Remember that the Los Angeles Times released the value-added ratings (made up by their own consultant) with the names of teachers in 2010?
Recently, the paper sued to get the ratings for three years-=-2009-2012. The LAUSD said it would release the ratings but not the names attached to them.
The public has no right to know the names of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers in connection with their job performance ratings, according to a court ruling issued Wednesday. In denying a request for disclosure by The Times, a three-judge state appellate court panel found that keeping the names confidential served a stronger public interest than releasing them. The panel overturned a lower court ruling ordering disclosure and rejected The Times’ assertion that the public interest of parents and others in knowing the ratings of identifiable teachers outweighed the interest in confidentiality.
Instead, the panel accepted L.A. school Supt. John Deasy’s contention that releasing the names would lead to resentment and jealousy among teachers, spur “unhealthy” comparisons among staff, cause some instructors to leave the nation’s second-largest school system, and interfere with teacher recruitment.
The judges said the specter of parents battling to place their children with the highest-performing teachers was of “particular concern.”
Is the rating based on test scores? Is it valid? Has anyone asked for the ratings of police or firefighters or other public employees?
Jim Ewert, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn., said the ruling was “unbelievable” and that accepting “conjecture” as evidence to deny public disclosure was “without precedent.”
“How a speculative declaration can rise to the level of clearly outweighing the public interest in disclosure is a mystery to me,” he said.
The Times sought three years of district data, from 2009 through 2012, that show whether individual teachers helped or hurt students’ academic achievement, as measured by state standardized test scores. L.A. Unified has provided the data but without the teacher names or their schools.
Using a complex mathematical formula, the district aims to isolate a teacher’s effect on student growth by controlling for such outside factors as poverty and prior test scores. The district sought to use the analysis in teacher evaluations but was resisted by the teachers union, which called it unreliable.
The court did not rule on the validity of the analysis, known in L.A. Unified as Academic Growth Over Time.
The judges did find that the public might have a right to know the schools where the anonymous teachers worked. They sent that issue back to the lower court for consideration.
Think about it. The LA Times published the names and ratings of individual teachers in 2010. Can anyone honestly assert that this data release improved the schools? Did it mean that the schools hired better teachers or that parents chose better teachers?
This is a thicket into which Race to the Top has led us, as districts and states across the nation use “value-added assessment” to measure the unmeasurable. No one has figured out how to make it work, but people continue to believe in it as if it were a magic talisman.
There is no evidence that the LA Times “magic formula” measures anything useful. Nevertheless, everyone will behave as if it does. The use of numbers creates the illusion of objectivity.
I apologize for being very off-topic but thought everyone here would find it interesting that the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor is highlighting abuses in charters in his fund-raising letters. I used to think anti-school privatization was a sleeper issue, one that few people knew or cared about, but not anymore. Our concerns are now mainstream, else Ed Fitzgerald wouldn’t be mentioning them.
From my inbox:
Barbara —
Test cheating. Tampering with attendance. Racism. Sexual misconduct.
In Ohio, a chain of 19 charter schools is now under investigation for these violations. It’s not what any parent wants to see in their child’s school.
Not only are these schools failing to challenge and prepare our children, but they pose a real threat to children’s safety. It’s an unfortunate consequence of a system rigged to give public money to unaccountable companies that see our students as cash cows, not the future of our state.
It’s time to hold Governor Kasich accountable and end his failed experiment on Ohio’s schools.
Join me and tell Kasich: Our kids’ futures are not up for sale. Stop taking money from public schools and giving it to failed charter schools run by your wealthy friends.
Add your name to my petition to Governor Kasich.
Our children’s futures shouldn’t depend on donations to Kasich’s campaign fund. But that’s exactly what’s happening right now. After donating over $62,000 to Kasich’s 2010 campaign, White Hat Management literally wrote the charter school law for Ohio without a single legislator present.
We need an effective education system that teaches our children the skills they need for life — not just how to take a test. We need to refocus on supporting passionate teachers who inspire their students, not demonizing them with bills like SB 5.
It’s time to focus on effective education, not what’s best for Kasich’s campaign donors.
If you agree, please sign on to my letter to Governor Kasich:
http://action.edfitzgerald.org/ohio-education
Thanks for your support,
Ed FitzGerald
“lead to resentment and jealousy among teachers, spur “unhealthy” comparisons among staff, cause some instructors to leave the nation’s second-largest school system, and interfere with teacher recruitment”
Well spoken Mr. Deasy. A few of the downsides to making everything in life a competition.
This is used in Ohio now to enumerate a teacher’s time with each child in class throughout their school years. Teachers have to enter the specific number of weeks they are “responsible” for the child’s education. Other data is collected and placed in the child’s record. So, if at some point a child drops out of school, they can look back to see which teachers, say, in the 4th grade, are responsible for that child’s issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battelle_for_Kids
The precise strategy for tracking how teachers “interface” with students starts with the concept of a “teacher of record” and this idea, known as the Teacher Student Data Link (TSDL) is courtesy of a Gates-funded survelliance program.
A teacher of record is best understood as person who has a unique identifier (think barcode) for an entire career in teaching. A record is generated whenever a teacher of record has some specified proportion of responsibility for a student’s learning activities. Further, these “learning activities” must be defined in terms of the performance measures for a particular standard, by subject and grade level.
The TSDL system requires period-by-period tracking of teachers and students every day; including “tests, quizzes, pro-jects, homework, classroom participation, or other forms of day-to-day assessments and progress measures”—a level of surveillance that is said to be comparable to business practices. See Teacher Student Data Link Project. (2011). Use and purpose of teacher-student data link. Retrieved from http://www.tsdl.org/UseandPurposeofTSDL.aspx
The system will keep current and longitudinal data on the performance of teachers and individual students, as well schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty. This data will then be used to determine the “best value” investments to make in education and to monitor improvements in outcomes, taking into account as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers. A warehouse provides for long-term storage of data to facilitate research on these topics. In Ohio, the warehouse is Battelle for Kids.
This Gates-funded advocacy campaign added significant resources to a parallel federal initiative. Since 2006, the U.S. Department of Education has invested over $700 million in the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) Grant Program. More than forty states have received multi-year grants to standardize data on education. Operated by the Institute of Education Sciences, the SLDS program is “designed to aid state education agencies in developing and implementing longitudinal data systems. These systems are intended to enhance the ability of States to efficiently and accurately manage, analyze, and use education data, including individual student records…to help States, districts, schools, and teachers make data-driven decisions to improve student learning, as well as facilitate research to increase student achievement and close achievement gaps.” See U.S. Department of Education. (2011). Overview: Statewide longitudinal data systems grant program, Institute of Edu-cation Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/slds/
“Institute of Education Sciences”
Isn’t there an oxymoron in that name???
The horrors of sci-fi predictions, come true, courtesy of Gates.
i think of the young man in the LAUSD, considered an excellent teacher by those who worked with him. committed suicide because of an “inadequate” rating.
My thoughts exactly! Why can’t his family sue the paper?
They can and that is the real reason for this complicated publicity deflection that makes Deasy look like he is actually being considerate towards teachers. On the contrary , he orchestrated this mess before he even took the number one position and LAT has shamelessly promoted these ratings as well as their series Passing Failure without fail for the last four years. However, the test data clearly lacks integrity. After so many cheating scandals there is no way any of it is remotely viable. In fact, the scandals are erupting because analysists know the gains are not even possible because that is not how things work.
While pouring over the Atlanta case, I was struck by the fact that the expectations for improvement we’re statistically unlikely as well. In other words, teachers who groaned when told to bring up 610 AYP to 800 in TWO years were right to do so because it is just not going to happen unless they cheat. While many teachers will not usually do this, plenty of prncipals under tremendous pressure are because these scores may mean money to the district, and often are deployed as impetus for promotions.
With this said , I add that any astute lawyer could file a class action for liability against LAT and LAUSD because there is so much empiracal evidence available now that shows the scores are profoundly faulty.
This is why LAT and LAUSDeasy went to so much trouble effecting this conflict and resolving it before one of the city’s countless corrupt judges ( see Richard Fine on FDN ) so that no one catches on to the libel from 2010 . NYC schools planned to do much the same thng with published rankings but quickly decided against it. I suspect NYC is a more shrewd and wary bunch than those of us in LALAland and the reformers knew that much.
One other thing must be added. When any administrator or official undermines the civil rights of a student or teacher in the course of duty, those unseemly indemity laws are not honored. Thus a school board, like LAUSD BoE that fails to review the charges and fires teachers without due process as Zimmer, Vlad, Galatzan, Ratliff, Kayser, and Garcia have at least 162 times since Deasy was installed. There are recent meeting minutes that bear this out as do votes which betray uninanmous agreement in ruining a teachers’ life without even opening the file to review the charges. These members of the BoE are PERSONALLY liable for teachers’ losses, which exceed back wages as they lose their homes, health and persuit of happiness.
All I can see through the screen of absurdity is the audacity of media. Suing for what!? Gaining popularity for more subscription by humiliating and insulting schools and teachers!? They must be well heeled in Ludicrous and Arrogant Times.
I cannot think of another profession where the individual, internal job performance reviews are publicly posted as a form of humiliation, blacklisting, and character assassination as done to teachers. Even the BBB gives businesses a change to respond and remedy, lawyer and doctor discipline actions are HEARINGS and can be sealed, private business may make it a firing offense to share reviews, salary changes and benefits.
Wait. I need to clarify. I cannot think of a profession in the United States. Now maybe in repressive regimes and dictatorships…. But we aren’t there yet….. right?
“AGOTcha”
AGOT is what it’s called
A gotcha is what we see
The teacher’s have been mauled
By LA-Times and -USD
A
GROT =AcademicGrowthRot Over Time.sorry,should have been “teachers”
“unbelievable” said Jim Ewert, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. Releasing a person’s rating based on a cruddy metric is unbelievable. even more unbelievable is that journos continue to phone in the Scam-of-the-Century. P.T. Barnum and all the past snake oil salesman would be proud. I wonder how much it will cost us and the U.S. when this sham finally collapses and is laid to rest?
Seems like a great opportunity for a liability suit. Some brave individual (with independent means of support) could really help out the entire profession by challenging the basis of the ‘evaluation’.
This is another bogus case filed to cover the truth/ Barb Braden mentions a great teacher from Bell who was devastated by his low rating and apparently got an earful from an administrator when he returned to school that nrxt week. I followed that week long series in LAT myself. I know LA well enough to see what others might not . The poor performers were in poor urban schools where English was usually not spoken at home. Complaint about culturally biased testing have been made for many years and the truth is testing is a skill set some kids have and others don;t I have worked with all kinds of kids in a variety of settings and demographics and I can tell you that Chinese is kids are more disciplined and do well on the test because they practice religiously. Every Saturday we took the SAT. well they did. I was sure my score would get canned.
BUt the truth is the tests are woefully inaccurate. SO this has become factual thanks to the analysts and experts who have exposed the flaws in VAM.
LAT ushered in VAM like it was the theory of relativity realized. Like most people, teachers assumed the data was objective but they also understood it is unfair to pit an undocumented ESL student against an affluent kid in the burbs who speaks English at home where his educated parents can help him with homework. They encourage him to go to college and become a doctor or an architect . My student has a higher education than his folks who he has to help navigate through life because they cannot speak English and fear deportation.
BUT I digress. The reason Deasy and LAT had this little squirmish was to 1, Help Deasy look less like an outright tyrant who hates teachers, though most of us caught the insults because they were hardly contained between the lines.Deasy may be under investigation for wrongfully terminating thousands of teachers over 40. He should be between PERB complaints and EEOC I mean teachers sound like impudent little brats in his quotes , which is, oddly enough, how Deasy is prone to behave. But he is like that. What stuns me is how well these grifts work.
2. LAUSD and LAT want to avoid being sued from the first published rank and stack affront which was a pop up article on the site. I have content mailed to me from minions that show this. So the defamation is ongoing. obviously they made a big deal about doing this in LA and NY and I heard some folks talk about libel but until recently I am not sure one could prove it. The teacher who committed suicide believed he was a bad teacher and killed himself not long after the scores were released. His family considered suing LAUSD and the TIMES. He was a wonderful teacher accoding to students, parents and colleagues.
This situation is a bit of a pickle and it is also evidence that these people are concerned about being caught—that means they are not impervious. I think we should recirculate the studies on VAM, blog on it and saturate cyber space with stuff about testing fall out fr teachers and kids. OH YEAH the scores have a big impact on property values. Damn this is good stuff. We can parlay that into an opt out bonanza. Of course I am unclear about the testing [plan while CCSS takes two years to regroup. I will ask a lawyer if that libel case can fly from 2010,
Filing that kind of case on the heels of Vergara may prove very fruitful for those teachers and the resistance/. We are winning,
Let’s just get the scarlet A’s and dust them off. What a ridiculous climate we teachers must endure by the yellow journalists.
I see no difference between publishing individual teacher’s job evaluations from requiring that teachers wear a red letter T in order to brand, humiliate, shame and convince other people that this segment of society is less than human, like forcing Jews to wear a Jewish star…
When did “I see no difference between” become synonymous with “I see some similarity between”?
Wild Thang, I think I love ya!
Sorry about my syntax, which I struggled with because things go haywire when you are starving, living on the edge of homelessness, and your lucid moments decline.
Maybe it’s a loss of brain cells, but I see some similarity between Flerp!’s comment and the gross injustices identified in my post which he chose to ignore.
There you go!
I am sorry to hear of your hardship Tinker. You are hardly alone as teachers are Homeless, hungry and lining up for public assistance in LA. It is outragious . I may have some ideas on how to help you get back to work and seek legal recourse. I am like you having lost my job, my house and my faith in human beings. But for whatever reasons I am incredibly resourceful and have helped. Few of the fallen fend for themselves.
http://Www.hemlockontherocks.com
Daughtersofbukowski@ gmail.com
So… what now in New York State, with high-stakes testing and APPR? I understand that this involved a California state court, but is there any action afoot here in NYS to keep teacher evaluations / ratings confidential?
What we really need is a rating model for (DAM) journalists.
Luckily for us (and for the LA Times) there is no lower limit on negative numbers.
Isn’t all of this so sad? That is why my name is Sad Teacher. Cosmic Tinker, Your entry made me cry, because you are so right. My mean governor John Kasich wants me to think I am a nothing and that I have accomplished nothing in my 30 year teaching career. I beg to differ. I have molded and shaped young lives. I am so proud of what I have done in my 30 year teaching career. John Kasich, Effective teachers successfully taught you to become Governor of the great state of Ohio. Why do you hate us so badly?
Ignore Kasich and keep teaching. He’ll fade. FitzGerald is a very weak candidate, but amazingly still in the running. People voted Kasich in with less than 50%. His policies are not working and people may begin to realize that.
And perhaps the Gulen insanity will come to the forefront & be Kasich’s undoing! News continues to come upfront on a daily basis
(note Diane’s post the other day on the investigation{s} in Illinois!
Sad Teacher, You deserve to continue to be proud of the work that you have done. Teaching really is a noble profession and not everyone can do it well. Ill-informed politicians, corporate billionaires and the media are using a measuring stick to judge people they have never met and in whose shoes they have never trod, in order to promote their ideological and economic agendas. I know that it can be very difficult to do, but try to remember that their campaign is not against you as a person, It’s against us as a people, and try to hang in there with us.
Of mixed mind on this one. I think there are real concerns about posting individual results. But the performance of public employees traditionally has been a public record.
If the school districts don’t act on the chronically low-performing teachers, then should parents have that information? Interesting issue.
For what it’s worth, I believe NY has recently enacted an arcane system that allows disclosure only to parents of students of the teacher in question.
In Ohio, the publish salaries in the newspaper because we serve the public. So far, no ratings. They don’t even publish the reasons for letting a terrible principal go. They even give them glowing recommendations and send them off to wreak havoc elsewhere. Oh, and let’s not forget the total lack of transparency at JobsOhio. And, let’s not forget that the whistleblowers are being punished for exposing facts about charter schools here. But, if this continues, give a teacher a bad class, and in the suburban schools, 95% are expected to pass. And those who migrate in to the suburban schools for a “miracle cure” and don’t pass because they have had issues in all their previous years of schooling can cause a teacher to suddenly have “the lowest %age” passing. Guess who gets punished?
Deb,
How about rating the members of the Ohio State Board of Education?
Ha…Mr Ross would be out on his rear. Kasich and his cronies are bad for education and the middle class.
No, it hasn’t been “traditionally” been a matter of public record. The public has NO right to personnel records or evaluations.
Except when it does.
Good think we have laws…..
Who decides who is “low-performing”? The principal, who can rig the classroom by overloading a teacher with sped students or ESL students to make the scores look worse.
The fact is teaching is a profession, not a Mickey Ds job, and “performance” is a matter of opinion, not fact.
The whole system is rigged. I am an ESL teacher.
“But the performance of public employees traditionally has been a public record.”
Really?
I had no idea.
Please tell me how I can see the personnel files, or at least the most recent performance reviews for my police officers, fire fighters, etc.
Are members of the military included? They are paid with tax dollars.
How do I locate this valuable I formation?
I do believe there is an underlying sexism grounded in conservative belief that is the elephant in the room. Do Republicans in Wisconsin exclude police and fire because they are predominantly male occupations? Are teachers attacked and infantalized in Ohio because a majority of teachers are female and not “knowing their place”?
I don’t think individual performance reviews have ever been public record. Discipline issues, maybe. The problem is public performance ratings are out of context. Should teachers have the ability to publicly rebut and clarify a public rating? Would you include executives and employees of companies that receive government funding, incentives, or assistance? Do public employees have less right to privacy than non-public employees? Does publishing performance rankings improve teaching?
On your penultimate question, yes, public employees have less right to privacy than private employees.
Are there performance records for federal employees? For starters, I would like to take a look at Arne’s file. How was Hillary rated? Is there a rubric?
“public employees have less right to privacy than private employees.”
OK, where can I find the personnel files and or recent evaluations of the fire fighters in my area, I hear some of them are underperforming.
My salary is part of the state budget and is public information.
“If the school districts don’t act on the chronically low-performing teachers. . . ”
Your assumption is not valid, therefore your question is meaningless.
May I evaluate chronically underperforming administrators?
Everyone has a hand in evaluating everyone else in many post secondary schools, including my institution. It seems like a reasonable system.
I find it hard to even comment on something that at its root is so inane. On the one hand if teachers were able to drive their own careers and evaluations were tied to professional development, community involvement, student feedback and students passing classes, then I could see a great teachers rating website. better yet, great schools and school digger would rate whole schools on the overall teacher/student educational experience. Are students engaged, did they ask and explore, did they want to go to the school or class. Were the homework assignments and work required relevant and advancing the student. The data would be collected on the difficulty level of assignments, the rubic used for grading, the critical thinking idex number which if there isn’t one their should be one created. Then sure put their names out there like doctors or lawyers. But that is in a world where teachers are not a the bottom of the totempole in their own field and career. The world where the likes of non-educators are not manufacturing these standards to hold teachers accountable for what is for the most part out of their control. So a child is not taught to write in fourth grade but the standardized test for writng is in fifth grade. Isn’t that child already at a major disadvantage, and who should be held accountable the fifth grade teacher or the fourth grade teacher. And what about when the school clearly does everything in its power to avoid intensive help of children, say requiring afterschool tutoring or more seriously denying IEPs.
This is the best bait and switch campaign I’ve ever seen, look its the teachers, its not the high stakes testing, the underfunding public schools for charters and IT DEFINITELY IS NOT THE FACT THAT THERE ARE MILLIONS OF DISADVANGED KIDS NOT RECEIVING SERVICES. Teachers are not social workers, they are for the most part respectful, skilled, and dedicated to the craft and art of engaging young people to learn, if only they were left alone to be able to do it.
Let’s remember Rigoberto Ruelas, a victim of the LAT’s witchhunt of teachers.
susannunes: you and I think alike…
From HuffPostEd, 9/28/2010, the entire online article:
[start quote]
SOUTH GATE, Calif. — The Los Angeles Times should remove teacher performance ratings from its website after the apparent suicide of a teacher despondent over his score, the union representing Los Angeles school teachers said.
United Teachers Los Angeles also has asked school administrators to join with them in the request to the newspaper, which published the ratings last month, union president AJ Duffy said.
The body of 39-year-old Rigoberto Ruelas Jr., a fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School, was found Sunday at the foot of a remote forest bridge in what appears to be a suicide.
The motive for Ruelas taking his own life is far from clear. But union officials said he had been upset since the Times published his district ranking as a “less effective” teacher based on his students’ standardized English and math test scores.
Ruelas scored “average” in getting his students up to acceptable levels in English, but “less effective” in math, and “less effective” overall. The school itself ranked as “least effective” in raising test scores, and only five of Miramonte’s 35 teachers were ranked as high as average.
The rankings were contained in a database analyzing seven years of student test score data for students taught by 6,000 third- to fifth-grade teachers.
In a statement, the newspaper extended its condolences to the family and said it published the database “because it bears directly on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to judge the data for themselves.”
The publication of individual rankings sparked widespread outrage among teachers. The rankings ranged from least and less effective to average, more effective and most effective.
The union protested in front of the newspaper’s downtown headquarters and called for a boycott of the Times, which published the rankings as part of a push for a better method to evaluate teacher effectiveness.
Although other factors may have been at play in Ruelas’ death, union official Mathew Taylor said Monday he believed the ranking was a contributing factor based on conversations with teachers at the school. Principals have been using the rankings to crack down on teachers, he said.
“He was a very well-respected teacher,” Taylor said. “He took the pressure being applied to him to heart.”
Ruelas was last seen Sept. 19 when he dropped off a birthday gift for his sister. He notified the school to get a substitute for his classes Monday and Tuesday, but he did not return to work Wednesday and his family reported him missing.
Superintendent Ramon Cortines has said the type of teacher rankings published by the Times, known as “value-added,” shouldn’t be used as the sole criteria to measure effectiveness.
The school board last month authorized the district to start developing a new method for evaluating teachers that incorporates value-added rankings, as well as in-classroom observation and other measures.
Detractors say value-added rankings place too much emphasis on test-score teaching, especially in schools like Miramonte, a large school in an impoverished, gang-plagued neighborhood about six miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. About 60 percent of Miramonte students are Spanish-speaking English-language learners.
“Test scores are directly related to the socio-economic status of the student population,” said Taylor. “The best teachers are given the toughest kids. This man had won many awards.”
By all accounts, Ruelas did not shy away from problem kids.
Parents and former students described him as a mentor to youth tempted to join gangs and a tireless booster that low-income children could make it to college. He often stayed after school to tutor struggling kids and offer counseling so they stayed on the straight and narrow.
“He took the worse students and tried to change their lives,” said Ismael Delgado, a 20-year-old former student. “I had friends who wanted to be gangsters, but he talked them out of it. He treated you like family.”
[end quote]
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/28/rigoberto-ruelas-suicide-_n_742073.html
R.I.P. Rigoberto Ruelas.
😎
Thank you, Krazy.
“Deasy, when asked for evidence documenting harm to teachers, did not produce any; instead he said in an interview Wednesday that ‘it’s [his] belief’ that would occur.”
Rigoberto Ruelas’ suicide has apparently been forgotten by Deasy.
You know he was part of the whole push to publish before he even got the bump up to number 1. His media manipulation is legendary but to concede that Ruelas was harmed is contrary to his present purpose which is to deflect attention from this now that evidence shows the practice is libelous and reckless.
Christine Langhoff: google “Patrena Shankling” and “John Deasy.”
You will get many hits. One of them is an honorable hard working person that got fired for doing the right thing, the other is…
Not Patrena Shankling.
But then consider this posting from yesterday—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/07/23/ohio-will-investigate-only-one-gulen-charter/
Like Patrena Shankling, when you do the right thing, you can put “former teacher” on your resumé.
And when you’re the likes of John Deasy, well, consider his soulmate Paul Vallas:
“I go in, fix the system, I move on to something else.”
Link: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Paul-Vallas–213999671.html
$tudent $ucce$$, ain’t it grand?
😡
Ruelas worked in Bell a city famed for its unprecedented response to local corruption which has seen the culprits recently punished for abusing their positions and stealing massive sums from this working class community. They came out in force for Ruelas when they learned what happened. Cortines was obviously rattled by all thus but LAT reporters were unrepentant . Given their skills as journalists I would like to see how well the stood up to an evaluation of their performance.
Ruelas committed suicide when he went to school, the burden of a bad rating already depressing him only to be called in to an administrator and chastised for embarrassing the school. He had not missed work in all his years as a teacher there and students from those years came out in force to credit him with their success . He kept them out of gangs , off drugs and on top of their education . He taught 5 th grade so it seems to me this should be factored in to his evaluation too, but it isn’t.
Instead administrators ambush teachers and write absolute lies about them in observation notes . Teachers are targeted and sabotaged by overloading , untenable schedules and disruptions that include being forced to travel from classroom to classroom, assignments that are far outside their expertises, a deliberate scheduling of miscreants, EL, IEPs, and truants. While one teacher may be responsible for three test heavy courses anothe will get all seniors who have no testing whatsoever and are eager to succeed becase they didnt come as far as 12th graade to flunk out.Tests compromised by rampant cheating and a flawed system for analysis are employed .
And in these efforts the codes, CBA and policy are clearly ignored . Ruelas had no way of knowing that rating was not accurate nor could he have perceived the extreme betrayals he was among the first to really suffer . All he saw was that he had failed in his duty, which is everything to most teachers.
When we are fired, and estimates of 10,0000 to 17,000 teachers have been at LAUSD since the article was published, our ability to find another position is impaired by the dismissal as well as the fact we are coming from the distrct that is now notorious for sending perverts off with glowing letters of rec to get work at other area schools. Rumor has it that no small districts will consider an LAUSD cast off under any circumstances. Even if they do, the likelihood ofa higher paid teacher being chosen over a cheap rookie or cheaper intern is slim.
Ruelas probably was not thinking of that when he took his own life. He was probably thinking he loved his job and since he sucked at it, he could not, in good conscious, keep teaching.
Why doesn’t everyone in the education world read and share this report about why VAM is a sham?!? The critical evaluation is here for all to see!
Click to access ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf
Does anyone remember using numbers to measure things in science experiments and getting an answer to, I don’t know, ten places? And being told that that wasn’t a valid answer. The answer was only valid to the same number of places as the number you put into the initial calculation. And if that number is bad… Garbage in, garbage out.
You are quite correct, but that only applies to science and engineering.
VAMs are not science or engineering* (economics doesn’t count), so that makes it all OK.
VAMers are waste management specialists, so let’s just get out of their way and let them do what they do best: move garbage around and pile it into heaps (for money, of course)
*not “engineering” in the normal sense, at least. “Sanitation engineering” is something else and no sleight to traditional sanitation engineers or waste managers is intended. Unlike VAMers, the latter provide an all important service.
I don’t think that any of us will ever forget Rigoberto Ruelas.
However, in light of the Sleazy Deasy, perhaps we can come up with some kind of memorial/tribute to him, so no one EVER forgets.
For those of you who knew him and loved him, what suggestions can you make?
We have merit pay and the first year our local paper published all the amounts teachers received with a search engine where people could look up their teachers and it literally said “check to see if your child is one of the good ones”. Well, what they failed to tell the public is that the top teachers receiving merit pay (strictly based on one standardized test score) were the upper grade teachers-no one from Pre-K through 2nd Grade in elementary schools was eligible. So each one of us came up as the “bad” teachers because we weren’t rewarded anything, however we weren’t even considered.
My point is that often the public does not always understand the process and I think journalists feed into that by implying things that are not necessarily true. We fought it as an invasion of privacy, that merit pay was essentially an evaluation of performance but we lost. In this case–every other profession I know of keeps evaluations confidential, in fact, when we used the state eval, we were even cautioned from even sharing our results from each other. I don’t know why teachers are always the targets of these things.
It’s interesting that they gave merit pay only to teachers in the upper grades. That’s where most of the men in K12 teach.
“I don’t know why teachers are always the targets of these things.”
Because the teacher workforce is comprised primarily of women and, in our society, females have always been and continue to be EZ pickins.
Why should teachers have all the fun? Time to splay open the records for all administrators, superintendents, state board of ed heads, etc.
File a request. Anyone can do it.
Please elaborate!
How can I see a recent performance evaluation of the police in my area?
Will it be in the paper?
I hear some of them underperform.
Click to access sunshine_laws.pdf
They can but will theuir requests be honored?,
That should mean exposing the records for ALL public employees. Then people could even call 911 and ask for the highest performing police, firefighters etc. to come help them. And don’t forget the 911 call center workers, too, in order to make sure folks can start with the best liaisons, because, at bottom, this is all about the magic of “choice.”
The “public blame, shame and then fire ” game shouldn’t be restricted to just “public” employees but should apply to any professional who deals with the public and/or gets public funds: doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, engineers, etc.
Because, you know, when a life-long smoker dies of lung cancer after being operated on flawlessly by a top notch surgeon, that surgeon should certainly be held accountable for the death: publicly blamed, shamed and then fired (and probably prosecuted and jailed too)
And when an arsonist burns down a wood frame building, the award winning architect who designed it and the professional carpenters who built it should be publicly blamed, shamed and then fired.
And the Nobel prize winning scientist who discovered a new medicine that was eventually taken in overdose? Blamed, shamed and then fired.
All professionals (not just teachers) really need to start taking responsibility for their actions.
The public has a right to know everything about these people and to punish them even when they are not responsible (though they always are).
Careful what you wish for because entrepreneurs are always looking for new markets. Mandating this would mean that every worker is liable for malpractice, which would heftily feed insurance companies, as well as bring more litigation to lawyers, who tend to be the ones who go into politics so they’re the ones who would create such laws.
Publishing value added ratings of teachers is so unfair and so horrible. I had to write in and let everyone know that not all teachers are treated the same. In my school district only Grade 3 through Grade 8 of certain subjects have value added scores. Why is it fair to hold some teachers feet to the fire and other teachers have no state test at all? For example, if you teach 7th grade Science in Ohio you have no state test and no value added scores at all. You are responsible for developing your own SLO test, administering your SLO test, grading your own SLO test, and then seeing if each student met the growth formula. In other words, that teacher has complete knowledge of the test in their head at all times. The state tested teacher does not have this advantage. Then, how is it fair when the SLO teacher, without the state test, has a higher ranking than the value added teacher? That is happening widespread in my school district. Don’t get me wrong – I love the 7th grade Science teacher – but truly is it fair that they don’t have to go through a state test and the value added teacher does? Many of the SLO teachers in my building, who do not have the state test, are enjoying higher ratings than the value added teachers. So, how is it fair that the value added teachers are in the threat of being fired while the SLO teachers have more of a safety net. It is all flawed, so unfair, and immensely demoralizing to all involved.
To the poor gentleman who committed suicide over his rating – how very sad. I wish I could have talked with him, took him to church with me, and helped him retrain into another job. Nothing is worth taking one’s life. The only reason all this crazy stuff is happening is for the privatization of public education – so that the rich can become richer. They do not care about the children or the teachers. It’s all about the money.
Sad Teacher, remember too that causing division and fomenting jealousy among teachers is also a goal of this so-called reform. Whether we are members of a union or not, if we don’t stand strong together, we will certain fall alone.
At our school, there is one man who stated that when his evaluation is determined by test scores, he will close his door and refuse to collaborate with anyone. Hevis already selfish, doesn’t share with anyone who doesn’t worship his opinions, and practically isolates himself. He does get good scores, but do we. However, the way he badgers his students at the beginning of the year is sickening. It is like creating a Stockholm Syndrome every single year. Terrible person.
It is a dog eat dog world. Teachers are becoming vicious and vindictive.
What do folks think about the efforts to rate teachers using student ratings?
Here are the ratings for the faculty at one California high school:
http://www.ratemyteachers.com/abraham-lincoln-high-school/3513-s
One of my students last year told me to go out, buy him lunch and he would give me the money. He was not happy when I refused. That would probably have been included in the evaluation.
Gee, sounds like Christie & “no” pension reform! (Christie promised you money, didn’t he?) Perhaps your student is planning a career in politics-?!
Hi retired!
What are the chances the pension will be there when I retire?