Emily Talmadge, who teaches and blogs in Maine, noticed that her blog was being followed by a private investigator firm.
She had written two columns about high-powered consultant Robert Marzano. She received a letter from him, warning that she had slandered him. She said he had never taught; he had, for a few years. She said he had a $6 million contract with the Detroit Public Schools. He denied it. She then obtained a copy of the contract from a reporter in Detroit.
Her point? Why is a district that has no money paying $6 million for professional development?
She writes:
“Across the country, parents and teachers are growing angrier at the disconnect between the real needs of school districts and how funds are being spent. In the case above, the money would have been enough to pay at least 22 teachers for five full years.
“Instead, students in Detroit are now attending classes with 40-50 students, while teachers are wrestling with a development program that many feel is interfering with their ability to teach.”
Kudos to Emily for her investigative work.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wish the collective disgust and anger of the electorate would erupt in voting out all the liars and crooks that are policymakers.
In Michigan, the electorate has a love affair with the liars and crooks that are policymakers because they are one issue voters (God, guns, or babies). If a politician favors (or proclaims to favor) one of those issues, Michigan voters are blind to ALL of the other garbage these policymakers drag along with them. Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat are prime examples of the crap voters are willing to ignore or deny in favor of their favorite cause. Michigan teachers are just as guilty in their voting habits.
Nothing that happens in Michigan surprises me any more. I am saddened and sickened by the disdain our elected officials have toward Michigan’s public education system and those who work to support this state’s future through its schools. I hope voters see through the public image of the incumbents who wish to return to office to kick them to the curb in the next election cycle. Hopefully it’s not too late to save this state.
Dr. Marzano appears to be another so-called school improvement “expert” who has driven away with a pile of cash in his trunk. Race to the Top? Ha, ha, ha. A race to the bank, or a vacation home in the Caribbean or wherever else these phonies stow away their pay. Our hard earned tax dollars at work!
Real life teachers out there, you all know what these “consultants” do. They pull up to the school district, do their drive-by staff development then leave behind their half-assed, untested schemes. Like, Common Core. ( Sure, let’s “build a plane while we fly it.”) Or, VAM, RTI, SLO, PLC, TRP, MDT or SED (Note: I just made up one of those acronyms…can you spot it?)
Apparently, this guy has lawyered up. That’s an odd way to open up a dialogue with teachers out in the field.
There is nothing wrong with Common Core. I have been teaching deep meaning to content for twenty years. I think in some places it has been implemented and tested poorly perhaps.
“Nothing wrong with Common Core”, Madia. Sorry, but where have you been teaching the past few years, on Pluto?
Apparently, there aren’t many Republicans on that planet since during last night’s G.O.P. debate the idea of “Common Core” seemed about as welcome as getting a bad case of diarrhea.
Not that many of the candidates have had much to say lately about education. Not a lot of “deep meaning” there!
He doesn’t want to open up dialogue. Clearly has misrepresented his association with Detroit, and he wants to intimidate Ms. Talmadge to shut her down. That is why this blog is important to enable freedom of speech and shed sunlight on the dark dealings of corporations.
Madia, excellent point. We teachers do not need Common Core to tell us how to teach, especially when such standards are written by non-teachers.
My district uses his protocol. It just makes for a dog and pony show whenever you have an evaluation. It feels so fake. Just let me teach, don’t make me create some long-winded scale, refer ad nauseum to my objectives, just let me teach!!
Last fall, we had Marzano training. There were at least 15 consultants who came to the different schools. I hate to think how much that cost, especially when the day was not at all beneficial. TIme to let teachers have a voice in what happens, and give the consultants the old heave-ho!
I feel a sad personal connection to your statement that we have somehow fallen into the “dog and pony” show where the evaluation of “good” teachers comes into play. I have seen young, tech-savvy but not-yet-great teachers play the system by putting out high tech media about themselves, and so many not-willing-to-play-the-dog-and-pony-show-game truly good teachers steamrolled.
You’ve been teaching Common Core for 20 years? Most impressive. Do you have a patent on that time machine?
Or are you saying that you don’t need Common Core to teach “deep thinking”?
Will the real Dr. Marzano, please stand up.
It does seem a simple matter to correct Talmadge by stating schools, subjects, and grade levels taught in N. Y. and Seattle, i. e., IS 22, Bronx, substitute and reading teacher, 1968-1971. And if he supports his program, why is he afraid of the taxpayers questioning the cost? It is a public expenditure not a private church one that is involved?
His initial response may have been a bit overheated for someone who wishes to cultivate customers. Better to argue for the positive, if any.
If people, who have received contracts, paid with money intended for student education, threaten teachers with frivolous lawsuits and then proceed with action, I hope the crowd-funding sites for the teachers, will be identified at this blog.
Here is a link to the debunking of Marzano’s research on interactive “smart” boards (research for which he was paid by Promethean a maker of such boards) that concluded that those boards accounted for a 17% increase in student achievement, whatever the hell that means-you understand better when you read the debunking:
http://edinsanity.com/2009/06/03/marzano_part2/
Links to all the parts are in that one.
Marzano did a meta analysis of his own poorly designed studies. I love it Duane!
Marzano, snake oil, magic elixir, what do they have in common?
You mean that Marzano who has a very indeterminate amount of K-12 teaching experience, anywhere from 1-3 years telling K-12 real teachers how to teach. How profitable, eh!!
Maybe Emily can help uncover who Charlotte Danielson is. Many teachers are being evaluated by her rubric and I can not find information on her teaching credentials. It was posted on this blog three years ago. https://dianeravitch.net/2013/06/15/alan-singer-who-is-charlotte-danielson/
Anyone having any information on her credentials?
Duane, looks like a semester of student teaching. As a commenter on Emily’s post points out, Marzano got his BA from Iona in 1968 and lists his NY (note, not NYC) “teaching” experience as 1967-68. So, not even a fake real teacher, a là TFA.
Yes, saw that but one of his CVs says “Dept Chair” for like three years at an all boys Catholic school. Whatever that may mean.
That’s not teaching. He was watching others teach. Probably where he developed his Marzano method.
We are drowning here in Florida under the weight of the most oppressive, onerous regime most of us have ever known. This supposed “teacher evaluation” system is a surveillance scheme to make sure we are following the non-stop testing calendar, using “approved” texts (soon to be all online as Florida is “Going Digital!”). Not only has his outfit removed creative thought and true critical thinking with its soporific “small digestible bites” lock-step lesson style, but has driven out our truly Best and Brightest! Ask any teacher as you walk through the hallways or to the parking lot, what the absolute worst thing that has happened to teaching is, and you’ll get one word: MARZANO!
On top of ruining our school year, Marzano has invaded our summers, too, with Advancing the Core of Teaching online courses. These courses begin with a confusing maze of fill-in-the blank-only-one-right answer questions as you familiarize yourself with his 41 Elements, Domains, and ridiculous vocab of “Procedural” and “Declarative” knowledge. Ironically, the more we implement this plethora of nonsense in the classroom, the less students even glance at the board. This is especially evident as we add increasingly complex rubrics for each standard we teach. And if we ask students to rate themselves on the Marzano scale of proficiency, they give themselves high fives out of contempt for the phoniness of the scale. In sum, this very pricey dictatorial system is not only destroying genuine teaching, but skewing the curriculum so egregiously toward “arriving at the RIGHT answer in a group consensus” with big corporate info-text oriented materials, that students are more disengaged than ever before.
What you are describing is pathetic micro-managing from know nothing politicians that have bought into these bad ideas from pseudo-research. I feel sorry for real teachers being subjected to such junk ideology, and I feel sorry for the students subjected to tedious nonsense when they really should be learning. The state policymakers want to frustrate teachers and students while they undermine the very institution they should be supporting. It is time to clean house in Tallahassee.
I am so glad Emily is calling out the chief of this tribe of cynical bully charlatans (which includes Danielson and Lucy Calkins and many others). This group of canny operators shrewdly exploits districts’ needs to LOOK like they are doing something impressive. Whether it works (and it never does) does not matter. The demand, which these clever capitalists exploit, is for an APPEARANCE above all. They offer an impressive sounding, tidy, clear-cut set of things to do –a program. Everyone wants a program. There is no proof these programs work. In fact they usually do a lot of harm by displacing legitimate educational practices. In that sense, “snake oil” is the perfect term for them –they are pretending to bring health, but in fact bring its opposite: sickness. Let us expose these frauds and try to move on from the Era of Charlatan Consultants. I will gladly donate to Emily’s defense fund should the cynical lying bullies persecute her.
Oddly you mention Lucy Calkins–She told a group of administrators during a paid inservice in my school district to read the “F***ING” book if they had and questions about her writing units of study. That was very professional of her–and yes, that was the exact word she used.
While widely used, her writing units of study are singularly the worst writing curricula I have ever had to implement during my career as a teacher. The suggested mentor texts used throughout the narrative unit are very dark and depressing, as are those used within the memoir unit. Children don’t need to be exposed to such disheartening literature this soon in their “careers”. I will be using more uplifting and inspiring texts to teach with next time around. The units of study are confusing to use and disorganized in nature. They are written above and beyond a child’s brain development at the elementary level.
Yet, Ms. Calkins thinks so highly of herself and her glorious units that she named the units after, well, herself…
I am not alone in this assessment either. My entire school district of elementary and middle school teachers loathe these writing units of study for their lack of structuring the writing process for children’s brains. We must use them or else!
Because everything in education is very top down in structure now, these units of writing were forced upon us, (oops), thoughtfully selected for us.
And yes, we are also in lockstep thanks to the FOCUS ON RESULTS data driven program, which I also despise. We are technobots teaching to bytes of data. I feel as though I am in Nazi Germany, goose-stepping en masse, as I am yet again forced to implement this as well.
RtI is another theoretical fantasy–it doesn’t work in the real world. Just another way to keep districts from spending money hiring another RSP teacher and dumping more work onto the teacher.
Thanks for letting me vent. My frustration level is high right now. Powerlessness is never a good way to feel as an educator. Can’t help but feel this is all by design.
This emperor of reform, like Charlotte Danielson his co-reformer in teacher ‘improvement’, has no clothes.
They hate being pointed out as nakedly greedy and empty of real worth to teachers by the peons whose lives, careers, and profession they have wrecked.
And their ‘professional development’ hasn’t ended the so-called achievement gap, stopped generational poverty and racism, or produced better teachers.
It has caused lots of tears, frustration, anxiety attacks, mass retirements, and an exodus of good teachers from public school teaching.
They should be shunned, ridiculed, and anathematized by all who support good teaching.
Sue me.
If you dare the scrutiny of an impartial judge and national publicity.
I’m not one of your fans nor do I have to be, Mr. Marzano.
Every thing I have said here is true and has happened right here in Florida and is easily documented. I am not afraid of the truth or of edubullies and their attorneys.
EDUBULLIES. Fantastic imagery.
Once Marzano puts his ideas out as solutions, they are fair game as is his methods and expertise. Only Reformers would call peer review and critical discussion, slander.
The foundation of both Marzano’s and Danielson’s work is that teachers are NOT peers and are NOT qualified to review the work of their ‘betters’. Instead they are worker bees subject to the almighty administrators who are fresh from one or two 45-minute training sessions and are then able to justly and fairly decide if a teacher gets a pittance of a COLA or gets to keep a hard-earned and expensive teaching license.
Everything about both of their programs is predicated on doing things TO teachers and pretending it is being done WITH teachers, despite the fact that there is no room for disagreement, contradictory research (and there is a great deal of that hanging around), or just plain proof that their checklists and rubrics and continuums are little more than hokum and snake oil.
Neither is able, willing, or capable to put their money where their cockamamie theories are and actually go into a school for a year implementing their impossible dream planning, teaching, and assessment schemes, and taking the results as a final word on whether they ever get to walk within 1000 yards of a child or a professional teacher again.
They will get their comeuppance eventually. Fakes, liars, and charlatans always do. The problem is the longterm damage they will leave in their wake thanks to the imprimatur of the ASCD, the NEA, the AFT, and other professional organizations that chose to accept money to endorse and work ‘with’ them to the detriment of their membership.
I am beyond disgusted with both of these unqualified grifters.
I wrote off Marzano ten years ago. When I hear his name, I cringe-Too much corporate and too little rolling sleeves up doing the heavy lifting.
The Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa are using Marzano currently.
Dr Nancy Sebring might have had connections with Marzano?. She is quite the traveler
And was involved in one of the hottest sex scandals to hit the Midwest. Her twin Nina Rasmussen bankrupt The Downtown Charter school.
check out Supes.
We need to connect the dots in who all in every state gets paid off and how our tax dollars are being wasted!!
I agree. We should also track policymakers’ stand on education in Congress and the states. We can’t keep putting the corrupt back in power.
How does one teach before completing a BA degree (in English) and with no evidence of any teacher training and count it as professional experience? And how does one “chair” an English department with essentially no teaching experience or training? That Catholic school must have been really hard up to make a kid fresh out of college chair of the English department. (I wonder if he was the only English teacher?) I noticed he was getting a Masters in Education at the same time in reading and language. After receiving that degree there is no evidence that he ever set foot in a classroom as a teacher again.
I have found some of his books interesting and helpful in developing my own philosophy of practice over the years, but I can’t agree with what seems to end up being an attempt to reduce teaching to formulaic procedures. I feel the same way about the other entrepreneurial gurus intent on defining good teaching according to their own designs. They should have stuck to informing practice rather than trying to mandate it.
Marzano has good strategies for teaching vocabulary. The problem isn’t him per se, but the way his strategies are implemented. The real problem with education is a lack of persistence. We never stick to one thing. We change variables so often that it is impossible to truly understand which new program of the 50 changes per year increases student achievement. Fifteen years ago it was Max Thompson and his learning focused strategies. Then we changed our strategy guru again when the curriculum changed. Then Marzano became all the rage. I mean, really. We have had three complete, upside down, circle around changes to our curriculum in Georgia. Once we get a hold of the curriculum, they change it again. We are constantly looking for the next quick fix to problems that are not in the schools, but in the homes and across society. Hang in there; another edutourist will come around the corner and peddle his new cosmopolitan ideas that will make our schools so much “better.” -_- meh.
Here in Washington we are slaved to the Danielson criterion. I have tried to do some internet research and have found little substance to her. It’s like she doesn’t exist except from the sound bites that are on her website that are then repeated everywhere that she is being promoted. I have yet to see any indication that she did any real teaching anywhere. If I was promoting something that I did for education I would be listing out the places that I taught, what I taught, and how long I taught. I haven’t seen anything that gives any details of any actual teaching that she has done. Only thing that the websites say about her is that she has been involved in education at “all” levels. What ever that means.
We have what is called TPEP. Stands for Teacher Principal Evaluation Program. I call it Teacher Principal Elimination Program because that is what it feels like. It has eight criterion that a teacher must fill out the whole thing every 4 years and one to two of the criterion the other years. It is a mess and very vague as to what to do. I spent at least 15 hours of my own time last year working on it for only doing the one criterion that I was suppose to do. I heard of teacher spending over 20 hours. Then when I had my final evaluation with my evaluator it was quite obvious that my evaluator did not even read it before the meeting. My wife has told her administrators that she will not do the teacher part of the Danielson TPEP items. She told them that she is a conscious objector for various reasons. I’m considering the same because I object to the time that we have to put in to accomplish this useless hoop jumping. I believe that we need to do the same as the parents about testing and start an opt out of the evaluation movement. I know we run the risk of being fired but my wife and I are about to the point that it’s either that or stop teaching all together. My wife asked her principal whether he considered her a good teacher and he said yes. Yet because she won’t do the TPEP evidence gathering stuff she has been told that if she doesn’t do it 2 years in a row she will be fired after the second year. So basically in order to be a good (proficient) teacher she has to waste her time and time that she would be working for her students.
We need to find out how much money is spent by states and districts on these worthless evaluation systems and let the taxpayers see how the money they’ve interested to the state is being wasted by this.
I’ve been saying this for quite some time on this blog: one of the critical problems in public education is administrative leadership, or lack thereof.
There are far too many superintendents and principals who are short on teaching experience (some frightfully so), and long on dictate. Too often they are deficient in a fundamental understanding of the science of learning. They simply follow the latest consultancy fad, from DuFour’s “PLCs” to Marzano’ “strategies” to Danielson’s “Framework.”
The bandwagon extends to Pearson and STEM and “standards” and “rigor.”
An awful lot of these people – from administrators to consultants – could NOT do on their very best day what they mandate for teachers. There are plenty of them who embellish their records, or load up their curriculum vitae with meaningless data.
Too, most of these “leaders” have no earthly idea what the primary mission of public schooling should be. Ask them and they’ll regurgitate “for college and careers.” Some of the true sycophants will toss in “global competitiveness.” They are not interested in democratic citizenship because they do not and likely could not actually practice it as “leaders.”
These are top-down people. And they identify with the Common Core. It’s got all the stuff in it that they’ve deemed important. The NEA and AFT and PTA and ASCD and the national associations of superintendents, and secondary and elementary principals, have all endorsed it. So, this is a significant problem.
In public education, one the biggest obstacles to genuine reform is its “leadership.”
Meanwhile, the charlatans are cashing in.
Adminimals* is the term you are looking for democracy!
*a combination of the terms administrator, minimal thinking and animal (which responds to training but not teaching and learning)
Dr. Ravitch, This is Bob Marzano commenting on your report of my interaction with Ms. Talmadge. When a friend sent me her blog post, I contacted her via e-mail and informed her that at least two of the statements she made about me were false. One was that I had never taught, and the other was that I had a 6 million dollar contract with Detroit Public Schools. I gave her some details about my teaching background and told her that I do not have a contract with DPS. I spoke one day about a year ago to district administrators for a modest fee. I said I would look into the contract issue since she sent me a link to a news story she had read that reported on such a contract. She had my e-mail and there was certainly a tacit invitation for her to respond to me directly. I found out that Learning Sciences International (LSI) does have a large contract with DPS. They use some of my intellectual property in their trainings. They have since written the original news agency that published the story and informed them of the error. They will be contacting you soon with the same information. To imply that I have a large contract with a district in financial difficulties certainly paints an inaccurate and unfair picture of me. I would have hoped that you would contact me first before writing a blog that implies I have lied and now have been “taken down.” I’m also quite disappointed with how Ms. Talmadge has handled this. Apparently she reached out to you instead of me, and you now have spread the false information even further. You have my e-mail now, so I would welcome a conversation with you and Ms. Talmadge that is not played out on a public blog. I must admit, i don’t understand blogs. They seem to be a venue for anyone to say anything they want without verification and without consequence for inaccuracies. In closely, let me say again: it is absolutely false that I have a 6 million dollar contract with DPS. You will be receiving proof of this shortly from LSI.
Thank you for taking the time to have your voice heard here, Dr. Marzano.
I have been an admirer of your work for some time and find the accusations the people on this blog and the others it references to be mean-spirited and, frankly, quite hard to believe!
Please speak up and set the record straight so that your detractors can be shown to be in error. Your critics claim that your classroom teaching experience is limited to a single year in the public schools, and possibly three years at a parochial school. Please clarify precisely how many weeks your taught at a public school in New York, the precise dates of that employment, the name of the District, and your official job title while you taught there. Please also state how many students, +/- 15, you taught on a full time basis in New York. Please clarify the same for your teaching experience in Seattle during the Nixon administration.
I’m so glad you are monitoring the blogs that slander you. It’s even better that you have chosen to engage the public via this forum!
I look forward to reading the honest specifics of your classroom teaching experience so that your slanderers’ criticisms can finally be put to rest. I also hope that you follow through on slander lawsuits so that this information will be entered into the public record and thus available to school districts who wish to evaluate your credentials and experiences when they are deciding whether or not to hire you in the future.
Please reply to this post so that your lowly critics, like @2old2teach who ranted above, can see how wrong they are. I imagine if you ignore this post it might be used as evidence that @2old2teach’s criticisms are true, but you’re too honorable a man to allow such a thing to happen, so I do look forward to your reply.
Thank you for all of your hard work over the years!
This is a brilliant line from Chris in Florida:
“Everything about both of their [Marzano’s and Danielson’s] programs is predicated on doing things TO teachers and pretending it is being done WITH teachers, despite the fact that there is no room for disagreement [or] contradictory research (and there is a great deal of that hanging around)… ”
It’s the pretending that is especially irksome. So transparently fake.
Now that Bob Marzano has weighed in , perhaps he can clear some things up.
Bob,
1. How much public school teaching experience do you really have? There’s a year referenced in New York schools? Was that student teaching, or was that a full year in a public school? And what about those three years in an all-boys Catholic school…why did you leave teaching?
2. You say that you have no contract with the Detroit schools. In your comment here you say this: “To imply that I have a large contract with a district in financial difficulties certainly paints an inaccurate and unfair picture of me.”
Yet, Learning Sciences International does – according to you – own “much” of your “intellectual property.”
And Emily Talmadge writes that you told her this about Learning Sciences International: “I can’t imagine that they received a $6,000,000 contract, but if they did, such money does come back to me.”
Okay, so YOU don’t have the contract, but Learning Sciences does. And guess what? YOU are listed as “the executive director of Learning Sciences Marzano Center for Teacher and Leader Evaluation.”
Don’t you make a fair chunk of money off of that contract? And if so, aren’t you sort of just play a game of semantics?
3. There has been criticism that some of your research (on homework for young kids, on interactive white boards) has been grossly misrepresented. Would you agree or disagree with that, and why?
4. A wide array of research – including your own – finds that most of the factors related to student achievement are not under the teacher’s control. In fact, the direct effect of the teacher is a very small portion of the total variance in student achievement scores, is it not? If that’s the case, then why are schools spending so much time and energy – and money – on your programs?
5. At the Learning Sciences International website, under “Who We Are,” there are no names listed. But it does say they engage in a “partnership with you for the “Marzano Teacher Evaluation Model, the Marzano School Leadership Evaluation Model, and the Marzano District Leader Evaluation Model” and for the “Learning Sciences Marzano Center Essential Strategies for Achieving Rigor.”
In addition, Learning Sciences touts an annual conference “hosted by Learning Sciences International and world-renowned education researcher Dr. Robert J. Marzano.”
So, in a sense, Learning Sciences is YOU, and YOU are Learning Sciences. How would you describe your “partnership” with Learning Sciences? Describe your financial partnership.
6. The main purpose of the conference referenced above, held last month, was ” to connect administrators and educators with innovative, visionary ways to provide rigorous instruction and prepare students for success in college and the global workplace.”
How does this college, workforce readiness, and global competitiveness stuff differ from the Common Core?
I’d very much like to see your response.
Alas still no answer from Mr. Marzano. I. Am. So. Shocked.