teachers couldn’t get anything remotely like a raise without the extra degrees. As salaries increased, masters and additional hours gave experienced teachers more money than previously possible. Realizing this, many districts started freezing salaries of teachers at the top of the pay scale which is usually around 18 years of teaching. There are a lot of teachers who finally got the salaries they deserved only to have them frozen.
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The fact that teacher raises are dependent on getting an advanced degree (or graduate credit hours in some cases) is a policy decision. The authors of the paper I cited think it is a bad policy. I have no doubt the schools of education think it is a great policy as they get to demand a cut of any teacher’s raise.
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Why is it that private industry expects workers who want to advance in their careers to further their education/training? Why would anyone think that furthering one’s education in one’s profession is a waste of time? There is something really wrong in attempting to say that “advanced training” is of no benefit.
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Actually, I don’t think private industry does offer advancement based on education. How many CEO’s have doctorates? If advancement was based on education, wouldn’t the CEO’s of the largest corporations have the most education?
Here is an article on the education of the CEO’s of the Fortune 500 companies. The 500 executives collectively have 465 college degrees.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-school
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I believe I said advanced education/training. The training one receives on the way up is not limited to educational degrees. Schools settled on formal educational training probably for obvious reasons. The professional today who isn’t pursuing their industry’s advanced training is probably not going to go very far.
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Wouldn’t you expect the folks with the most formal training to be the ones with degrees?
Schools might have settled on encouraging graduate degrees for incorrect reasons. That is what this research is all about.
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“Wouldn’t you expect the folks with the most formal training to be the ones with degrees?”
We have no way of knowing. There are plenty of training opportunities that are specific to particular careers that do not come with academic degrees. Teachers take short courses all the time that advance their skills but don’t necessarily give academic credit toward a degree. There is probably more of an incentive for teachers to pursue further academic degrees, though.
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Deb, So well said! I was just going to add what you so beautifully put into words. It is not fair, as you would agree, to compare Master’s degrees to other professions. We are a low paying profession to begin with. Other professions, most likely, do not begin their careers at $33,000, like in my city district. Yes, you are right on the mark with your other statement too. I was on a 5 year pay freeze – up until this school year.
Don’t you think it is absurd that they now pick on a profession which is so low pay? I honestly can’t believe it. All they are doing is going to make a SEVERE teacher shortage, which is exactly what they want. No one in their right mind would go into this bullied, low paying profession with the horrible high prices of college tuition.
My husband (who later went into administration) and I never had as much money as my sister and her husband (both worked in factories.) I just asked my husband the other day what we could have financially done differently. We have been married 29 years, and we still don’t have the material possessions of people who worked in factories. My husband said that it is very hard for 2 teachers to be married. We had a heck of a time getting the money for a down payment on our home. Honestly, with the horrible inflation of today, I worry that new, young teachers (especially if 2 teachers marry) will never be able to own a home. Even though my husband and I struggled to put things together, we would never be able to do it today with $4 a gallon gas.
When I went into teaching almost 30 years ago, I was smart enough to become a pharmacist. I had the high grades and ACT scores. I went into teaching because I LOVE kids. I truly regret my decision. Although I love my students and I love to teach, I do not begin to have enough money to get my child through medical school and live the rest of my life. I have already started talking with my local college about obtaining an Associate’s degree, so that I can work from 54-74. I am presently 50. They have been very kind to me, and they told me that I still have a valued place in the work force, even at my age. When you grow older as a teacher, people begin to look at you as if you are stupid. I never looked at my older colleagues that way. I think it is a symptom of end times. With the insane new teacher evaluation system, no teacher wants to turn 50. It is the kiss of death – if you have poor administration. Thanks again for your comments, Deb…THank goodness we have Diane’s blog….
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Sad Teacher ~
I wish I could give you words of encouragement, but teaching is under attack and this may just be the beginning. We are probably not squirming enough, going away quickly enough and are not keeping quiet, or stop blogging and Tweeting.
They are upping the ante by destroying tenure, pensions & probably block our access to nursing homes in case we need them. Personal? You bet!
Yes, older teachers are the closest to this cliff and young teachers appear to have little respect and experience with highly qualified, educated, knowledgable teachers. Many of us are placed in a category where we have much to offer, but others could care less and do not want to hear from us. US society values younger and younger workers for the financial worth. We take up a space for cheaper 22 year olds, and we present a group older than their parents, with whom they still live and prolong their adolescence.
Please, hang in there and find humor where and when you can. Humor has helped me tremendously in teaching, parenting, relationships, in caregiving for two loved ones, and as a Senior…especially on Wednesdays for 5% discount? HUMOR! You’re not alone.
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“teaching is under attack and this may just be the beginning”
Actually, what we are seeing with the resistance to the fake education reformers and their high stakes testing may be the beginning of the end of a long war on teachers that stretches back almost two hundred years—it seems.
For instance, I’m reading an advanced galley through Amazon’s Vine program of “The Teacher Wars, a History of America’s Most Embattled Profession” by Dana Goldstein.
The tentative release date is 9-2-2014. I’m 15 percent of the way into the galley, and I can tell you that this war against teachers started a long time ago and seems to be part of the US culture—a cancerous strand of American DNA.
The book’s description on Amazon: A brilliant young scholar’s history of 175 years of teaching in America shows that teachers have always borne the brunt of shifting, often impossible expectations.
In other nations, public schools are one thread in a quilt that includes free universal child care, health care, and job training. Here, schools are the whole cloth. Today we look around the world at countries like Finland and South Korea, whose students consistently outscore Americans on standardized tests, and wonder what we are doing wrong. Dana Goldstein first asks the often-forgotten question: “How did we get here?” She argues that we must take the historical perspective, understanding the political and cultural baggage that is tied to teaching, if we have any hope of positive change. In her lively, character-driven history of public teaching, Goldstein guides us through American education’s many passages, including the feminization of teaching in the 1800s and the fateful growth of unions, and shows that the battles fought over nearly two centuries echo the very dilemmas we cope with today. Goldstein shows that recent innovations like Teach for America, merit pay, and teacher evaluation via student testing are actually as old as public schools themselves. Goldstein argues that long-festering ambivalence about teachers—are they civil servants or academic professionals?—and unrealistic expectations that the schools alone should compensate for poverty’s ills have driven the most ambitious people from becoming teachers and sticking with it. In America’s past, and in local innovations that promote the professionalization of the teaching corps, Goldstein finds answers to an age-old problem.
I’ll be posting a review on my Blog and on Amazon when I finish the book.
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Lloyd~ I agree that educating children in the US has a long rocky history. I personally do not remember, nor do many of my older university profs friends, whose direct experience goes back over 80 years, a daunting crisis for teachers, children, future of public education & the profession of teaching. The size of this takeover, the harm to the children, destruction of teacher education programs, total blackout of research based references, and the master collaboration of billionaires entrenched in this Total Takeover is frightening. Teachers are not able to protect their children, unless in a natural disaster or school shootings.
Yes, teachers have had a hard go of it in this country. Now, it may become a permanent Armageddon. I struggle to be more positive.
Not only am I concerned about all the above, but I am searching for options to protect our beautiful, creative, intelligent and kind grandchildren. My heart aches.
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For sure, it seems worse than ever right now, but I don’t recall any time in the thirty years I taught that it was a job without challenges and trouble. There were always difficult parents, students, administrators and big mouthed lying critics.
This morning on my walk, I stopped to say hello to a neighbor who I knew was retiring from teaching this year. He teaches in a district that is located nearby in an area where mostly the upper middle class live in homes that average probably a million each. He told me his teaching career had been a great and rewarding experience. I don’t think he ever worked with kids from poverty, barrios or ghettos. If he worked in Orinda, CA his entire teaching career, then I know he didn’t. He had it easy—very easy compared to inner city schools surrounded by high rates of poverty and violence.
I mentioned to him that I had taught for thirty years and retired in 2005. He asked where I taught. I told him and described the community and kids; the violence. He cringed, and I think he might not have totally believed me. We’ll see.
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If your colleagues experiences go back 80 years and they think this is the worst time for students, they have forgotten who public schools were designed to educate and who the public school system did not care to educate 80 years ago.
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TE,
You said, “public school system did not care to educate 80 years ago”
What a foolish statement! The profanity and insults that I want to throw at you like sewer slime is swirling in my head, but I will restrain myself. My hands are shaking with a anger as I pound furiously at my keyboard.
What those words reveal about you is incredibly said that this type of thinking exists and you have the audacity to express your ignorance and bias openly.
The public schools mirror the culture of the time—a country steeped in the history of slavery, racism, child abuse, discrimination of minorities and women—and it took state/federal government/s to enact progressive laws to attempt to drive back that hate and abuse by restricting, for instance, the KKK and white supremacists and other citizen groups full of hate and evil. The public schools are not a living thing—they are not human like the conservative dominated U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled corporations are. The public schools mirror local culture and society. The public schools are not responsible for the United States eighty years ago or even today. There are 316 million people in the U.S., and whatever this country or any state is reflects the majority of adults in each state and the country as a whole. The public schools are nothing but brick, mortar, wire and pipes.
The public schools are part of the country’s infrastructure and if neglected, the schools, like they highways and railroads, will decay and fall apart.
Until the 1930s children could be sold by parents, who lived in poverty, to factories, whore houses and coal mines as young as five.
Before the 1930s, in factories, half the work force could be under 12 because they were easier to manage and cheaper labor than teens or adults.If a child was injured on the job, out they went and it was easy to find a cheap replacement.
The federal child labor laws changed that world in the 1930s, so kids could not be sold into servitude and had to go to school. At the time, in some states, girls as young as nine could be sold into prostitution to work off their slavery on their backs to mostly evil, old, white rich men. Young boys were sold to coal mines to work deep underground. Their job was to harness themselves to a sled full of coal and drag it to the surface up steep tunnels too small for men and to do it in total darkness.
The reason these children weren’t in school is because the law did not require them to be in school and poverty is horrible fate for any family to face. When starvation threatens and parents have several children to feed, the choice is between death and survival—so the child that will fetch the best price is sacrificed.
And eighty years ago (1934) the laws clearly discriminated against minorities and many who were allowed to go to school, were sent to schools that were not supported properly and were segregated. In fact, those schools were in similar condition to schools we hear about all the time that have mold, rats, leaky roofs, etc.
That didn’t change until the 1960s and still the hateful white supremacists and racists found every method possible to subvert those laws and drive the U.S. back into a nation divided. And the only reason change came about is because a majority of the working class rose up and protested. Change didn’t come from the top 1%, and some members of that super wealthy segment of society are behind driving the U.S. back into the dark ages before the 1960s.
For instance, the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882 was the only law that legally allowed racism and discrimination against a minority and it wouldn’t be repealed until 12-17-1943.
If the public schools are not doing the job they could do—-at any time—-it isn’t the fault of the schools or the teachers, its because of the leadership of school districts, states and the federal government that abuse these schools by not supporting them with what’s needed for the teachers to do their job.
America is a country that’s been at war since World War II, and it has spent literally more than $40 trillion dollars since 1945 funding defense and fighting wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and a host of smaller conflicts in mostly third world countries all over the world, and yet this same country can’t support public schools properly and the White House allows fraud and greed to run rampant robbing from the taxpayers who support the public schools while trusting their elected leaders to do the right thing.
And you dare to even hint that the public schools are responsible for the way it was or the way it is.
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Lloyd,
So you think the local school boards were clambering to give African American students a great education in the 30s and 40s and 50s?
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You ignore every point I made, and ask a ridiculous question that avoids the core of the issue. Shame on you!
Local democratically elected school boards for about 14,000 school districts—spread through fifty states—reflects the values and behavior of the voters who elected them in the local communities. This is why surveys show a HUGE majority of American adults approving of the local public schools their children attend—across the country.
Individual school districts do not reflect the entire country, and the schools themselves, and the teachers that work in those districts are not responsible for the laws and ed codes of the states and federal government that dictate how the schools will be run and the basic subjects taught. Funding for programs also comes through taxes and fees from local communities, states and the federal government approved through the democratic process.
If the funds are not there, then the schools can’t maintain the infrastructure of the buildings or the programs that are designed to help the most at risk kids.
For instance, in areas with a large representation of tea party voters, candidates supported by the tea party movement stand a big chance of being elected and then pushing and implementing the ignorant agenda of the tea party people.
What is the REAL alternative being offered by misleading those who allow themselves to be fools with the use of the word CHOICE that is being pushed hard by fake education reformers?
The answer is that in the end—if the fake education reformers supported by billionaires like Bill Gates achieve their goals—a few corporations run by highly paid CEOs controlled by a handful of mostly extremist billionaires (neo-conservatives, neo-liberals, fundamentalist Christians and libertarians) will run the whole show for most of the schools in the country reducing significantly the chance for change later when political climates in the states and local communities shift away from extremist groups such as the tea party movement, because you can’t fool all the people all of the time and eventually, as history reveals, a majority of voters will lead change back in a progressive direction that benefits most of the people instead of a few who are grossly wealthy.
But once the democratic process that leads to change is gone, that option is gone too.
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Lloyd,
There has never been a time equivalent to the present when the teaching profession as a profession was subject to coordinated and well-funded attacks. Never. There has never been a time in our history when public education as such was the target of billionaires’ ire. Never. Never in our history. One can dredge up anecdotes but this time of attacks on the existence of public schools is unique as is the effort to replace teachers with TFA and computers.
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You’re right. Never before have some of the richest people in the world worked together to deliberately to destroy a public institution designed to educate the people and offer them a hand, if they would take it, to climb out of poverty.
And I fear that what Nick Hanauer (worth one billion dollars) recently said may be the only way to resolve what is happening in the United States—if the resistance to the fake education reformers doesn’t succeed and stop them, and then drive back the corporate takeover of the public schools.
Nick Hanauer warned, “The pitchforks are coming … for us Plutocrats.”
To avoid what this billionaire predicts is going to happen, the resistance we offer to the likes of Bill Gates must be successful.
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Well, I, for one, can’t find humor in my last 8 years on the job working under a paranoid, hateful principal who caused the lowest morale in our building that ever occurred. She gave bogus evaluations and made up things to “price” she was right. I won’t go on about it all.
But the stress of worrying every day if Dr.Jeckyll or Mrs.Hyde was going to show up to terrorize us. I retired. I couldn’t deal with her and all the changes any longer. I just felt constantly watched and judged incorrectly, despite my kds’ test scores, despite everything I did for that school, despite all that ALL the teachers did k-4. There was no amount of money that would have kept me there once my health spun out of control. This whole push for excellence isn’t about the kids. It is about some idiotic rating that makes the district look good. They pay lip service to thecteavjers, but we feel no real appreciation.
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Deb, I want you to know that I feel your pain. I was always blessed with outstanding administrators until this past year. My past principals cared about me, my husband, my two children, my family dog, and where we vacationed over the summer. When you lose effective, caring principals and have to cope with hateful principals, it is a nightmare. Everything changes over night. I just got my testing scores, and I praised God for my kids’ great test scores. I had an outstanding group of young people this year. They could do my taxes if I asked them!
I was terrorized this year by poor administration, and as I’ve said in my past posts, the only thing that I have is my continuing contract. I told my husband that if I had more than 10 more years of teaching to go, I would have to retrain and get my Associate’s degree.
With the toxic changes in our educational system and the stresses I
presently have, I could have never made a career out of the teaching profession. I told my husband that I deliver an outstanding product, and it is not deemed to be outstanding until the student performs on a test. I had a great class this year, so I had great test scores. I’ve had more difficult classes, and the test scores always reflect the difficulty of the class. The teacher is at the mercy of the class he/she gets. With the new teacher evaluation system, I am very afraid that poor administration will begin to “stack the deck” against teachers they dislike by giving them the troubled students. It is going to be a mess.
Please know, Deb, that your students will always remember that you were a wonderful teacher. The students are all we have. My family, my students, and my church kept me going this school year. I prayed every morning as I entered the school building. “God, please protect me from the evil that looms here.” God always did, and God will see all of us to the completion of our careers. Thank you to Diane and everyone who writes on this blog. You have no idea how much you help me. (:
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H.A. Thank you so much for your kind comments. I promise I will always try to bring humor to all of this! My husband invested 31 years in education, and thank goodness I have a kind husband who knows the stresses I go through daily. He also reminds me to feel blessed, because I do think we are in the last couple groups of teachers who will be able to reach retirement age. Thanks again, H.A., for your kind and encouraging words. I really appreciate it!
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Re: TE
A perfect example of the difference between business and education.
In education it’s what you know.
In business it’s who you know (and how many bodies you are willing to climb over).
(Okay, it can be that way in academe, too, but it’s not celebrated quite the same way).
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Sorry, wrong link. It should be —
Re: TE
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And what self-serving know-it-alls they are too! Their representative “teachingeconomist” even deigns to pass judgement on web pages that he has never seen. I saw those DoE webpages myself, which reported on the master’s effect, and they were VERY detailed and quite extensive. Clearly, someone was chastised at the DoE and told to take them down because they went against the party line.
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Not a Public,
Again my comments are based on what CT actually posted, not on a nonexistent web page that you remember seeing.
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For God’s sake, where do you think EdWeek got the charts from? You think they created those themselves? They cited the source.
I saw the charts at the DoE website, too, as did many others. There were several interactive pages and they were all gone shortly after the EdWeek article came out. It’s pretty obvious that DoE didn’t want those pages to be viewed anymore, because that information is contrary to their position that master’s degrees are useless and not worthy of increased pay for teachers.
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The chart posted by CT says absolutely nothing about controlling for anything.
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I saw those pages on the DoE website as well and, in a way, I feel responsible for the DoE’s removal of them, because I tweeted Duncan about the posting of the EdWeek article and pointed out that his propaganda about the futility of master’s degrees for teachers is disputed by evidence on his own website. Shortly afterwards, all of those pages disappeared.
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The EdWeek article just shows copies of some of the charts that were on the DoE website. The article said absolutely nothing about the research design, so of course there was no information provided about controlling for variables.
I find myself more and more inclined to want to test people with doctorates, who so often display this kind of convoluted thinking as evidence allegedly supportive of their arguments, before paying for their educational level. And, in this zeitgeist, that just might be on the horizon.
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One of the reasons why some professors in higher education such as TE like to trash K12 teachers and teacher education is because they don’t believe there are any special skills involved in teaching beyond content knowledge, since they were not trained to be teachers themselves. So they are in the same camp as those who don’t believe advanced degrees are necessary for teachers to learn more about child development, pedagogy, pedagogical content knowledge, etc.
Those folks teach lecture halls with up to 750 students and they have TAs to teach seminars, so they don’t actually get to know most of their students, so why learn anything about learners or teaching strategies? Being the “sage on the stage” is a comforting ego trip for them. Just wait until this administration’s plan for higher ed rolls out. Their days are numbered, too…
“First they came for the K12 teachers…”
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Teacher Ed,
Where have I “trashed teachers” in my posts?
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A teacher would need to have very low self-esteem to feel appreciated by you. I don’t typically read what you write anymore, because so many of your posts have oozed with disdain for K12 teachers, teacher education and public education. Love for charters and your own prescriptions? That’s readily apparent, even though you know just as little about K12 education as all the other untrained, inexperienced K12 “reformers.” Contrary to your opinion, K12 teachers are not ignorant fools and can see right through your silly games.
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Again,
Please point out anywhere that I have trashed teachers.
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Does anyone still have the original URLs for those disputed web pages? Even if they are broken now, I may be able to find an archive copy.
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The animadversions above illustrate in rather sharp relief the radical divide between academic culture and business culture — between the cultivation of knowledge and the cult of Ka-Ching! In point of present application they show us why the ideals of sharing knowledge with the widest possible public cannot help but be polluted and poisoned by the private interests that commodify, hoard, and proprietize every bit of knowledge they can gain control over.
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Sorry, John, I have a different computer now from the one I used when I saw those DoE pages.
I tried to warn you guys about getting into this with TE. The first time I referred to “The Master’s Effect” article, it was in response to a claim by Kane (of Chetty & Kane fame) and TE supported Kane, even though Kane provided no citations whatsoever but, like today, TE expected details from the DoE. That was when the DoE website was closed because of the government shut down and, after it reopened, I looked for those pages but they were gone.
TE has his mind made up that K12 teachers should not be paid for advanced degrees, even though colleges pay teachers according to their educational levels –and he’s safe because he has a doctorate. Just ignore him and his agenda.
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Searching on {U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress, various years, 2005-2011 reading assessments}, I find pages for individual years with similar-looking charts —
http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2011/
Some problems on my browser with the Flash version, but there are buttons for the non-Flash version and to download the full report.
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OIC, the Flash version is displayed slide-show fashion, you have to click the numbered boxes at the bottom of the figure to flip through the slides,
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Good find.
It still looks to me like the graph simply compares the NEAP scores of students assigned to teachers with masters degrees to the NEAP scores of students assigned to teachers without a graduate degree.
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Means nothing to me, since that sort of phrenology is not how I measure the value of education on either side of the learner/teacher interface, but I merely looked for what was asked.
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Great, John!
You can click on “explore these results further” and see more info, including a table with average scale scores by family income, which are still higher for low income students (eligible) each year for those who have teachers with master’s degrees.
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That info is here: http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2011/context_4.aspx?subtab_id=Tab_3&tab_id=tab1#chart
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BTW, take note of the inconsistent and less than stellar scores of low income 4th graders of teachers with doctorates. Kids with Master’s AND Bachelor’s level teachers scored higher in all years except 2011, when only the Master’s level teachers beat them! It was the same for 8th graders, except for the year 2007. And this was in reading, for which Kane et al. say that master’s degrees particularly don’t matter.
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Thanks so much for finding this, Jon!
Lots of people have egg on their faces, including Kane, Chetty and TE –who assumed that the teachers with master’s degrees were just more effective because they worked primarily with high income kids in the suburbs. Wrong. And he banked on Chetty and Kane being right because they are economists, are from Harvard and apparently he thinks VAM is science. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.
This info needs to get out to all the lawyers who will be dealing with future cases similar to Vergara, to refute Chetty and Kane, since this demonstrates the kind of incremental gains we would expect from children in poverty, and also because those behind the impetus to strip teachers of their rights really don’t want teachers paid higher salaries for master’s degrees.
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Teachers are required to change and grow through professional development ad college coursework, often at their own expense. Grouping those classes into a degree program makes sense and keeps the teacher informed about new ideas, applications and pedagogy for the classroom. Of course, some today, don’t seem to believe pedagogy exists. …
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Was it mandatory for teachers to answer the level of education questions? Question everything!
The conclusions these reformers draw from data is amazing.
Next they’ll ask what type of toilet paper teachers use.
Concluding that Charmin is chosen by high scoring teachers, because they can relate and reach high performing students from wealthier homes.
Low performing kids are taught by teachers in schools without TP, which saves the school $$, and soon they can close those schools & poor kids can attend charter schools.
Nothing but CRAP! Correlations of nonsense can be endless. They would even disrespect Mother Theresa because she wore dresses with blue & white stripes. Can’t fight these utterly insane battles.
The limited knowledge of children, teachers, teaching & learning keeps shining through with these CorpEdReformers. No credentials in our profession.
The highly educated and experienced educators are disrespected, kicked aside, ignored and their professional work dismissed. Disgusting!
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H.A. I LOVED your post! It has all gotten that silly and ridiculous. Ha..Ha..The rich politicians have to totally kick the Master’s degree and experienced educator to the curb, so they can begin to take over. They disregard our master teacher status because they are continuing to dumb down American education.
The data driven educational movement has gone whacko. We have to give pretests and posttests for almost every concept in our classrooms. There is no time to teach anymore – let alone when my students start taking 40 hours of online PARCC assessments next year. Yes, when they can convince everyone that our master’s degrees and years of experience mean nothing, learner beware. You will be taught by people with no education at all, so the charter school executives and online companies can pocket ALL of the money, once allotted for teacher salaries. Unbelievable.
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