Rebekah Ray responded to another Florida teacher who complained the changes by the State Legislature has destroyed the promises made to him when he became a teacher. It’s method of evaluating teachers is one of the worst in the nation. If they don’t teach reading or math in grades 3-8, they are assigned ratings for students they never taught in subjects they never taught.
Ray writes:
I would not sign that evaluation. The first year Florida started its detrimental evaluation system I taught all 11th grade classes. I was asked to meet with the principal and the AP of curriculum (my evaluator) and was told I was a “Needs Improvement Teacher”. I was devastated because prior to that year, I had always received outstanding evaluations. I was also an NBCT teacher. Additionally, for that first year of the insane evaluation system, all teachers on campus who did not teach 9th and 10th grade were supposed to receive the school-wide VAM. I pointed out that I should have received the SW VAM scores because I taught all 11th grade students. The AP looked at me and said, “No, you have one 10th grade class.” At that point, my devil horns came out, and I asked for specific data that they based their scoring on. The principal called the district office and spoke to the one mathematician who did the calculations for each teacher. He stated that I had received that score because over the course of three years of teaching, nine of my students did not pass the FCAT re-takes. I asked, “What about the 300 other students who had passed; don’t they count?” They did not have a clue how to respond. I refused to accept their evaluation and did not sign it. The principal told me to send him an email once I had time to think about the situation, so I did. I asked for all sorts of data on those nine specific students: When did they enroll in my class?; How many absences did they have?; Are they on free or reduced lunch?… and lots more data. I received no response, but the a-holes gave me the SW VAM, and the next year, they moved me to 10th grade in an effort to set me up for failure. At the end of that year, I met with my evaluator to sign my evaluation, and she commented, “You are one of those teachers.” My defense mechanism immediately went into high gear, and I asked, “What does that mean?” She replied, “You are responsible for our A+ rating.” I had no idea because I’m that rebellious teacher who refuses to look at data; I look at the students in front of me and tell them point blank, “I will never treat you like a data point; I will treat you as a human being, and you will work harder in this English class than any other ones you have been in, and you will pass that stupid state test with no problem!!” Then I never mention the test again until a month before its administration. (I also ignore the scripted common core curriculum). Ergo, my students excelled, and for consecutive years, I earned perfect VAM scores (unbeknownst to me). I only learned about it because the department chair told me. (Again, I rarely look at the data; I always look at the child). My next evaluator consistently awarded me with high scores such as 99/100. The following year a new evaluator came on board, an academic with a doctorate in Reading, but zero classroom experience. She tried to lower my rating, but I refused to sign until she changed her scores, explaining, “Nothing has changed; I cannot help that you never came to my classroom to observe those specific activities, and I still have perfect VAM scores, so why do you think it’s okay to lower my score in categories I have always been rated as Highly Effective?” She changed my scores both years she evaluated me.
The tragedy of it all is that I had to consistently fight to get what was rightfully mine from the outset. No teacher should have to suffer such denigration and demoralization at the hands of administrators who have been given district and state directives to assign lower scores because “Too many of your teachers are being rated as ‘Highly Effective’”.
I have five years before I can retire, but my heart is no longer in it, so I will be leaving this profession and the children who I dearly love teaching. The stress that comes with teaching has taken a massive toll on my health, and I am currently on an LOA because of it. (Yes, I also had to fight for my FMLA benefit; it’s always a fight, with the district and admin on one side, and the teachers on the opposite side). It’s not supposed to be that way; we are all supposed to be on the same side, but it’s not like that here.
I have two pieces of advice for anyone thinking of going into education: 1. Don’t do it!! 2. If you really believe it is your true calling, then go straight through and get your masters degree; subsequent to that, teach in the U.S. for a minimum of three years, so you can get some experience; apply to teach overseas where your efforts will be appreciated and rewarded. Most of all, you will be respected and honored everywhere else in the world because you are a teacher.
Such a sad and moving story. It is hard to believe teachers have to go through this sort of insanity.
Same sort of thing happened to my sister in DE. She taught special ed, the school system was giving both PARCC and SBAC and many of her students couldn’t pass the tests. She went from “highly effective” (for years!!!) to “needs improvement” and her administrator at the time fought it. The next year the admin changed and she received another “needs improvement”, but the new administrator wouldn’t fight for her . She was close to retirement and another bad review would affect her retirement benefits. She decided to take a pay cut and become a TA for her last year of work AND she informed them that she would be using every sick day that she had accumulated over her 10 years of tenure in the system. She basically worked a 2-3 work week and the school had to pay for a substitute for her sick days. More than one way to skin that cat.
I had a somewhat similar situation my last year of teaching in the States.
As a traveling music teacher, I worked at two schools. One was three days a week, on M-W-F and the other was on T-Th.
I got a bad evaluation from the M-W-F school. The T-Th school put up a petition and teachers at that school signed it saying they didn’t want me to leave. It was sent to the superintendent.
I, for some mysterious reason, started being sick on M-W-F but was totally well and attended school on T-Th until the finish of the year.
I want to add that teachers at the M-W-F school were intimidated by the principal. Nobody would speak to me or a man teacher who was also being terminated. We would sit at lunch at the ‘loser table’ because nobody would sit with us. This fellow told me that the principal had flirted with him and he hadn’t responded back. He thinks that the reason he was fired was because of not accepting her flirtatious behavior.
I had one friend who would speak to me. She’d meet me in the basement of the school and we’d speak behind a high bookcase.
My friend, the one who would speak to me, was consequently given a number of bad evaluations. They were so bad that she became clinically depressed.
What kind of school has an environment where teachers are so intimidated by the principal that they are afraid to speak to a colleague? What kind of principal is so evil that she/he would give bad evaluations to teachers based on out of classroom behavior?
that is a key word in the reform game: “new.” Endlessly pushing around administrators under the name of “fixing” schools sets up that devastating dynamic of admin/teacher adversaries instead of admin/teacher comrades.
Teachers in Florida are leaving in droves. Florida offers teachers little support, terrible pay and benefits. I’ve met a number of teachers that are liquidating materials at garage sales where I stop to look for books for my grandson. The state is led by corrupt right wing zealots that are backed by copious amounts of dark money.
One agenda item is to destroy public education in order to privatize it. It is unfortunate that this competent, capable teacher is caught up in this political game. The problem with using VAM data to evaluate teachers is, as a New York judge noted, that VAM scores are capricious and arbitrary. In the hands of compromised administrators, VAM can be used to harass career teachers into retirement. While teachers have a union, in this right to work state, the power to make change is limited. Florida is losing some of its best teachers as a result.
I was always highly rated as a public school teacher, both before I retired in 2012and – with one odd 6 month stint – after I returned to the classroom. I was National Board Certified. I was asked to mentor new and struggling teachers, and not just in Social Studies. I was asked to take student teachers, & twpof mine became my colleagues and a fairly elite public school, one now the department chair. I have been a department chair in 2 different schools. And I am no longer in public school, took a 30% pay cut to teach in a Catholic HS where I am given total freedom to use my best judgment to help my students succeed, grow, develop in knowledge, skill, and maturity. I value public schools, and will continue to fight for them, to improve them, to make things better for the teachers who work therein. But I reached the point that now in my 70sI wanted the energy I put into teaching not to be wasted with the b&*^i8&t that is far too prevalent in public school settings, even in the very good school in which I spent about half my career.
I taught at the beginning of my career, had a successful career in educational publishing, and then returned to teaching at the end of my career. What a difference these years made!!!!
At the beginning of my career, I had an English Department Chairpeople who were highly experienced teachers. The general attitude of administrators was that English teachers were the experts on English, History teachers the experts on History and the teaching of History, etc., and they pretty much stayed out of stuff that wasn’t their business. We in the English Department would hold regular meetings and discuss what was and wasn’t working in our classes, choose curricula, share tips and lesson plans and materials (many of which we had developed), and set policies and procedures. Once a year, the English Department chairperson would do evaluations of the teachers in his or her department. We made our own tests. There was enormous opportunity for innovation because we could actually discuss with one another various pedagogical approaches and curricular materials and make our own decisions. Our discussions/debates about pedagogy and curricula were vigorous and spirited. Many of the teachers were older women who had been doing the job for years. They were, almost to a person, scholarly and highly knowledgeable. The kids learned a lot.
I loved teaching. The only reason I left was that the pay wasn’t great. I started a family, and the year I left, I almost tripled my salary.
Flash forward 25 years. When I returned to teaching, everything was micromanaged. We still had department meetings, but these had devolved into sessions in which the Department chairperson read to us the latest mandates from our administration or from the state. Curriculum materials were chosen for us and were HORRIBLE, test-preppy crap. We were expected to follow a day-by-day script from the state. Formal evaluations were done four times a year by APs or the Principal, using mandated checklists, and in addition, there were four other informal evaluations and a system of demerits for not completing an enormous list of requirements (if, for example, an AP came into one’s classroom and the standard, bellwork, essential question, daily vocabulary, and homework for the hour’s lesson weren’t posted on the board; if one’s Data Wall or lesson plan book (each class had to have a two-page lesson plan in a folder) were not completed and up to date; and so on (there were hundreds of such requirements–far too many for anyone to keep track of them). In short, the Department Chairperson and the teachers had lost all autonomy. We were expected to do enormous amounts of test prep because what mattered–to the evaluations of the students, of us, of the administrators, and the school–were the scores on the invalid, sloppy, ridiculous state tests. My pay depended upon the school’s state rating based upon those demonstrably invalid tests.
And the teachers had changed. They were mostly young. They were not scholarly and not knowledgeable. “What’s a gerund?” the 26-year-old English Department Chairperson asked me, looking at the month’s required grammar topics. “Oh, what’s that book?” a fellow English teacher asked me about a volume I was carrying. Never heard of this guy. YEETS?”
“Yeats,” I said. “His collected poems.”
“Oh, I don’t read poetry,” she said.
The Reading Coordinator informed us that our 9th graders had to read ALL of the Odyssey, in her words, “the ENTIRE NOVEL.” She freaking thought that The Odyssey was a novel!!! When we met to discuss a classical literature unit, she had no idea that the term referred to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome.
And there was enormous churn. Between a quarter and a third of the teaching staff every year.
To teach at all sanely, I had to pretend to be following the rules while secretly making my own curricular materials in the form of handouts.
I spent most of my time carrying out required tasks that were of ZERO value to my students, most of the related, in one way or another, to supposed “accountability.”
The profession had been utterly ruined in the name of “reform.”
cx: I had English Department Chairpeople
The teaching of English had become no longer a profession that an actual professional would put up with. What was wanted were not experts in their field but kids willing to do exactly and only what they were told, which was generally to have the students turn to the exercises on standard LALALA.xxx.666 in their online test preppy curriculum.
When workers have all their autonomy taken from them, this saps their spirits, and they don’t perform well.
I love reading your posts and the insight you bring to issues.
It makes me cringe to think of professional, experienced English teachers being evaluated by young chairpeople who were trained to be bureaucrat’s in the name of school reform.
No, the evaluations were done by the APs and the Principal. The English Department Chairperson didn’t even have a role in that!!!! Fortunately, my Principal was sane and recognized that I brought a lot to the job. But the evaluations by the APs and the Reading Coordinator, absurd indeed. It was everything I could do not to laugh in their faces.
This speaks to the teacher experiences in my district in many ways. I am in a smaller district and different state – but there are similar themes.
I whole heartedly agree with your advice to those thinking of a career in teaching. Well said.
Same here. I got great evaluations until I was given all the Algebra II kids who could not pass another teacher. On the basis of that small class, my entire evaluation hinged, because evaluators were looking at the scores of students and the evaluations of principals. If these did not agree, the principal was called out. So my evaluations went to heck and the principal would not even admit this was why he started being critical. He was a really nice guy, so I suspect he was afraid to admit what was happening. When I returned to a subject that was not tested, my evaluations got better.
I am not that good a teacher. I get that. I am too philosophical and ethereal. I am lazy. I would rather learn new stuff than grade papers. I do not know how to call a parent and give them the bad news. But none of the evaluations I have had ever caught me doing anything that keeps me from being my best, and most of the things that bring me under the critical eye are silly.
You know your subject, Roy. That’s a HUGE part of being a good teacher. And you care about your students. That’s the other part.
Using VAM, any teacher that serves the poor and/or compensatory students as well as classified students is at a distinct disadvantage with this type of faux evaluation. These teachers often wind up in the cross hairs of a compromised administrator’s hit list.
Yes. This happens all the time now. An administrator doesn’t like a particular teacher, so he or she assigns this teacher the remedial students, the teacher’s VAM scores drop, and so does the evaluation.
Yes we are supposed to be on the same side but sadly it is not true. I applaud you for thinking of the child in front you and not the test. I always did the same and had respect from the families and the children however not from some of the administrators. My students did not test well since they had learning challenges however the students and their family members knew I deeply cared for them. The first semester I was called into meetings and told that I had put the district at risk because I didn’t follow the exact word for word “curriculum” for several students (I taught K12) and blah, blah, blah. I had talked to the parents of those students at the beginning of the year and we started off very well. The parents were very supportive of what I was doing. Then the meetings started and I’m not sure why. I felt I couldn’t stay any longer and retired in a matter of 2 weeks at the end of the semester. Family members and students still are in my heart and from notes and comments I still get I am still in theirs. Thank you for listening as I haven’t really talked about this.
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So many of these stories! Education really needs its Studs Terkel, to collect them. Very sorry to hear that you did not get the support you needed, Marilyn, and good fortune to you in the next phase of your life.
Thank you so much! It helps to have encourage and support here! We do need a Studs Terkel…good idea.
According to a 2019 report coauthored by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, 15 states are still inflicting teacher evaluations by VAM (value added measures) and 28 are using the equally invalid process of writing up Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). SLOs require you to predict the end-of-year (or end of unit) achievements of students, among other ridicule-worthy feats. https://kappanonline.org/mapping-teacher-evaluation-plans-essa-close-amrein-beardsley-collins/
Vamboozled, the website of Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, is a great resource for anyone still being a victim of this method of estimating the “value you have added” to the test scores of your students.
But there is also a deeper and little known origin story for VAMs. That story was exposed to view in April, 2020, by Gene V. Glass, a Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a Regents’ Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University. Glass released a treasure trove of correspondence about VAM (value added measures), first used in education by the late William Sanders, an agricultural statistician. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2020/04/an-archaeological-dig-for-vam.html
In his blog post “Archeological Dig for VAM,” Glass reveals how William Sanders borrowed statistical methods for calculating VAM, then began using those calculations to judge teacher productivity/quality, based on the test scores of their students, specifically in the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS).
It turns out that Sanders’ TVAAS process (VAM) was “built on the formulation of the late C.R. Henderson, a Cornell statistician, a fellow in the American Statistical Association, known for his pioneering work in breeding animals, specifically herds of dairy cows. Henderson’s statistical methods of producing a “genetic evaluation of livestock have been widely accepted, utilized, and enhanced by animal breeders and statisticians.”
Until Henderson’s 1953 publication of “Estimation of variance and covariance components” in Biometrics,” no one had tackled the difficult problem of “estimating variance components from unbalanced data of cross-classified models, e.g., of milk production records of daughters of A.I. (Artificially Inseminated) sires in different herds – where sires are crossed with herds, and, for a large group of herds, each sire has daughters in many herds and each herd has daughters of many sires.” https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/31657/BU-1085-MA.pdf;sequence=1
If you have a background in statistics (mine is minimal and vintage), you may enjoy reading the extended “defense” of VAM/TVAAS by the late William Sanders who cites his debt to Henderson’s work. Sanders’ defense of using VAM with teachers and the test scores of their students is revealed in his answers to numerous questions from William Robert Saffold, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, who is well-informed about the results in TVASS in Tennessee and wanted more information to interpret the results of TVAAS for educators. The extended discussion reveals the many unwarranted assumptions Sanders made in constructing TVAAS.
I think the hoopla over the specifics of VAM (and SLO’s) is too often disconnected from the fact-based origin story on “how to cull herds of dairy cows to maximize their productivity.” VAMs and SLOs are designed to cull teachers based on their productivity in raising the test scores of their students.
Almost all of the accountability structures in education based on standardized test scores are designed to cull–select and discard–teachers who are not producing gains in test scores. In VAMs, test scores of students are not much different from measures of milk production, whether of individual teachers or the whole herd (school).
Some supporters of VAM’s are acting as if education geneticists. They seem to think that some teachers are destined to be more productive than others. They insist, for example, that Teach For America graduates with high GPA’s from selective colleges are good breeders of above average test scores in their students. Moreover, these potentially good breeders only need is a brief course in summer before they are ready to produce students who are high scorers on tests. That brief summer dose of instruction is analogous to providing artificial insemination in breeding females… or for males, perhaps a dose of Viagra.
VAMs and SLOs are flawed measured pushed by the Obama/Duncan administration’s Race to the Top. These measures are still present in many state ESSA plans. That may explain why Race to the Top testing resources are still available, even if developed under contract for Race to The Top by members of a “Reform Support Network.”
The Reform Support Network was nothing more than a huge marketing campaign for these flawed measures. Here, for example, is how they marketed SLOs as a substitute for subjects and grade levels for which there were no statewide standardized test scores for calculating VAM. One is the infamous collective measure where, as Diane notes, teachers “are assigned ratings for students they never taught in subjects they never taught.” https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/rsn-slo-toolkit.pdf
Brilliant, Laura!
Then Gov Ned McWhorter (D) needed a measuring tool bc the legislature, giving more funding for schools, demanded it. The State Auditor’s Office in TN commissioned two studies of TVAAS because it was very much of a black box. One study was done by the Ontario Institutee of Education by two people, one of whom was Sheldonj Bock, and the other was by the then Commissioner of Education in FL, whomj believe was named Fisher (doing this from memory almost 20 years after looking at the studies). Sanders was claiming he could demonstrate teacer effects 3 years out, starting from when a teacher taught specific students, but even Sanders cautioned against using VAM to compare teachers in different schools. The two outside reviewers of TVAAS totally demolished Sanders claims abougt 3 years of effects, and were more than a little critical of things like his methodology and some of his assumptions. I also in that time frame had a 1 hour phone conversation with a technical person from NWEA (which offered value-added assessment tools) who was also quite critical of what Sanders was doing.
There were many attempt to try to have quantitative measures of teacher quality going back even before A Nation at Risk. Those that start in the 1980s and going forward have almost all failed gto be the silver bullets some thought they would be. And as far as using quantitative measures as the sole or primaryy way of evaluating teachers (or students IMHO) I think those insistung on them need a thorough explanation of Campbell’s Law.
I agree. Magnificent, Laura!!!
The “Avoidable Tragedies” section, of Captain Hoofarted’s Idioms, contains:
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
“To live by the sword is to die by the sword.”
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.”
“Florida is the worst place to be ” period.
Aww, shucks, SomeDAM. Thanks! We aspire to excellence here in Flor-uh-duh!
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/why-you-should-move-to-florida/