State Senator Michael Johnston, architect of Colorado’s failed, punitive teacher evaluation law, may run for governor.
Johnston, an alumnus of Teach for America, is a devout believer in standardized testing. His law, passed over the objection of the state’s teachers, makes test scores 50% of teacher evaluations.
I happened to be in Denver the day that his bill came to a vote. We were scheduled to debate at lunch time, but young Senator Johnston showed up after I finished speaking. I got to hear him, but he never heard me. He told the audience that his bill would produce great teachers, great principals, great schools. All by basing evaluations on test scores.
Senator Johnston’s fantabulous claim never came true. Six years after passage of his law, Colorado has the harshest teacher evaluation statute in the nation and apparently no will to change it.
What are the results? When measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Colorado is in stagnation since passage of Senate Bill 191. Scores in fourth and eighth grade math and English are flat or have declined. None have gone up.
His greatest achievement was a bust. Since its passage, the theory that teachers can be evaluated by the test scores of their students has repeatedly been debunked by scholarly associations like the American Statistical Association, but Mr. Johnston is unable or unwilling to admit his ruinous error or to take steps to repeal it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for sharing this. It highlights the importance of speaking up about terrible ideas, whether they have been proposed by a Republican or, in this case, a Democrat.
Interestingly, our district’s superintendent, Dr. Bruce Messinger, has recently been named Colorado’s superintendent of the year. He has made it clear that he will never implement this law because he honors our work. Coincidence? I think not!
I do my best to help defeat Michael Johnson.
Kathy Gebhart, an attorney who has sued the State on behalf of poor school districts sits on the BVSD board. She gives me hope for the future of the Colorado Democrats.
Colorado is constrained by the Taxpayers Bill of Rights so the per pupil contributions from the state are near the bottom in the country. Some school districts are dealing with crumbling buildings, teacher shortages, and a four-day school week. So what did Michael Johnston do? He forced an inflexible teacher evaluation system on the districts, driving teachers out of the profession. He forced unfunded mandates for technology to support the new, unproven, and expensive tests. He forced new curriculum materials to support the common core state standards. He absolutely buried the poor school districts under this bureaucracy. He also pushed through pay-for-success contracts to destroy Head Start and enrich the hedge funds who are guaranteed an 8% return on their investment, money which belongs to the cash-strapped Treasury. Also, marijuana monies promised for K-12 never materialized.
Mr. Johnston has absolutely no business running for governor after this mess he created.
FYI, Pay for Success (aka, Social Impact Bonds) are written into ESSA as a permissible funding source for state run PreK. Any surprise that the DC establishment was cheering it as a bipartisan success?
However, prior to ESSA’s passage , Duncan’s DoEd’s initial & continuing state PreK grants had SIBs as one of the requirements for getting the grants. TN received a continuing grant to expand PreK in Memphis & Nashville as did 16 other states. We can count on our DoEd to keep feeding the Wall St beast.
The insidious nature of SIBs is how they target SPED kids as a backdoor around IDEA. SIBs funded PreK tracks every student to third grade. For every student who does not qualify for SPED or if a SPED student drops a related service(s), the banks get paid extra $. In some SIB contracts the students in PReK are followed through HS & as long as they DO NOT get SPED services the banks get paid a bonus per kid.
These people who dream up scams at the expense of the vulnerable are disturbed, immoral sociopaths, or both.
To me the implied message is these children are never going to be “stars” so let’s use them for some corporate welfare. I agree this is misguided and immoral. Trained teachers would be able to serve these children better.
“Senator Johnston’s fantabulous claim never came true.”
As it never could!
“When measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Colorado is. . .”
And neither could the NAEP ever “measure” (sic) anything.
The NAEP, being a standardized test can never overcome all the inherent foundational conceptual, i. e., onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that Wilson has shown that render any usage of the results as completely invalid. Until we refute the false methodology of “educational measurement” we will continue to harm many students.
To understand what Wilson has proven, I urge all to read his never refuted nor rebutted seminal 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.
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.
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).
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.
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 words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
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.
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.
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.
Cart before horse.
If you had all variables nailed down and worked out, meaning if you had a great solution to virtually all of the problems facing schools, students and teachers, then maybe you could use testing (inappropriate, delimited assessment) as a tool for making further refinements or catching clear glitches or signals. But testing itself as a tool to get there, to distort teaching and abuse students, teachers and admin will never, ever work. This is freaking self-evident. Johnston is deluded or fraudulent.
That the 50% test -based evaluation isn’t legit, is even bad for kids is not a concern for people like this. Teachers are the target, kids are collateral damage, charters and TFA are strengthened.
“…but Mr. Johnston is unable or unwilling to admit his ruinous error…”
The “expert” virus strikes again. While the experts spawned from the
“vain and illusory” process are often wrong, they are seldom in doubt. The
sole arbiters of truth club, pitch their “social gospel”, as if they were the
cornerstone of consciousness (reality is what WE say it is)…
Adam and Eve JOHNSTON are rolling in their grave…
Unfortunately, not many will recognize what that “vain and illusory” process is. (hint: Those are Wilson’s words, see my post above)
And, due in great part to Johnston — a repeated voice against the infestation of “bad” teachers whom he imagines running rampant — recent headlines in the Denver Post about a looming teacher shortage (even as DeVos simultaneously received a glowing endorsement).