Carol Burris: A Young Teacher Ruined by Reform

May 30, 2015 //

Carol Burris posts a letter from a young teacher in DC who graduated from Burris’ school in Long Island. She is not happy with the high-stakes testing, test-based accountability, and Common Core. Want to know why so many teachers are leaving? Corporate, punitive, gotcha reform.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Data and Data Mining, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching, VAM (value-added modeling)

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Gordon Wilder says:

May 30, 2015 at 5:42 pm

The new teachers as well as those who have been teaching. The people making up tests and grading teachers are so ABYSMALLY ignorant but are so sure they are knowledgeable.
It is devastating to all, teachers, students and now many parents are finding out as indicated by this blog.
Where it will all lead if this continues unabated is frightening.

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- Dawn says:
  
  May 30, 2015 at 7:41 pm
  
  It will lead to the relentless surveillance of all of our students and teachers from pre-k to the slot the government planned economy has waiting for each one. It will lead to the inventory and control of each and every unit of human capital. It will lead to one world government under the auspices of the UN. Robert Muller, the “Prophet of the UN,” assistant secretary general for 40 years there, invented the World Core Knowledge in the 1980’s which was re-branded as the Common Core in 2009. Until people recognize the connection between the UN and the Common Core, it will remain a mystery why this is happening.
  
  Once that connection is made, it all becomes quite clear as to why the so-called reforms are still being pushed into schools even though parents, students and teachers don’t want them and recognize them as destructive. The main objective of the UN is to establish an institution that can regulate every aspect of life on earth. In order to do that, unique sovereign nations have to be replaced by culturally similar regions beholden to the UN and no other political entity.
  
  You can see why education would be the place to start to change hearts and minds to make all of this possible. Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 spells it all out in detail. Read it before you call me a conspiracy theorist.
  
  Reply
  - rockhound2 says:
    
    May 30, 2015 at 8:18 pm
    
    Should I don my tin foil hat before or after I read it?
  - Dawn says:
    
    May 30, 2015 at 8:42 pm
  - thenextlevel2000 says:
    
    June 1, 2015 at 8:13 am
    
    I never understand the “tin foil” hat comments that are made in response to comments which reference the UN and its connection to education reform.
    
    It isn’t as if this is made up in the imagination of so many people, like we all just had the same dream. This is no conspiracy or secret; these documents are out there, for all to see. Those who choose to call other names, and refer to tin foil hats are being naive. Just really naive.
    
    Who would have ever thought what is happening to our schools would ever happen? Why would a global UN connection, which is clearly documented, be simply unspeakable, lest those who speak it are mocked?
Laura H. Chapman says:

May 30, 2015 at 6:43 pm

“I may have been a bratty kid. I may not have always understood you when I was a teenager. However, when I tell you that I am so proud to have gone to high school with you as my principal, it is the truth. You had our backs then, as students (even though we may not have always realized it), and you have our backs now, as teachers. I am so grateful to you for taking the position you have and for standing on the front lines defending teaching and learning as it should be. From RVC to DC, your voice is heard and appreciated. Thank you for all that you do.”

This the way education works, across generations. Influences on students and the profession not captured by the almighty test scores, rubrics, checklists, and exotic statistical estimates of use only to classify the “test-score-productivity” of teachers in one of four or five categories. The basic humanity in teaching is being killed off by this nonsense.

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carolcorbettburris says:

May 30, 2015 at 7:01 pm

She was NEVER bratty 🙂 always lovely and very bright. Share her story. It matters.

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- artseagal says:
  
  May 30, 2015 at 9:48 pm
  
  What I wish is that when sharing this young teacher’s story people WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND AND REACT and realize the direness of it all. The pot is starting to boil around the country but it is not quite there yet. Sadly there are not enough tales of “fallen soldiers”… OUR CHILDREN to cause mass uproar!! I feel hope with parents and parent coordinators and feel they are beginning to understand and react. A parent with a special needs child just the other day (who was always happy despite having issues with learning) suddenly wet himself during testing. That parent is outraged. The parent liaison is seeing more and more of this. It is HORRIBLE to think that this boy is just one of many revealing symptoms of this abuse! As more and more reported cases of the effects of this testing abuse are exposed, I do hope “ed reform” comes crashing down and those responsible are held accountable!!!!
  
  My district keeps adding more and more canned… boiler plate… mandated kinds of programs into teachers daily lives and they are all designed – like the PARCC – to amass data and evaluate the teachers as if the students are just cogs in the process of this latest “disruption theory” fad in education.
  
  The tragic and ironic effect is that teachers are finding it more and more challenging to be truly “present” in the classroom. They no longer have time to see their students as individuals and to respond to their needs in a natural progression because “ed reform” mandates are imposing this lack of presence. Teachers today are so busy assessing this and assessing that and teaching in order to complete this form and that form for ‘higher ups”. At least your student had one year of being able to be “present” and she so beautifully describes her experience of her first year of teaching!
  
  I liken this lack of “presence” to the traveler who does not experience the place traveled because he/she been too busy with the camera at every turn. Teachers are being forced to metaphorically “click snapshots” of their every movement in the classroom. This “creative disruption” is purposefully destroying the true teaching profession and the student learning environment while advancing this hideously idiotic and abusive “reform agenda.
  
  So I will certainly continue to talk to parents, to ask students about all this testing… hoping that the pot boils over sooner rather than later – too many student lives are being lost and too many new teachers are not getting to have that joyous connection with students that has been the mainstay of the teaching profession prior to “ed reform”!
  
  Now which potential presidential nominee is going to FIGHT FOR OUR CHILDREN and mean it???
  
  Reply
- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  May 31, 2015 at 7:07 am
  
  Clearly very bright.
  
  Reply
Alabama teacher says:

May 30, 2015 at 7:20 pm

I am regret that this teacher (and all other teachers in her situation) never got to experience what real teaching was like in the days before NCLB and RTT along with Common Core. I am so lucky to have taught for six yeas before NCLB. I would give anything to go back to those days. Many a day, I sneak in activities from back then, but I still have to do so many thing that are developmentally inappropriate for my 1st graders.

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Linda says:

May 30, 2015 at 9:48 pm

“Ruined by reform.”

Statistics from the internet show employment at Bill Gates’ company, Microsoft, ranks at about 1/2 of the size of the 50th largest U.S. employer. And, the firm’s employment number is in decline. An education department, federal or state, that listens to anything Gates says about employment, innovation or education, has the wrong focus and the wrong self-appointed savior.

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- Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:
  
  June 1, 2015 at 12:00 am
  
  Gates never created anything in his life. He’s a marketer born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
  
  Reply
  - Ken Meyer says:
    
    June 1, 2015 at 10:26 am
    
    Linda;
    
    That’s true. MicroSoft Corporation just magically manifested itself out of thin air, didn’t it? [smile]
schoolgal says:

May 30, 2015 at 9:56 pm

Was this the result of an agreement reached by Randi and Rhee that also led to unfair firings and new union leadership in DC?

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roxanne says:

May 30, 2015 at 10:06 pm

This is good evidence of how this method of evaluation is hurting our teachers and students. Please share more hard evidence such as this. It helps all of us who debate the validity of the CORE regularly. We need as many testimonies as possible to build our case.

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- Duane Swacker says:
  
  May 31, 2015 at 9:35 am
  
  Roxanne,
  
  The case against the “CORE” and the accompanying standardized testing has already been delineated/outlined by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted complete destruction of those educational malpractices. Read and comprehend his 1997 treatise “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.
  
  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 supposed measurement of 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.
  
  Reply
retired teacher says:

May 30, 2015 at 11:21 pm

These are unfortunate times for all our teachers, especially new, young teachers with great promise caught in the cross hairs of a rigged system, faux metrics and demoralizing evaluations. The only advice I can give is to ignore the insanity, devote your energy to your teaching and students, and don’t take comments to heart. Your evaluation really is not about you; it is about politics.

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