This arrived in my email box. I hope Regent Tilles, a member of the New York Board of Regents, reads it before he votes on the Governor’s flawed and punitive teacher evaluation program.
Dear Regent Tilles,
I am writing to you to share my own experience as a teacher in the hopes that you’ll see how absurd basing teacher evaluations on test scores can be.
Before I reveal my state growth score, let me give you some figures. After all, in any other job in the world, you are judged on performance. And Common Core is supposed to be about getting our students college and career ready, two places where they will be judged on performance. So after my principal gave me my state growth score, I decided to take a look at how my students actually performed on the state ELA test.
I had 31 students take the state ELA test. I am not going to count one student and his Level 1 score based on the fact that on the Part 1, he simply filled in A for each question in column 1 of the answer sheet, B for each question in column 2, C for each question in column 3, and D for each question in column 4 (that alone should be enough to see the flaws in having a test-based evaluation). 14 of my 30 students scored at Level 3. That’s 46.7%. 7 of my 30 scored at Level 4. That’s 23.3%. 70% of my students scored Level 3+4. The percents for the entire grade level in my building were 26% Level 3, 15% Level 4, 41% Level 3+4. In the regional scores given to us by BOCES, 42% of the students on my grade scored on Level 3+4. Other than the SED, anyone would look at my numbers and say not only did I do my job, I did it very well.
Here’s another way to look at the results. My students accounted for 27.5% of those who took the test on my grade level, but they accounted for 48.3% of our Level 3 scores and 43.8% of our Level 4 scores. Let me say that again. My students were a little more than 1/4 of all those on my grade level in my building who took the test and yet I accounted for nearly 1/2 the Level 3 and 4 scores.
Based on that data, the question I have is, “Did I do my job? Was I an effective teacher?” Well if I were a school myself, my percentage of students meeting state standards, 70%, would rank me 8th in all of the county.
So now the big reveal. What was my state growth score based on these fantastic results? A 20 out of 20? At least a 16 out of 20? No, I was a 1 out of 20. Yes, a 1. 70% of my students met state standards, yet based on the ridiculous growth formula SED uses that no one really understands, I was deemed to be an Ineffective teacher. Thankfully, my bosses recognize the job I do and due to my score on my observations and our local 20%, my overall score is enough to rate me Effective (barely).
I hope my situation shows just how deeply flawed a test-based teacher evaluation system is, and that you will do everything possible to make sure we eliminate it. I have no problem being evaluated. Contrary to what the governor may think, he did not create the teacher evaluation system. I have been evaluated every year during my 22-year career. All the governor and our legislators have done is create a system that simply DOES NOT WORK. I’m asking for your help in fixing it.
Sincerely,
A proud teacher beginning his 23rd year
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a racket and its reach, far spreading at all levels of academia. Read Prof. Alice Dreger of NU’s recent resignation letter: http://alicedreger.com/resignation_NU
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My opinion of NU just tanked. The letter highlights the dangers of corporate takeover of academic freedom. What a shame that NU has so forgotten who they should be.
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Sigh. And herein lies the problem with using test scores to measure, well, anything.
This teachers’ students scores, despite being very heavily 3s and 4s, do not indicate that he “did his job”. All such scores indicate that his children, by and large, did better than their peers taking the test. This says nothing (good or bad) about him as a teacher. It says nothing about what his kids actually learned. It simply shows how well they did taking a test. Their scores reflect them and can’t be used to show that he is either “effective” or “ineffective”.
Furthermore, we don’t know what class he teaches. If, for instance, he is teaching a “gifted” or otherwise advanced class, by definition those kids get higher test scores, so it would be expected that his kids would get higher test scores, so maybe the scores he cites, while higher than average, are in fact lower than would be expected. And because test scores are most highly correlated with wealth, we’d have to know the socio-economic standing of his kids.
Please stop the test score madness. Just because the “reformers” try to use test scores to show that teachers and schools are failing doesn’t mean that we should try to use them to show success. They are meaningless, except, as mentioned, to show students’ relative family wealth.
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Agreed. Resting all of your teaching ability on the scores of your students is a real slap in the face to those of us who have taken positions in low-income, high need areas. This type of argument is as damaging to our profession as the argument for growth scores.
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I might have to take a break from reading what’s going on in the corporate driven education reform wars as it’s happening. My anger level is reaching epic proportions. I’m sure if the psychopathic, autocratic oligarchs funding the reform wars could feel my anger, they’d all lose sleep and end up with PTSD.
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Me too, Lloyd. Thanks.
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Imagine if the Governor gets his way, a teacher like this would be rated ineffective if these scores accounted for 50% of the teacher’s rating. If this happened two years in a row, this teacher who can get 70% of his students to get 3 or 4 on a very challenging test, could be fired. Who would replace this teacher? A novice with no experience, but at half the price. The district may save a bunch dollars, but it is the students who really pay the price. We are so much more than a ridiculous VAM number.
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This teacher’s experience sounds like an episode from the Twilight Zone… or a living nightmare. Of course, basic fairness doesn’t seem to part of the alleged “reformers” playbook. What comes to mind is the phrase used by Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings: ‘Have they no sense of decency?’ Apparently, not. What a sad lesson for our children to be witnessing. The public humiliation of their beloved teachers. Our nation has come to this.
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Has the New York teachers’ union staged any mass actions? If not, why not?
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NYSUT has put itself in the back pocket of the “reformers”. Since the UFT took over NYSUT two years ago, they have done NOTHING to stop this madness. Even Randi Weingarten has utterly capitulated. It’s scary how quickly they sold the rest of us out.
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I threw my VAM ratings in the trash this year as soon as the envelope arrived from ODE, without even opening it. There is little I can do to alter the test scores with my population as they are so disadvantaged to even be on the measurement scale of the tests. There are just too many other factors not accounted for when calculating VAM scores for teachers and, by extension, schools.. Poverty, ELL, transience, health issues, family transitions, disability – all very definitely impactful. Yet the VAMmers seem oblivious to reality. Or maybe not and the goal is to replace all teachers with IBM Watson.
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It’s plain crap from beginning to end. The tests are crap, the pathetic attempts at quantifying the degrees of impact of all those aspects of delicate learning environments potentially full of disruptions from all quarters, including unethical behavior by admin and inappropriate initiatives, and on and on and on.
VAM is a complete sham. Yet the punch line is that even in utter error the law of averages keeps it from looking like total crap in aggregate. But that’s merely a false positive.
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Good for YOU, MathVale.
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Thanks. Too many teachers obsess over their VAM. It becomes a massive gaming of the system. Good teachers rated bad, bad teachers rated good. Departments of Departments make rules to counter the gaming. Teachers find ways to navigate the new rules. Departments make more rules. A few hands are smacked. A few high fives. If the goal of VAM was to destroy education, the Reformers are doing a great job. My concern is a generation will be lost to the failed Reform movement. I can already see the damage done from my classroom vantage point. It will take many years to repair.
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I can’t even respond to this; it reminds me too much of the ridiculous crap that I was put through last year and the year before.
I will say it again, “You cannot value education and demonize educators.” We are in deep deep trouble in terms of public education in this country.
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Yes, maybe her students should have all been 4’s. Now where do you find that teacher who will be able to get them? Hmmm. I guess a TFA with the great first year skills Michelle Rhee brags about where she tapes their mouths shut and makes fun of their speaking.
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Remind me again, what novice teacher ever got 70% of their kids to pass from a low scoring population and to do even better than passing (a 4)?
With 31 kids the sample size is so ridiculously small (for instance that one kid intentionally bombing the test hurt his score as much as possible from an already small sample), that saying there is any validity to it is insane.
Saying one score for one kid on one day with such small pools of scores (if the scores can even be believed with their political cut scores) says anything about the teacher is absurd.
If the state chooses to set the bar at the unachievable level, there is no means to appeal, no way to change it.
Since when do we believe ANY computer is infallible with zero human review?
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There is no honest way to justify VAM or to rationalize its application in the evaluation of teachers. It is clearly a sham. When people like Regents Tilles and Lester Young fail to do what is obviously the right thing by scrapping defective measures that misjudge teachers, they are just as obviously part of the problem, not the solution.
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Common core has weaponized testing to shame and guilt teachers and learners into performing better. Ahhh, I don’t think we are going to shame and guilt our way to a better, or more well educated society, do you.
Notice too, shame and guilt are the way of lawyers, judges and the rule of law. Just saying.
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VAM is a political tool that can be refined and tweaked to allow politicians to get the results they desire. It is neither about teaching, learning, teachers or students, even though they may influence the score. It is a political weapon, nothing more.
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As Diane has said in multiple blog posts… these ratings are junk science.
When I got my rating in my email this year, I had to laugh…
It was either laught or cry…
Out of the more than 120 students that I taught in the last marking period, out of the 250+ students I taught all year, the state decided that they would grade me based on 14 kids that just happened to take a science regents this year. keep in mind, I do not teach a regents class, I teach a science elective
The number they came up with (of course was ineffective) was based on a sample size that was way too small so the statistics are completely irrelavent.
All of us in our department are in jeopardy of having poor ratings… and thankfully… my Assistant Principal is pissed
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