New York State education officials released data showing that the top-rated teachers, based on student test scores, are less likely to work in schools enrolling black and Hispanic students.
Did State Education Department officials read the VAM reports showing that VAM is statistically flawed as a measure of individual teachers? Are they aware that less than 20% of black and Hispanic students met the absurd passing mark on the state’s Common Core test for the past two years? Are they aware that test-based accountability discourages teachers from working in high-needs schools? Interesting that the article cites the leader of Michelle Rhee’s organization, TNTP (the Néw Teacher Project), whose goal is to replace experienced teachers with new hires. At the rate these so-called reforms are accepted as credible (despite evidence to the contrary), TNTP will be able to place millions of new hires.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If it wasn’t for the fact that many teachers fear where their next job will be, I think every public school teacher in the country should quit, and let TNTP replace them all—it will be interesting to see where they find almost 4 million qualified teachers.
Then we’ll sit back and watch as the corporate education reformers struggle to find enough data to cherry pick so they can lie about how great they are as the country’s education system crashes and burns to the ground until nothing is left.
I agree! I know many teachers who want to walk out the door and never look back.
This is a big, well, duh. It’s been known forever that test scores are correlated with socioeconomic status. Black and Hispanic kids are more likely to be poor, especially urban poor. So teachers who teach kids in poor schools are likely to have poor VAM scores. Color me shocked.
From Bruce Baker: “They (growth measures) measure, to a large extent, the conditions into which teachers are placed, and NOT the effect of teachers on student outcomes.”
Friday Graphs: Bad Teachers? or Bad Policy & Crappy Measures in New York?
https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/friday-graphs-bad-teachers-or-bad-policy-crappy-measures-in-new-york/
I would have left a comment on your School Finance 101 post, but that wasn’t possible.
I wanted to mention that using high stakes standardized tests to rank and then fire allegedly incompetent public school teachers, and then discovering through these tests that most of these teachers are working in schools with high rates of children living in poverty does not reveal bad teachers, and the evidence that using VAM in this way is TOTALLY WRONG may be found on the international PISA reports.
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
If the alleged claim of the corporate educatoin reformers that the results of these high stakes tests will reveal incompetent teachers is true, then that means every school that serves a high rate of disadvantaged students in every country PISA tests are full of incompetent teachers around the world and not just in the U.S.
But … “Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.”
What does the last pull quote tell us?
ANSWER: That the alleged incompetent teachers in the U.S. who work with disadvantaged students—when compared to all the incompetent teachers in every country tested by PISA who work with disadvantaged students—are the highest quality (incompetent) teachers in the world.
An oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. How can America’s public school teachers be incompetent when the disadvantaged students they work with are outperforming the disadvantaged students in every country PISA tests.
People as ignorant as all that do not understand statistics very well.
To say that because A precedes B, A MUST be the primal cause of B is like saying that because I once wore pink shoes and it rained the pink shoes must have been the causal factor for the rain.
Using statistics in such a myopic way is to emblazon their ignorance. The statistics are there, they just have analyzed backwards.
With such mentality in our “leadership” I sometimes think that I am blessed to be the age I am and that the worst which is to come because of such ignorance and stupidity that I will be gone before that worst derived from such ineptitude finalizes and the you know what hits the fan.
I worry about my grandchildren especially but am deeply concerned even for my children and the world which they will inherit but am a loss as to what to do more than what I have already done to change things for them.
Those in positions of power? Maybe there is a hereafter in which they will have to answer for their actions – just as maybe I and others too will have to answer. Logic, common sense seems to have been lost by those who have sought power for their own gain and to the netherworld for even their own children.
If black and Hispanic students do have lower rated teachers, one would think the logical and obvious solution would be to try to lure higher rated teachers in with better pay, and providing better facilities to work in.
Nah –let’s just keep luring new teachers in and firing them when they inevitably fail. Sound a bit sadistic? Even better, from the perspective of someone like Rhee.
Keep firing those low rated teachers till all teachers are above average.
That’s the plan. A complete turnover every four or five years. The hidden mandate via Bill Gates is to rate between 20%- 25% of teachers incompetent annually and fire them.
Eventually, the Gates cabal will test its way through the entire adult population and have to start recruiting teachers in India and other third world countries. By then, the corporate education reformers won’t care if the teachers speak English or not.
All they new recruits have to do is walk around a room crowded with 100 students carrying an electric cattle prod to keep the students’ eyes on their computer screens as they work their way through the common core step-by-step lessons—and the annual high stakes tests will make sure to ask complicated, confusing questions on topics the children never learned from the programmed CCSS lessons so children grow up with a strong sense of failure as they are trained to live in fear every second of their lives.
Ok..let’s try an experiment. ..take those so called highly effective teachers in your achieving districts and swap them with lower performing schools for one year. ..do you honestly think there is going to be a difference
As an ESL teacher, I would have had a target on my back. Lucky for me, I retired before I could be declared incompetent. I offer my sympathy to my hard working colleagues that will have to bear the brunt of this stupidity. As for Cuomo, I’ll just flip him the bird.
After looking at those tables, is it the teacher or the zip code? Charters don’t count because they skim off the top and have choices as to who they take in. They keep only students who have the least issues.
liars incorporated at full tilt!
“Unbounded Absurdity”
Once you throw out science
Absurdity knows no bound
Reality defiance
Is easy to be found
Sing along with the Vikings
(Notice that Viking begins with a V and that Vam also begins with a V and VAM ends in AM and so does spam end in am, therefore VAM is spam and is GOOD and VALID!)
Lovely VAM, wonderful VAM
Lovely VAM, wonderful VAM
VAM
VAM
VAM
VAM
Lovely VAM
Lovely VAM
Lovely VAM
VAM, VAM, VAM, VAM
The testing discourages teachers from taking jobs in high needs schools, but most people don’t know it punishes more than Math and ELA teachers. In NY districts, they punish all teachers, especially NYC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/25/how-is-this-fair-art-teacher-is-evaluated-by-students-math-standardized-test-scores/
Has it occurred to anyone else that we have turned the Ed system over to at hose who lack analytical power and who could be diagnosed aspbergers, or who can perform high level math but cannot develop appropriate premises, or who see themselves as highly educated but do not know they are ignorant in many areas? Could it be they lack the wisdom that comes from having highly different experiences over a period of time?
The Ed system wasn’t given to the fools. They hijacked it through fraud.
Yes, it surely was Mr. Lofthouse; And it is the fraud which is my chief concern. Who will continue to fight past 9/2106 now that Tisch’s people are talking to Cuom’s people? Will I be dead before this is sorted? My daughter has 1 more year of refusing (5/2016) but I will keep up on the fraud way past grade 8. Will I be dead before this is sorted out, I often wonder……………RTTT/money all for the privatization of public schools in the poorest districts. Will I see control of schools returns to local taxpayers? Hmmmmm…just reflecting – I 100% agree we were high jacked way before the US public noted.
In the movement to hijack the public education system in the U.S., the propaganda came first—even before A Nation at Risk came out in 1983 when Reagan was president.
For instance, does anyone know when the Walton family started its decades long voucher movement? I read recently that the Waltons spend, on average, about %160 million annually on there voucher campaign. I’ve been out of teaching for a decade and I recall that they were at it even in the 1980s and maybe earlier.