This is the worst constitutional amendment to appear on any state ballot in 2014.
It ties teacher evaluation to student test scores. It bans collective bargaining about teacher evaluation. It requires teachers to be dismissed, retained, promoted, demoted, and paid based primarily on the test scores of their students. It requires teachers to enter into contracts of three years or less, thus eliminating seniority and tenure.
This is VAM with a vengeance.
This ballot resolution is the work of the far-right Show-Me Institute, funded by the multi-millionaire Rex Sinquefeld.
He is a major contributor to politics in Missouri and to ALEC.
The Center for Media and Democracy writes about him:
“Sinquefield is doing to Missouri what the Koch Brothers are doing to the entire country. For the Koch Brothers and Sinquefield, a lot of the action these days is not at the national but at the state level.
“By examining what Sinquefield is up to in Missouri, you get a sobering glimpse of how the wealthiest conservatives are conducting a low-profile campaign to destroy civil society.
“Sinquefield told The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that his two main interests are “rolling back taxes” and “rescuing education from teachers’ unions.”
“His anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-public education views are common fare on the right. But what sets Sinquefield apart is the systematic way he has used his millions to try to push his private agenda down the throats of the citizens of Missouri.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am a history teacher. I have family in Texas. I have occasionally toyed with the idea of moving to Texas to be closer to my family. Every time I do, I think of the idiotic, amoral and false history standards that the right wing Texas Board of Education has adopted and realize that I will never move to Texas.
If the state of Missouri decides to adopt such a spectacularly anti-teacher referendum, you can be sure that teachers of all stripes, liberal and conservative, will have the same attitude towards Missouri.
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Most Show Me Staters do not take lightly to changing the state constitution unless it is a religious right concern (abortion, gay marriage, etc. . . ) and without the pulpit behind this amendment it is going nowhere and has been a waste of taxpayers monies to include it on the ballot.
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Are you sure? What if people vote for it?
Is it primarily driven by cost concern? Or just a final blow to unions for teachers?
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It’s driven by the Rexsters complete contempt and hatred for teachers and unions. He paid to have ballot signature gatherers. There is no groundswell of “righteous indignation” by the common folk as there is for being against those religious right issues. It’s all his doing (and those he paid to do his doing). He’s a Koch sucker wannabe, although dangerous because he has too much money to throw around and unfortunately for many “money talks”.
I stand by my 73/26 split.
Betcha a beer that it doesn’t get more than 33% yes votes.
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I trust ya. I’ll buy you a beer either way.
Do you agree that not enough people understand the threat of ALEC? What can done about that?
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Unfortunately, most people with whom I speak have no clue to what ALEC is about. ALEC has done its best to be a background player in not seeking out publicity all the while “buying off”* politicians and it has been a brilliant political strategy.
Not in the old fashioned quid pro quo way but in the new “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” way that attempts to leave no traces.
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I asked some campaign folks why there was not more talk about it. They said it’s not an efficient campaign strategy to try to get people to understand ALEC so they opted more for sensational ads about tax breaks for millionaires. I think that’s a strategic error. I think people, especially teachers, need to know about them. Many, many teachers I know are voting for ALEC members and have no clue.
Also, while I have your ear, I still have an earnest quest to understand how public school is a cornerstone of democracy. Because if that cornerstone is going away, what should we be prepared for?? In practical terms. What will a day in small town America look like without public schools ten years from now? Twenty? Fifty?
Chance favors the prepared mind. While fighting to prevent their demise, how should one prepare for life if that demise occurs? What should be expected? What will change?
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Joanna,
Sorry about getting your name wrong before! As one whose name is spelled wrong all the time I should have been more careful. Mi culpa, mil perdones.
If you want to know what that day will look like look no further than to places like Mexico, Chile, and other Latin American countries where there are multitudes of poor and illiterate especially in small rural towns but also in the barrios of tin and wood shacks who can’t afford to go to a school.
What opportunities are there for life’s advancement?
Those are societies that have historically had a small percentage of the population own a vast majority of the land and wealth of the nation (to which our country has been escalatingly moving towards especially since Uncle Ronnie’s 1980’s and being capped off by the Obomber’s policies).
That is what it will look like except with a “veneer of prosperity”, i.e., no tin shacks and all still having access to that perfect means of societal control-the boob tube.
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Joanna,
I agree with you. I think teachers’ unions themselves should be teachers –super-lucid, truth-telling teachers that explain the facts to teachers and the public alike. I wonder if the skills-trumps-knowledge orientation of many teachers disinclines the unions from really trying to teach their members and the public. All the critical thinking skills in the world won’t lead you to the right vote if you don’t know the facts and hear the pre-thought-out arguments of people who know the facts deeply.
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Joanna, Can you send a link to a list of all ALEC members?
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Robert, you have to hunt around to get complete lists, but here’s a start
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/ALEC_Politicians
Also, Wikipedia actually has that as an entry (members of ALEC), for whatever that’s worth.
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Ms. Best,
Thank you tons for the link, and your post is yet again (because who can remember everything?) a sobering reminder that ALEC is one of the biggest if not THE biggest root in American political disease.
I am going to re-imprint that on my brain and use ALEC as a refocused lens!
Superb education you have provided here. You pushed my ALEC button. . . . it had been turned off for the longest time. . .. NOT good!
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This is all relatively simple. The politicians ruin the economy by offshoring jobs and accumulating endless national debt. They print money to the point where everything is hyperinflated. Just go to McDonald’s and you will see what I mean. They then tout college as a way to get ahead which in many cases is not true. i.e. education degress english degress ect. The banks then get rich due to the massive amounts of debt students incur falling for the con hook line and sinker. When students graduate and can’t find any reasonable employment opportunties, the same evil pricks who created the mess (politicians) turn around and say “you see it’s those horrible schools and teachers that are producing students with no tangible skills for all those high paying jobs we can’t fill”. Yet the truth is all those high paying jobs are gone just ask Clinton he is the one who shipped them overseas. Teachers are simply an easy scapegoat to divert attention away from the real perpetrators whom have soley ruined all facets of our society not just the economy.
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“The politicians ruin the economy by off-shoring jobs and accumulating endless national debt.”
While this is somewhat true, I think it is arguable that more jobs have been lost in the manufacturing sector to automation. If not, then why has the manufacturing sector in the United States, still one of the top two if not #1 in the world, continued to grow while jobs have been steadily lost over the last few decades.
I suggest you read what the National Association of Manufacturers has to say about this industry:
http://www.nam.org/newsroom/facts-about-manufacturing/
You may also want to read this piece that was published in The Week: 3 reasons why U.S. manufacturing is on the rise
http://theweek.com/article/index/249045/3-reasons-why-us-manufacturing-is-on-the-rise
In addition, while it’s true that the $16 or $17 Trillion federal national debt has been growing at a furious pace starting with President Reagan, the net worth of the citizens of the United States is about $147 trillion and that means the federal national debt is only 11.2% of the net worth of all Americans.
In fact, if we look at the growth of corporate profits after taxes in the private sector in the United States, you will discover that they have skyrocketed at an amazing pace since 1950, and took off dramatically in 1990 from about $300 billion annually to more than $1.8 Trillion annually today.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/10/corporate-profits-after-tax/
The total economic standing of United States is complex and is much more than just the federal national debt.
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You seem to be using a strange definition of hyperinflation.
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It doesn’t matter where you move the profession has been degraded to a job. It’s simply a matter of to what degree that change has occurred in each respective state . Get out while you can it will only get worse. The teaching profession has experienced a constant downward trend for the past 20 years or so. Even the states that were once pillars of excellent public education now resemble a giant corporate cesspool of greed and corruption.
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I think you are probably right. Bit to what degree and for how long? Will there be a teacher shortage?
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But to what degree, rather
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Thanks Diane for introducing us/me to yet another over-bearing over- rich, ALEC proponent who uses his fortune to eradicate ‘dangerous’ teachers and their unions from the education experience of
America’s children. Save America from pencil toting teachers, but give us more gun toting NRA members.
‘Sinq-U’ (Sinquefield) is a new name to me, but is now listed in my book of dangerous oligarchs (along with Eli Broad, David Welch, and the Waltons). This ridiculous ballot measure shows us how distorted public policy is in Missouri. Some mention it cannot win, but we know that it might. Remember, the Waltons and Broad funded Parent Trigger in California.
Chiara…the 3 year or less K clause also caught my eye. I imagine it is there to show that teachers can be fired within 3 years with NO cause and of course, no due process. If the principal dislikes that you are a registered Dem, or only likes blue eyes and yours are brown, what the hell….fire away. There are always spare parts teachers waiting in the wings in the form of TFA kids.
But, as in California, most states are finding that Schools of Education are not being flooded with applicants. Thinking students who are matriculating into upper division are being realists and do not need all this buffeting by the bullies of Wall Street in exchange for crappy working conditions doing one of the hardest jobs, for the lowest pay.
Nuts to Sinq-U. Let’s hope that Sinq will SINK.
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Can you imagine Dentist VAM? Your license will depend on your patients brushing habits. I would only Treat patients that did not need treatment. Then I will be the greatest Dentist ever. The proof is the great teeth. Unrefuteable.
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The profession will sink to the degree that teachers let it. I’m sorry but there are a ton of spineless teachers out there whom are flat out wusses. I remember speaking about a sick out when our district began to implement unfair practices and violate our contract at will and all I heard from teachers was; “I don’t want to get in trouble or fired”. You have to fight fire with fire. The mickey mouse tactics of the Union such as wearing a blue shirt to display how “blue” teachers are with respect to all the horrible educational policies being implemented simply have the reformers laughing their asses off. In fact, it inspires them to reach even further for more control and power. If we all called in sick nationwide for a period of a week those bastards would be at the negotiations table singing a different tune. They can’t fire us all we are simply too great in numbers but everyone is so scared of what may happen to them individually. I was scared when I quit the first day back from summer vacation this year but it turned out to be the best decision of my life I am far less stressed and although financially I may not be as well off I am about 18 months away from finishing my Masters in Physician Assistant studies and when I do finish my starting salary will be close to triple what my teachers salary was with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics and 12 years teaching experience. I could care less about my pension because it would have been gone by the time I became eligible to collect it. It is one of the very last segments of the economy that the greedy Wallstreet pigs have yet to get their greasy meat hooks on and when they do, and they will, you can kiss it goodbye. Get out now open up a school or find another career.Do not let fear hold you back; fear of the unknown is no reason to inhibit your desires or abilities. Education has become an enormous bureaucracy with top down micromanagement where all of the money is siphoned off from the top by the least educated and experienced individuals when it pertains to educating children while the remaining crumbs are left to trickle down to the students and teachers. As for the Unions, they are ALL complicit in the fraud accepting money from the very people whom are destroying the profession all while claiming to be looking out for the best interests of teachers and students. Yeah right!
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“. . . but there are a ton of spineless teachers [and administrators] out there whom are flat out wusses [and/or have no critical thinking skills whatsoever].”
They are called GAGAers*!
*From the growing collection in my “Devil’s Dictionary of Education Jargon” (all apologies to Ambrose Bierce):
Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers’ agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along (see GAGA). The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
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The last paragraph about cost-savings is propaganda and should negate the entire amendment proposal right there. This is AWFUL. It goes way too far.
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As I’ve predicted before, this ballot issue will be defeated 73% -27%. Even the Rexster knows it is a losing cause and has supposedly quit spending more money on it.
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Duane–I trust your judgment (you know Missouri!), but the way these amendments are written (ILL-Annoy has put out such goobledygook, making it very difficult for people to make hide nor hair of their meaning/intent) perhaps all of the people will be confused all of the time (& yes, you CAN confuse all of the people all of the time–one need only look at ILL-Annoy!).
Anyway, hope you’re right, & fingers crossed for y’all!
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rbmtk,
The wording seems pretty straight forward to me. It’s just a matter of letting people know what this really means, i.e., that teachers will be evaluated by their student test scores. And when I talk to folks about this they laugh and say “Are you kidding me?” Unfortunately I’m not. And that bullshit (using student test scores to be a part of teacher evaluation) is being pushed through anyway by MO DESE mainly as part of the NCLB “waiver” process. I think someone might have told the ol Rexster to cool his jets because they are going to do that anyway.
But the killer for most will be the last statement about costs. We here know that there are significant costs to implement these schemes and I think most Missourians can figure that out.
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I believe that nothing will stop this momentum until the public understands that these “quantifiable measures” are basically tests that are “curved” to the normal distribution. This means that no matter what teachers do, there will ALWAYS be part of the student population that fails.
The wording “standards-based performance” and the idea that the tests are criterion-referenced mislead the public (and most educators) into the belief that all children could pass the tests. This is patently false, as the testing companies cannot standardize the tests from year-to-year without normalizing the results by scaling the weight of individual questions.
Bottom line – leaders such as Diane Ravitch must push this message to parents. Legislatures don’t even care enough to demand contracts that publish the testing companies psychometrics, so until enough parents cry foul, standardized testing and the billion-dollar industry that profits from it will remain intact.
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This represents a war on teachers of children. Notice that it does not target teachers of adults. Our only hope is that the average citizen will see it for what it is and vote accordingly.
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The language is interesting- ‘”require TEACHERS to enter into contracts of three years or fewer with school districts”
I think they deliberately turned that around to make it appear to be a mandate on teachers rather than school districts it’s a mandate on both of course, but that might be politically unpopular, another ed reform mandate on schools, so they flipped it the other way.
They don’t lack marketing people in ed reform. I’ll give them that.
Hey, once we get rid of these evil unions and this horrible “tenure” thing all our troubles will be over, right? God almighty, one would think tenure and public school teachers are the most pressing problem this country has, what with the enormous amount of money and time they’re putting into it.
We could be talking about icky stuff that makes everyone uncomfortable, like how this lobbying group is purchasing a state law.
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Also, is there anything on there that’s a radical departure from the position of the Obama Administration/Democrats?
For all I know they’re quietly backing it.
I can’t find a dime’s worth of difference between “far Right” ed reformers and ed reformers in the Democratic Party, other than slightly different rhetoric in the 3 months before an election. The Democratic Party has adopted the entire “far Right” education agenda. Arne Duncan could have written that.
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That is so true. In NJ, Cory Booker and Christie both support charters and school privatization. But Christie’s rhetoric is vile, vicious and vehemently against the teacher unions, tenure, seniority, teacher pensions and teachers in general. You get none of that Christie-style acidic bile from Booker but Booker still is a big supporter of charter schools.
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Good cop, bad cop…
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Joe,
Booker supports vouchers too.
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Cory Booker is little more than a neo-liberal with lots of great vocabulary and oratory skills.
All polish and gloss and negligible populist values whatsoever . . . .
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Read this to learn more about Cory Booker and his (soon to be indicted?) self when it comes to charters and reform:
http://www.thenation.com/article/180044/newark-school-reform-wars
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Chiara, I’m grinning at your phrasing because NC’s state superintendent told me “there wasn’t a dime bit of difference between the Common Core and standards NC was already drafting.” So, therefore, we took the money. And the standards. (But they are gone now, sort of).
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We just went to a mandatory “professional development” 3 hour ‘class’ last week (read: total waste of time) to ‘unpack the NEW Florida Standards!” where representatives from the state DA (Differentiated Accountability) squad were present to monitor and correct our speech and though and intimidate our practice (read: Educational Gestapo).
When I continuously referred to the “Mathematics Florida Standards” and “Language Arts Florida Standards” as CCSS one of the Gestapo officers attempted to correct me.
I immediately did a side-by-side comparison of the “new” standards and pointed out how they matched verbatim, other than a less-than-15% difference, as required by RTTT. She didn’t attempt to correct me again.
Sometimes I get by with pushback and although it is a small victory it feels mighty good!
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Go Chris! Call ’em out. I find most GAGAers don’t know what to do when someone critically thinks about the situation of thought policing.
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Also, Chris we have a mandatory 10 hours of a reading prof development. It’s interesting, sort of, but because our DPI sponsored it I find myself wondering which RttT contract is actually dictating the content. Propaganda in the form of required prof development. Not cool.
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How productive is it to refer to anyone as far-right or far-left when discussing the redesign of governance through the redesign of teacher evaluations and contract as a state, rather than local power? I live in Missouri and I have campaigned against Amendment 3 on behalf of (what the media calls) conservative legislators who believe in local control of schools and teacher contracts by local non-partisan school boards; these same boards having the responsibility to be accountable to parents who are their children’s first, and life-long teachers. What Mr. Sinquefield’s advisors tell him and what he supports is not right or left, it’s just plain wrong. What Democrats have done in collaboration with Mr. Sinquefield to get value added modeling as a component of the NCLB waiver (there is no difference in VAM in either document) is just as wrong. So let’s drop the directionality terms that cause fractions where none should exist.
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Why did there have to be waivers? Why did they not just ditch NCLB? I’ve read that no politician wants that on his/her watch because it would seem unAmerican to go against such lofty and hopeful language as NCLB. But really. When are we going to get real on this?
You are right about the parties.
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Read the State of the State Standards 2010. The only conclusion the Fordham folks could draw was that America needed a national set of standards. They couldn’t come up with the recommendation to ditch NCLB because that would have been inconsistent with the agenda of the Common Core Cabal in Washington DC, including Gates and every NGO he funded there. UnAmerican? Globalists don’t care about what is American. Re-read Lou Gertsner’s (Achieve Inc) advice to Obama in the Washington Post to abandon local control; Marc Tucker’s (NCEE) recommendations for state control of education; and Chester Finn’s (Thomas B.Fordham) statement in his farewell post that “local control needs to be reinvented”. The reason NCLB wasn’t ditched, is because Gates-Duncan and company didn’t want it ditched, they wanted to use it as a tool. If we’re smart about this, everyone who loved education and appreciates it as the hallmark of citizens living as free people in our American republic will work to eliminate both common core and NCLB. Do you suppose we can stop the identity politics long enough to accomplish that?
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Mary in NC I have looked at it like a triage.
1. Get ALEC out of General Assembly
2. Address everything else.
Thank you for this info on the NCLB perpetuation.
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On the Chester Finn one, I’m struck by this:
——–
“Complacency
Two forms of complacency alarm me. The old familiar one is the millions of parents who deplore the condition of American schools in general but are convinced that their own child’s school is just fine (“and that nice Ms. Randolph is so helpful to young Mortimer”). The new one, equally worrying, is reformers who think they’ve done their job when they get a law passed, an evaluation system created, a new program launched, then sit back on their haunches, give short shrift to implementation, but defy anyone who might suggest that their proud accomplishment isn’t actually working.”
——
Well, that’s the very same thing from parents that Dr. Ravitch pointed out on John Stewart—only she, like me, seems to sympathize with the notion that if a parent likes his or her school, that the idea that all others are awful is probably a myth that should be debunked. What Finn is proposing is that we somehow convince parents that their schools are not good, even though they think they are.
That ain’t right. Don’t you be messin’ with me and my child’s school if we like it, yo.
That’s the problem. They want to convince American parents that we don’t know what’s best for our children.
You mess with a mama you’d better be ready to have the fear of the Lord put in ya. As far as I’m concerned.
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Mary, thank you so much for so clearly taking the time to discuss with me. I greatly appreciate it. You are very well informed.
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Taking the time to clearly discuss, rather. 😉
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Mary B, should I call him a rich crank?
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What ever term you choose to call him, be sure it also describes Duncan. And please check out the letter from the National Academies to Duncan dated October 5, 2009. You’ll see that the Board of Testing and Assessment had a meeting set up with reps from the U.S. Dept. of Ed for July 30, 2009. When did he publish the RTTT grant announcement in the Federal Register? July 29 — think there was something to that pre-emptive strike?
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What Finn is proposing is that we somehow convince parents that their schools are not good . . . In a nutshell, the phrase, “never waste a crisis” applies, however, the full statement is incomplete. What is left to nuance is, “. . . that we create.” What you are getting at is a sense of being manipulated by elitists, financial, bureaucratic, and academic, who believe they can make decisions about your children’s lives better than families can. They achieve the manipulation of the general population through the manipulation of student test scores. I’m in Diane’s camp on national standardized testing — it has very little to do with real education. It is useful, however, for shaping public opinion so as to “nudge” the general public toward a conclusion about the need for “centralized everything” run by the government elitists. And while you brought up the topic of fear of the Lord — I like to fall back on the “Big 10” when I’m trying to discern what’s going on and what to do about it. #5 is “Honor thy father and mother.” As far as I can tell, that does not translate as “fatherland” and “motherland”. It translates as local control.
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One other question.
When I was getting my teacher certification (I went back to school to do so, pursuing a Masters) we had to do some sort of presentation I think in philsophy of education class maybe. . .anyway, I remember that I showed a short clip from “White Nights,” (I am a music teacher, so I always tried to tie my projects into the arts), whereby Gregory Hines’ character is an American street-bred tap dancer who goes to the Soviet Union because his art is appreciated more there than it was in the U.S. and Mikhail Baryshnikof is a defected Russian ballet dancer whose plane has to make a crash landing in Moscow, and they put him in the custody of the Gregory Hines character. The two compare their dance moves, their values, and their stories. My point in showing it was to demonstrate that the ballet dancer could not have achieved the level of expertise in his ballet had he not been taken in by the state and nurtured that way (with little to no choice otherwise. . .which is precisely why he fled); the tap dancer was self-taught from the streets of a hard life in Harlem, and so too his culture nurtured what he excelled in. And there they were. Together, each having achieved their notions of perfection in their arts by their countries, but each having to go to the other country to really get recognition in a way that they wanted it (but could that ballet dancer have achieved his success in America? Should he have? Would he have been happier without?)
I think we are facing a real question, now with our schools, perhaps because when our schools were largely built up and developed into what they are now, we were at odds with the Soviet Union and the communist way of life. We didn’t necessarily know what we were, but we knew what we did not want to be. Then came the fall of the curtain, and perhaps since 1989 we have struggled because there is no longer this strong notion against which we are defining ourselves. We want to be globally competitive, and yet we have nothing to react against in our education and child-rearing philosophies (and anything we did have to react against, we have done so with war and not with attention to what we are raising our children to be). So what we have left is a scramble to be number one in this global plethora, but with nothing to define our selves in terms of what we are NOT, and suddenly we don’t know who we are. I’m not even sure we know who we are not, at this point.
Was America better at defining ourselves when there was a Soviet Union to juxtapose our values against? Because, a lot of times lately I feel like we are becoming more like the Soviet Union in terms of our schools.
This is why I keep begging for more commentary and thought on what it is that our public schools have provided in terms of being a cornerstone of democracy. What are we giving up if we bail on local control and influence of our schools, and furthermore what will democracy look like without that?
We need these conversations of speculation very badly. Or, I do anyway.
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Joanna, my reply to your last post is misplaced under Diane Ravitch’s post. My apologies — the content still applies to your post.
As for the question you ask about this post. I use movie clips to illustrate concepts I’m presenting to students, and find that it’s a powerful teaching tool. However, we mustn’t confuse movie scripts with reality. Communism in White Knights is romanticized to make a point about the similarities of human beings seeking affirmation of their abilities and gifts. The realities of communism their under Lenin, Stalin, and Putin is not the communism portrayed in that movie. You must read about the Stalin’s starvation of his own people to manipulate the masses to conformity, or the resistance of the Ukrainians to Putin to understand the real dangers of “the state.” I don’t have to look to communist Russia as an opposite to define what America is. I look to the writings of John Adams in his analysis of the different republics throughout history, their strengths and weaknesses, and the writings of Jefferson on the purpose of public education for a reference of who we are, and how to define the purpose of public education. The questions you ask were introduced in the mid-1800’s when wealthy elitists, such as Robert Owen who made money from technology (textile mills) began meddling in people’s lives with utopian idea. Read my Missouri hero’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to see the predictions of Mark Twain if technology elitists get their way. Also read the warnings of C.S. Lewis if school masters do not stop the replacement of liberal arts education with work force development — the commentaries you seek are already written. Remember, “There is nothing new under the sun,” but, you have to be familiar with another great classic that has been all but banned from public schools to know the source of that wisdom.
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Mary, with ya. And thank you for pointing out my belief of a fiction portrayal. Guilty as charged. Ecclesiastes 1:9, I do know.
My first teaching jobs were in Missouri. Pitcher Academy in Independence and East Elementary in KC. People told me to avoid KCMO, so I went directly to it. I learned a lot.
You are a wise woman. Glad I found you. I am listening to your interview on Missouri Ed Watchdog. Any chance teachers were not consulted on Common Core also as part of the assault on them? Or was it just to keep them out of the conversation?
Your certainty on our country is refreshing. But I do find that many people do not have that clarity. Many need the guidance of the conversations I too was requesting. BUT you have pointed me in a good direction
so maybe I can then do that for other people too.
Blessings to you! You certainly seem to have your head on straight and I agree with everything you’ve said and typed. I hope to read more.
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Mary Byrne,
A national set of standards would have been fine if only the 24 people who wrote the CCSS were current public school teachers with lots of experience and cognitive scientists.
If only the CCSS had deferred to robust research on human development.
If, if, if, if . . . . . . .
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I disagree Robert. The standards movement is a failure. After all these years the promised reforms have failed to materialize yet we continue to chase that pony over the rainbow.
Fordham and Finn will never admit that they were wrong: it’s not in the conservative DNA. They will just continue to whine that the standards movement didn’t fail; it was failed.
Just like they whine that conservative policies (like trickle-down voodoo economics) never fail but they are always failed by the less than a true conservative commitment.
The one-true-Scotsman fallacy at work.
Standards don’t work. Despite the best of intentions they always become a de facto curriculum and become isolated skills divorced from reality that will never coalesce into learning success.
We’ve proven that rather well at this point, haven’t we?
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The standards movement has a 13 year record of failure. The educational chain in any given school district can only be as strong as its weakest link. Educational standards/goals/targets are rarely the weakest link in our school systems. until the weakest links are repaired or fixed, none of this will matter. This is why a one-size-fits-few, set of national standards will prove to be an utter waste of time, money, and energy. Factor in the tremendous opportunity costs and the new and ever expanding null curriculum and the devastation to a generation of young people is nothing less than shameful.
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You’re missing the real purpose of the national set of standards. Read the governors’ 2009 application for State Fiscal Stabilization funds — you know the pot of money 10X larger than RTTT grants, given directly to governors to support the CCSSI. Read Arne Duncan’s speech to UNESCO in 2010 — you’ll learn things he never told the American public. http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/vision-education-reform-united-states-secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-united-nations-ed. The governors signed on to four assurances, one of which was the adoption of common standards and tests aligned to the standards, another was establishment of statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS). The two go together — the standards and tests aligned to them are designed for populating the files in the SLDS. The common core standards are not about education, they’re about work force development. The sooner we wake up and come to terms with the governance agenda behind the core, the sooner we can start working to restore true education to the public in this country.
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MB
The CCSS agenda/business plan require all four ingredients:
1) CC national standards that are set in stone
2) Companion, national tests, designed to produce a desired (high) failure rate.
3) PUBLIC school teachers evaluations tied directly to said tests
4) Student test data harvesting technology.
A four-headed monster designed to dismantle free, public school education.
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I wonder if we could paraphrase Arne’s fourth assurance as follows. Anyone?
Arne: The fourth and final assurance propelled states, for the first time ever, to commit to dramatic change in persistently low-achieving schools. The United States cannot substantially boost graduation rates and promise a world-class education to every child without ending the cycle of failure in the lowest-performing five percent of our schools. Year after year, and in some cases for decades, these schools cheated children out of the opportunity for an excellent education. As adults, as educators, as leaders, America passively observed this educational failure with a complacency that is deeply disturbing.
Paraphrase/Subtext: Finally, for the first time ever, Americans can no longer ignore the fact that racist real estate and hiring practices have caught up with us. The Unites States cannot substantially boost graduation rates and promise a world-class education to every child without confronting the sins of the past. Therefore, we must single out teachers, the only ones who have patiently and ardently tried to help atone for schools whose populations became undesirable to your average white person (who fled for the suburbs, leaving poverty and family stress that comes with poverty to teachers to handle, often underfunded and ill-equipped). Yet, nobody wants to accept responsibility for our racist past, so best to blame teachers. As adults, as educators, as leaders, America was happy to ignore the plight of poverty and leave it in the hands of teachers until it became clear that we also must blame them for it while hiding behind them ashamed of our own pasts.
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Chris,
You might be interested in the letter Marc Tucker wrote to Hillary to promote a national set of standards for the transformation of the entire American education system to workforce development. That letter is published in the Sept. 17, 1998 Congressional Record and can be found at http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dear+hillary+letter&qpvt=dear+hillary+letter&FORM=IGRE
The standards movement got traction under Clinton with Goals 2000 http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/goals/progrpt/reality.html. Are you classifying Clinton as a conservative?
It is true that Democrat and Republican administrations contributed to the present crisis. The challenge is, taking political filters off long enough to read the letter and consider that identity politics is keeping teachers divided, and therefore, ineffective in the fight to restore education.
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Mary, thanks for the link. I’ve actually been following this corporate takeover since Susan Ohanian published her first books about it in the early 1990’s.
I never thought for a moment that Hillary would be a supporter of public education. I worked with and for her senate campaign in NYC and after she was elected she conveniently forgot all about teachers and was AWOL when the reformists began attacking us in NYS.
Trust no neoliberal, no neoconservative, no hedge fund manager, no billionaire, no member of ALEC, no member of the IMF, no member of the Chamber of Commerce, no member of the Washington DC elite.
They all have blood on their hands and money in their pockets taken from the mouths of our children. You are right in saying that the old paradigm of right/left, liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican no longer make sense.
Instead it is the plutocracy of the 1% against the rest of us. The Occupy movement got so much right and continues to shine the light on the misdeeds of the very rich few. Soon, I hope, teachers and parents will be able to join the battle against big greed and avarice.
A new revolution needs to be fought and sooner, rather than later.
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Chris and others,
The concept and practice of a common core is a good thing for society.
The problem is the following:
1) The people who wrote the CCSS are not bona fide educators. Just ask Mercedes Schneider.
2) There is far too much testing.
3) The utilization of test scores is evil, pure evil.
4) Technology has not been judiciously applies. Technology should be used to aid the teacher, not to replace the teacher.
5) Technology cannot grade tests in which the modality has far too many human factors, such as essay writing, for starters.
The elimination of tenure, bargaining rights, and tying test scores to evaluations has NOTHING to do with a best practices lens of having a common core for all children, and perhaps some much needed variation for ELLs and differently abled children.
The CCSS has been tied to all the above, unfortunately, but that has to do with power, not with the whole ideology of a common core.
The whole process of writing and materializing the CCSS was anything but democratic. Had it been otherwise, we would be in a far better place.
Whether people want to acknowledge it or not, we ALL have standards. When you see that your daughter is dating someone at 16, you don’t want her to be with some guy who is doped up or has a track history of petty thefts. That’s because your rubric is something like “guy must not be into drugs or crime”.
When you go to a restaurant that does things well, there’s a reason why the moussakka was to die for, and that is because someone knew how to layer the ingredients at the right thickness and could make a bechemel sauce with just the right amount of flour and milk and nutmeg. There were standards that applied, and that’s why you walked out content and maybe inspired to make the dish yourself.
(I am a HUGE fan of moussakka when made well, even variations on it in the recipe are great.)
However, the CCSS were not written with human development in mind nearly as much as they were written with academic progression. These two concepts are NOT the same. They should intertwine with each other, but they did not, thanks to the incompetence and corruption of our body politic.
I don’t see why people are so frightened by a common core. Is the United States fragmented and divided enough? Of course, I am frightened by THIS common core, but the idea and practice of one that is done well would be a big boon to American culture . . . .
Terrible how Obama and crony capitalists could take something so pure and taint it so heavily with their e-bola-like deadly politics . . . . .
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Contract teacher for 3 or less years – is the purpose of that to screw teachers of their pensions? Is it to make teachers go from town to town, district to district, state to state, to find continuable employment? Why do we not have term limits on all politicians? Senator Lautenberg was a senator for most of his life. Time to stop them in their tracks too.
These deform pigs will stop at nothing to effectively revolving door teachers – if they can’t get rid of tenure, now they want 3 year or less contracts so after the term then can fire them? Is this the TFA way? 2 years and out? NO ONE will become a teacher anymore.
I am going to tell my daughter to save all her money, and buy her own school. I am going to look into opening a charter school. Maybe start with a private preschool. I don’t think in 5 years she is going to have a job in public education the way politics are going.
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Can I work for your daughter Donna?
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YOU are one of my heroes. Of course, open door policy for you and all like you.
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Rex’s prime shill/lobbyist is a TFA alum named Kate Casas who states her gratitude to Wendy Kopp. Ugh.
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If this passes, Missouri will lose most of its best teachers and never get them back. In a few years, their kids will rank even lower in honest comparisons with other states, but don’t hold your breathe for any honesty in those comparisons—not for the far right, not from the Koch brothers, not from any of these oligarchs who are buying America from the ground up until they own everyone and control every moment of our lives.
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What does that look like? When they control everything? I suspect there would be some sort of uprising before it came to that. Or more heroic people standing up and commanding respect for common folks.
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It will look like Hunger Games.
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I think the uprising will only happen after so many people are suffering that life is intolerable for them, and at least 5% of the population is willing to die in their attempt to eradicate the oppressors. To make that happen, food stamps, unemployment and supplemental housing will have to vanish.
The oligarchs may also cut back and/or eliminate Social Security, Obamacare and Medicare to the point that it isn’t effective at all.
That’s when the real suffering will begin for about 50 million Americans (or more), and that is almost 16% of the population. More than enough to wage a successful revolution and set the cities on fire.
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I hate to say it, but Lloyd is right on the mark. . . .
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Pensions will also vanish, as the two-tier systems pushed by the unions no longer has new hires paying into the defined pension system. How long before they collapse?
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For the record, The Show-Me Institute was not involved in the development of this Amendment. If you are interested, here was our take on the proposal.
http://www.showmedaily.org/2014/10/take-amendment-3.html
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James,
How many years did you teach in the classroom? Was it a public school? Please feel free to name the schools if you would.
Please provide a link to your dissertation. Thanks in advance.
Have you read Noel Wilson’s 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”? If so, your thoughts please, if not may I highly recommend it to you.
Thanks,
Duane
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What exactly is your “take” on it then? Should it be voted for or against?
I cannot tell from reading the article you linked whether the Show Me Institute is for or against it.
Here are the concluding remarks:
“Final thoughts:
Proponents argue that Amendment 3 will lead to better teacher evaluations and more recognition for great teachers. Ultimately, they hope this will create an improved teacher workforce. There is just one fundamental problem with that argument—when it comes to teacher quality, we have what is known as a principal-agent problem. That is, we as citizens (the principal) want great teachers in our schools and we hire school administrators (the agent) to make sure this happens. If the agent does not do his or her job, there is little we can do about it. Ultimately, we are dependent upon the school administrator for hiring the right people, evaluating them effectively, and retaining the most effective teachers. If a school administrator lacks the will to remove low-performing teachers, there is little that parents can do about it. Amendment 3 does not change our fundamental principal-agent problem. It may remove tenure restrictions, but if school administrators lack the will, then nothing will change.
The only way to change this dynamic is through greater school choice. With school choice, a parent does not have to depend on an administrator to remove an ineffective teacher. The parent can simply choose to go somewhere else. This places pressure on school administrators to take a more active role in managing the teacher workforce. School choice is the answer to our principal-agent problem. School choice is the answer for improving the overall quality of the teacher workforce.
James Shuls contributed to this post.”
Yay or Nay???
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Shuls responded to a reply to the linked blog:
“Mike,
To evaluate if something “improves classroom instruction,” you have to have a measure of instruction. That measure could be observations by the principal or it could be tests that capture the learning in the classroom. I wrote a paper on why I believe student achievement scores should be used in evaluations. You can find it here: http://pdk.sagepub.com/content/94/3/34.full.pdf+html
As I wrote in the article: “If a teacher teaches what seems to him a very thoughtful and careful lesson, but students don’t learn the skills and/or knowledge intended, was it a good lesson? The answer, we believe, is obvious: If students aren’t learning, then the teaching isn’t effective. Plain and simple. Thus, teacher evaluation should absolutely be focused on student outcomes.”
I would argue that if you do not look at student outcomes, you cannot say whether a teacher is effective or not. You can simply describe their teaching practice with no connection to their effectivenes because the ultimate outcome should be student learning.
Comment by James Shuls — November 1, 2014 @ 5:54 pm”
James,
I’ll read your paper in a bit, but it appears that you’re one who believes that the teaching and learning process can be quantified. At least you didn’t trot our the “student achievement” nonsense and appear to be concerned with “student learning”.
And no it isn’t “plain and simple” that if the student doesn’t learn the the teaching isn’t effective”. There are so many factors (billions alone in the skulls of the students) that come into the teaching and learning process that to attempt to make it into a “plain and simple” proposition of student spitting out answers on a test, that it belies your knowledge of the teaching and learning process.
First assignment, my young bright friend: Read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted dissertation. I’ll give a little help: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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For James V. Shuls:
There is a vast difference between teaching and learning. A Teacher can teach a great lesson and the students who participate and pay attention learn while the students who don’t pay attention and participate don’t learn.
Do we shoot the teacher recuse of those who did not cooperate?
When we test 100% of the students to see what they learned, there is no way to discover who participated in cooperated in the learning from the teaching.
The reason why children who live in poverty do poorly in every country on the PISA, for instance, is because it is in this socioeconomic group where we find the most students who do not participate and cooperate with what a teacher struggles to teach them.
And this hold true in every country where the PISA tests 15-year old students. There is no exception.
In addition, a January 2013 study out of Stanford that broke down the PISA results by socioeconomic level proves this is a FACT. The same study was validated by the Economic Policy Institute. Here are a few key points to emphasize this FACT that is being totally ignored by the corporate supported fake education reformers as they chase tax dollars and don’t give a fart about what children learn.
—Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution.
—A sampling error in the U.S. administration of the most recent international (PISA) test resulted in students from the most disadvantaged schools being over-represented in the overall U.S. test-taker sample. This error further depressed the reported average U.S. test score.
—If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.
—This re-estimate would also improve the U.S. place in the international ranking of all OECD countries, bringing the U.S. average score to sixth in reading and 13th in math. Conventional ranking reports based on PISA, which make no adjustments for social class composition or for sampling errors, and which rank countries irrespective of whether score differences are large enough to be meaningful, report that the U.S. average score is 14th in reading and 25th in math.
—Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.
—U.S. students from disadvantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in the three similar post-industrial countries than advantaged U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers. But U.S. students from advantaged social class backgrounds perform better relative to their social class peers in the top-scoring countries of Finland and Canada than disadvantaged U.S. students perform relative to their social class peers.
—On average, and for almost every social class group, U.S. students do relatively better in reading than in math, compared to students in both the top-scoring and the similar post-industrial countries.
http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/
This revealing study out of Stanford has been out there for almost two years, but Arne Duncan and his master, Bill Gates—-and the rest of the pack of vampires leading the charge to destroy the democratically run public schools haven’t hesitated in their relentless assault to dismantle the public schools and replace them with corporate Charters that several other Stanford studies reported are mostly worse or equal to the public schools they are replacing, and this study was funded by the Gates foundation so Gates can’t be ignorant of those facts. He has to know what he is doing is perpetrating and supporting a fraud against the Citizens of the United States.
And that is a federal crime that comes with a ultimate punishment of ten years in prison and a $10 million dollar fine.
Who is guilty without a doubt: Bill Gates and Arne Duncan. Maybe Obama is just another migrant fool. It might be difficult to prove he’s read or heard of the results of the Stanford studies and maybe even the Sandia report of 1990 taht proves A Nation at Risk was also misleading and a fraud.
Here’s a summary of what the Sandia Report discovered about A Nation at Risk, a fraud that has been supported by every President starting with Reagan.
“A Nation at Risk” (1983) – What the report claimed:
—American students are never first and frequently last academically compared to students in other industrialized nations.
—American student achievement declined dramatically after Russia launched Sputnik, and hit bottom in the early 1980s.
—SAT scores fell markedly between 1960 and 1980.
—Student achievement levels in science were declining steadily.
—Business and the military were spending millions on remedial education for new hires and recruits.
The Sandia Report (1990) – What was actually happening:
—-Between 1975 and 1988, average SAT scores went up or held steady for every student subgroup.
—Between 1977 and 1988, math proficiency among seventeen-year-olds improved slightly for whites, notably for minorities.
—Between 1971 and 1988, reading skills among all student subgroups held steady or improved.
—Between 1977 and 1988, in science, the number of seventeen-year-olds at or above basic competency levels stayed the same or improved slightly.
—Between 1970 and 1988, the number of twenty-two-year-old Americans with bachelor degrees increased every year; the United States led all developed nations in 1988.
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2009/07/history-lesson-about-sandia-report.html
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From the article in Kappan that Shuls references in a response to a comment from the link listed above:
“We’ll make this case by outlining and defending the following four premises:
• Student learning is the primary objective that schools and educators should pursue.
• Current technology in testing and value-added data analysis allow for useful measurement of student learning connected to schools and
classrooms.
• Value-added measures that aim to connect gains in student learning to particular sets of teachers may be imperfect, but they’re also the best (and most efficient) teacher evaluation option available.
• New data supports the common intuition held by many of us: Deploying effective teachers clearly matters for the long-term life outcomes of students.’
First bullet point: No doubt.
Second bullet point: No, current technology in testing and value added data analysis does not allow for “useful measurement”. Those processes suffer all the epistemological and ontological errors that N. Wilson has identified that render the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID. Not to mention being TOTALLY UNETHICAL in using a test for purposes other than which they are intended.
Third bullet point: If VAM (acknowledged as being “imperfect”) is the “best and most efficient” that we have then we’re in a world of hurt. The four humors were the basis for medicine for millenia, the Ptolomeic model of the “heavens” held sway for centuries. VAM and the accompanying econo-psychometrics belong in the same category as the two above mentioned mis-explanations of how things are.
Fourth bullet point: Please point to the studies (and no, not the econo-psychometricians Chetty, et all) that definitively show that “deploying effective teachers clearly matters for the long term life outcomes of students”.
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Duane and Shuls,
There is now a growing accumulation of studies plus–of no less importance, perhaps of greater importance–real-life experience that demonstrates the futility of VAM, of trying to quantify teacher effectiveness. Teachers of ELL, teachers whose students have cognitive disabilities. and teachers of the gifted will not get the same gains as many other teachers. Most teachers don’t teach tested subjects so they will be rated by other teachers’ students. Great teachers will get low ratings because of cut-ups in their classes; it is all a roll of the dice. And absurd.
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This post is premised on a flat-out lie, namely, that the Show-Me Institute is behind this ballot resolution. In fact, Show-Me opposes the ballot resolution!
showmedaily.org/2014/10/take-amendment-3.html
“How much of a teacher’s evaluation is tied to quantitative data should not be in the state constitution.”
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Shoo fly, and Puhlease. Rhee said she was voting for Tuck, and I read that with my own eyes……..and she isn’t registered in that state…so sell your rhetoric elsewhere. Just cuz its in print doesn’t make it true. When you have a valid argument, I’ll pay you proper attention.
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Are you sure Rhee isn’t voting in California? She is a known liar, bully and fraud. She’s obviously a narcissistic sociopath.
It’s possible that she has established residency in several states and votes in all of them. Maybe it’s possible—the same has holding a duel citizenship in Australia and the United States.
Do the states check to see if this type of voter exists?
Did you know that on her Wiki listing, Michelle Rhee is listed as a Democrat, and she has two daughters. Imagine having Rhee for a mother—an evil witch raising two future witches, maybe.
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So does it suppose to mean Missouri Republicans are even more stupid than Rex Sinquefeld? If it is, they are pretty much hopeless–just like you.
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I will be very surprised if Amendment 3 passes in Missouri. It is interesting that there is so much criticisim of it from people from other states, it is not that much different from what will be happening in all the states which have adopted the CCSS.
Missouri is in the process of re-writing standards of our own so that we will not have to endure the 4 assurances. Good efforts are in action in Missouri.
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