Those who long to see teachers fired based on student test scores must have been happy last week in Tennessee. Four teachers were fired based on the state’s evaluation system. Is it valid? Is it reliable? Were they fired for teaching in high poverty schools? Did the state or the district provide them with support?
Audrey Amrein Beardsley blogged about this termination process in Tennessee here. (The number fired went from five to four after she wrote about it.)
Beardsley wrote:
“It’s not to say these teachers were not were indeed the lowest performing; maybe they were. But I for one would love to talk to these teachers and take a look at their actual data, EVAAS and observational data included. Based on prior experiences working with such individuals, there may be more to this than what it seems. Hence, if anybody knows these folks, do let them know I’d like to better understand their stories.
“Otherwise, all of this effort to ultimately attempt to terminate five of a total 5,685 certified teachers in the district (0.09%) seems awfully inefficient, and costly, and quite frankly absurd given this is a “new and improved” system meant to be much better than a prior system that likely yielded a similar termination rate, not including, however, those who left voluntarily prior.”
A lawsuit seems inevitable.
Two board members were outspokenly critical:
“If the firings are approved then [after independent review], the group of teachers will become the first to lose their jobs under Metro’s new system that relies on state teacher evaluation to dismiss teachers deemed low-performing.
[Superintendent Jesse] Register, in pushing firings that state law authorizes, has said that all students deserve excellent teachers. But evaluations continue to be debated in Tennessee four years after their implementation
“If we have bad teachers in the classroom, I fully agree that we need to get them out of the classroom,” said board member Amy Frogge, who voted against certifying the teachers of each. “The problem is, I’m not sure we’re using a fair measure to do that.”
“Two of the teachers who face termination are at Neely’s Bend Middle School, another is at Madison Middle School and the fourth is at Bellshire Elementary School.
“Teacher evaluations in Tennessee, known as the Tennessee Education Acceleration model, have faced criticism particularly for their use of student gains on tests measured through value-added data. This compares student scores to projections and comprises 35 percent of an overall evaluation score. Qualitative in-class observations by principals account for an additional 50 percent. The remaining 15 percent is based on other student achievement metrics.
“The board’s Will Pinkston, a frequent critic of Register, objected to the board being asked to take up the votes after receiving details about the situations of each teacher only days before.
“I do not trust this process or the people behind it,” said Pinkston, who made four unsuccessful motions to defer voting on the charges.
“If mass teacher dismissals are going to be the new normal, then let’s do it right, not scramble to get information to meet some arbitrary deadline.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Note to self. Do not go to Tennessee to be a teacher!
…or improve your game in the classroom.
Peter, the more you learn about the evaluation models, the less confidence you will have that they measure anyone’s “game in the classroom”
Peter clearly isn’t interested in learning.
Just that simple!! NOT!!!!!! There are rules, mandates, behaviors(classroom management)curriculum issues, poverty, family dynamics, politics, etc… The list goes on.. If we’re as easy as that ,do you really think so many parents and educators would be in an uproar!!!
Or test the validity of model by putting TFAers and state education policymakers on VAMpire machine.
Yes but just think of all the “Hope [Tennessee] Can Believe In.”
Actually, the “I” word has been coming to mind a lot lately prompted by President Obama’s frontal attack on public education.
the “I” word ?????
So how are Pre-K teachers in districts that offer public pre-k evaluated. Is VAM used? There is no historical data. Are the kids benchmarked at the beginning of the year, then again at the end? Do they throw pasta at the wall to see if it sticks? Shake a chicken foot? What? How? …or is pre-k exempt and it falls next to the K teachers?
Yes, Pre-K teachers have an assessment they give at the beginning, middle and end of the year-it takes at least 10 days each time because it has to be administered individually one-on-one. From K on up (including PE, Art, etc.) we have multiple choice tests that are given in the beginning and middle and end of they year. My problem with it is that even though our standards are getting more rigorous in K, the tests do not keep up with that. So our BOY was simply identifying letters and sounds-most of my students can do that already-so I know I won’t have the prerequisite growth this year! 😦
The children could be assessed prenataly to establish a pre-k benchmark.
As far as VAM is concerned, it is junk science, so why waste time trying to jam a square peg into a round hole? There are too many variables in the teaching-learning dynamic to effectively quantify the impact of the teacher on a student’s learning. There are many more variables in a student’s life alone to pin a score on a teacher’s back like a bulls-eye. Some of these factors are intelligence, motivation, economic, emotional, social and more. One problem is that the “reformers” are presenting a conclusion, ie.(the teacher is single most important factor in students’ learning), and then forcing the data to support their hypothesis. When there are so many subjective and inaccurate ways to evaluate teachers, it opens the door for abuse in firing. Senior teachers that are more expensive can be discarded without due process. Teachers that take a stand on any issue can be eliminated. It creates an unhealthy atmosphere of fear and mistrust. How will this improve teaching?
No one in administration in the Dept of Ed or local boards or legislators CARE that VAM is junk science. The former governor “pimped out” teachers to get his hands on $700 million of Race to the Top money. Now, we are stuck with this insanity and it’s quickly destroying education in Tn.
Thank you for posting Audrey’s article Diane. We are in a heck of a place here in TN. Memphis is really fighting back against the ASD- as is Nashville. Memphis needs serious love this week. Teachers protesting ASD taking over more schools and we have TN MemphisBATs on the ground going to meetings and protesting. Teachers in #memphis are firing it up. We could use any shout out for help you can give! Thank you! Tn ❤ you!
Lucianna, I will be in Nashville on Nov 19 to give you all the encouragement possible. Never, never, never give up.
‘Tennessee: Teachers Fired Using VAM Scores of Unknown Validity”
Isn’t firing someone based on a measure of “unknown validity” invalid by definition?
So, what we have here is a case of “known invalid unknown validity”.
I wonder what Donald Rumsfeld would have to say about that.
So let’s say VAM becomes the law of the land.
They get rid of the older, experienced teachers (who’ll still get the pensions they were promised for devoting their lives to teaching) and replace them with who?
An iPad? A Chromebook? A Surface? They are sure of how to get rid of the problem (extinguish the teachers who can’t teach to the test) but who do they think will take their place?
I’d like to hear from the Corporate Common Core Consortium who they think will take this job?
Jim Realini,
TFA and other uncertified individuals are waiting with bated breath. They are far more compliant than seasoned veterans who presume to know about curriculum and pedagogy.
I tend to think they are waiting only for another notch in their corporate resume. They ain’t gonna stick it out because they don’t have the ‘calling’ required of every single one of us who sacrificed tens (hundreds) of thousands of dollars in order to do what we love. AND, they don’t have intellectual chops of real teachers, who know that kids come in many flavors, and that we need to offer the right response to each. Also, they don’t know that ideas come in many flavors, and we need to be flexible enough to pick the right approach (visual? reductive/deductive?) to meet a particular student’s needs. In fact, most great ideas can be expressed from many different perspectives, so a real teacher must be flexible.
Think some snot-nosed TFA wimp can do that? Well, I was once a snot-nosed rookie (although with at least a masters degree and State certification in a few areas under my belt). It takes experience and empathy, and a willingness to listen to what your students are telling you. Yes, education is a ‘drawing out’, but it is also an honest dialogue. The ‘Master’ sometimes learns.
You have many excellent points John Wund. I am constantly learning from my students. The reformers want a revolving door of people who are not committed to either the children or the profession. One TFA at my school barely made it through a month of student harassment. A teacher has to simultaneously develop a thick skin and maintain sensitivity toward students whose lives and priorities may differ greatly from one’s own.
“Another is a computer instructor being terminated as based on this school’s overall ‘school-level value-added.'”
This is absurd!
The problems with VAM are well known, as are the problems with SLOs for judging teachers–student learning objectives. Then there is the objservation bit.
I took a look a the Tennessee ” General Educator Rubric” for rating “Instruction.”
It has 18 main categories, 105 subcategories, and 362 indicators that are supposed to be rated on a scale with a range from 5 (significantly above expectations) to 1 (significantly below expectations).
Raters cannot make these judgments by reading documents. The ratings assume that judgments are based on direct observations. The 18 main categories are (in order): Standards and Objectives, Motivating Students, Presenting Instructional Content, Lesson Structure and Pacing, Activities and Materials, Questioning, Feedback, Grouping Students, Teacher Content Knowledge, Teacher Knowledge of Students, Thinking (4 types), Problem-Solving (9 types), Instructional Plans (Madeline Hunter lives on), Student Work, Assessment (at least three types), Expectations, Managing Student Behavior, Environment, and Respectful Culture.
So, a conscientious rater (principal, outside evaluator) would be making judgments on about 1800 specifications for a single teacher, in only one round of observations. Reliable? Valid? Not. This is a fraud perpetuated as if the more specific and detailed your observation checklist, the more objective the rating is. Wrong.
This rating scale honors one kind of teaching in “above expectations.” This five-star teacher must be a “sage on the stage” who is consistently, always, regularly on time, efficient, and intolerant of time wasting. Time on task is a biggie.
The five-star teacher is always attentive to all students–all students, all of the time, always, and consistently. These are key words for getting a rating of five. This language means that the rater is monitoring each teacher frequently, at least three times. For any hope of a reliable rating the number of observations should go up to five, and these observations cannot be made in a brief walk through.
The five-star teacher knows precisely what students are to master in each lesson. He or she can “optimize” or “maximize” the achievement of objectives with a clear, explicit, and logical sequence of activities and materials–all selected because they are aligned with the standards–extending to teaching methods, how students are grouped for instruction, and classroom displays. Zowie.
Of the 105 subcategories in this rating protocol, exactly five of the entries credit the teacher if he or she has the wisdom and skill to make learning relevant to students. Moreover these excursions into students’ interests, curiosities, or making connections to their everyday experiences, or their unique cultural experiences are tolerated as a “motivational strategy” and only to the extent that these efforts do not waste time or lead students to be “off task.”
In a recent study published in Educational Researcher, the structure of rubrics for high stakes assessments was examined. What the researchers determined (and they are not alone) is that the more indicators you ask people to attend to, the more you get a halo effect— something known about since 1920.
The Halo Effect refers to ratings based on a “global judgment” not an independent judgment of each criterion or indicator, It may also apply to the regular use of only a few of rating categories from high to low.
In this respect, the validity of the Tennessee rating scheme, along with those of Charlotte Danielson and Marzano, are not just questionable, and a humongous waste of time, but another case of hiding behind numbers–numbers that are only worthy of being challenged in court. I hope this happens. Sources: http://team-tn.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/TEAM-General-Educator-Rubric.pdf
Humphry, S. M., & Heldsinger, S. A. (2014). Common Structural Design Features of Rubrics May Represent a Threat to Validity. Educational Researcher, 43(5), 253-263.
Two of the teachers that were fired were not “classroom” teachers but were library media specialists. This is one of the harder positions to fill in school systems. So, library teachers in Tennessee have to use as one of their score criteria either the school score, graduation rate because the subject is not covered on the EOC or TCAP test. I hope these teachers sue METRO for their jobs back. The other thing is that each one of these teachers is 40+
It appears to me that administrators enter observations with predetermined ratings and adjust the criteria accordingly. Am I getting too cynical?
Because it is well-established that factors such as parental discord, hidden health issues, household financial problems, and myriad behavioral factors can heavily influence a student’s achievement in school and performance on standardized tests, then in accord with the Due Process rights that teachers have, a teacher whose job is on the line because of students’ poor test scores has the right to request detailed information about students’ home life, parental relations, family finances, and other pertinent information that impacts student achievement and test scores. That will raise such a political backlash against using test scores to evaluate teachers that use of test scores to evaluate teachers would be swiftly dumped.
Another problem with the fervor to fire “bad” teachers is that they don’t have good teachers to replace them with. They will replace them with inexperienced TFA’ers or teachers just graduating with an education degree. Then those teachers are likely to leave before they can be evaluated out.
Meanwhile, the draconian, punitive, and ill-thought-out evaluation systems are driving truly good teachers out of the classroom. At my daughter’s high school in Knoxville, TN, a high school that was once considered the best academically, 69% of the teachers are now in their 1st 5 years of teaching. There was a mass exodus of qualified, good teachers about 3 years ago. Many went to administration or “coach” positions. Some went to other counties (which pay more and have policies that are not as insane).
Activists for education reform in Tennessee: please talk about how these policies are actually giving us a more poorly-trained workforce rather than a better one. I work at UT and have heard students saying they would love to teach, but will not go into teaching because they have heard how it is. Parents who are teachers are telling their kids not to go into teaching in Tennessee. Teachers talk about “churn”. It’s about trying to make a profit and have control, not about improving education.
All I know about VAM scores is they were in the process of setting them up the last year I taught in Florida. The observation dates, signed off by the Principal and AP, were falsified (well, three out of a dozen or so were true; so three-fourths of them were falsified). I had proof but the school board was not particularly interested. Meanwhile, I was one of only two teachers in the school whose kids scored well and improved, but I was let go anyway. I am against high-stakes testing, and quantifying children, schools, teachers, and administrators based on those tests. But I did find it amusing and ironic that I got “canned” when according to the “data” I was one of the best teachers there. The human element is being covered over in layers of mud and data, and bad administrators and bad teachers are still everywhere.