A few days ago, I posted a column by Peter Greene about a dreadful plan in North Carolina to align teacher pay and evaluation with test scores, an approach that has always failed and that always demoralizes teachers.
Peter was relying on the thorough research of Justin Parmenter, a North Carolina teacher who is a National Board Certified Teacher.
Another North Carolina teacher wrote the following comment:
As a North Carolina teacher, I can personally attest to everything that Justin Parmenter has written about this god-awful plan. It has absolutely no support either from teachers or from school districts, where the administrators know full well that it will only increase their already desperate staffing problems. Yet there seems to be almost nothing that we can do to stop it short of the NC State Board of Education. At least there, a majority of the members were appointed by our Democratic Governor Cooper and may balk at a plan so universally opposed by those it will directly affect. We have no real union (NCAE is an “advocacy organization”) since we’re prevented by law from forming unions or collective bargaining. We’re also barred from striking. We have no recourse except to appeal to those few sympathetic political figures (like the Governor) who might be able to stand in the way of this. The DPI and the Legislature, who created PEPSC, are just looking for another way to undercut public education (without just coming out and doing it openly) so that they can move on to the privatizing that they really want to do but that the public at large still opposes. Driving away experienced teachers by undercutting their pay and heaping new burdens on us is just their latest scheme.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Strikes have always been illegal until workers struck long enough to make them legal.
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true
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“Driving away experienced teachers by undercutting their pay and heaping new burdens on us is just their latest scheme.”
It’s not the latest scheme. It’s been the scheme for decades.
It was the goal behind NCLB , Common Core , VAM, “Personalized Learning” and is also the goal behind the “Cult Sewer” of folks like DeSantis and Abbott.
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it is those unwanted experienced teachers who see their game
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More than testing or score craze, it is corporate reform personified in NC public schools. In my opinion, that is the result of a number of past policy actions and none can be blamed on one political persuasion. Money and tidy fixes that fit onto spreadsheets seduce often and it’s as if we sold our public schools up the river a decade ago and now it’s the remnants of corporate reform still lingering. In fact, it’s sad to watch the trends that have taken hold (what I’ve learned largely from reading this blog) several years after they are unleashed in other places. To hear leadership tout the kool-aid (as they desperately and genuinely do want to hang on to what is left of our state public schooling as we once conceived of it).
Corporate Reform. Working in a public school is like working in an Applebees.
Survival of the _________________ (fill in the blank) is the name of the game in education anymore.
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True statements. (from a retired teacher from Texas)
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The standardized-test-based “Value-Added Method” (VAM) of evaluating teachers has been thoroughly trashed by the very people who know the most about it: The American Statistical Association (ASA), the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, and they know a thing or two about data and measurement. The ASA slammed the deceptively-labeled ‘Value-Added Method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers because VAM falsely claims to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the ‘value’ a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been. But the ASA lays bare the fact that THESE FORMULAS CAN’T ACTUALLY DO THIS with reliability and validity. It’s pure political ideology to claim that VAM based on student test scores reflects teacher effectiveness.
In its official statement, the ASA points out the following and many other failings of testing-based VAM:
“System-level conditions” include everything from overcrowded and underfunded classrooms to district-and site-level management of the schools and to student poverty.
A copy of the VAM-slamming ASA Statement should be posted on the union bulletin board at every school site throughout our nation and should be explained to every teacher by their union at individual site faculty meetings so that teachers are aware of what it says about how invalid it is to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers or principals — and teachers’ and principals’ unions should fight all evaluations based on student test scores with the ASA statement as a good foundation for their fight.
Fight back! Never, never, never give up!
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You are correct about the American Statistical Association’s censure of VAM to evaluate individual teachers. State after state insists on using a completely discredited measure.
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What’s happening in NoCar right now is painful to watch, and I feel terrible for everyone there, including my family teaching in public schools. I’m compelled to talk about Los Angeles this evening, though, so please pardon me for going off topic.
You’ve maybe heard about the disaster in L.A. this weekend. On Sunday, a recording of three city council members making heinously racist comments was posted on Reddit. They called Black people some things I won’t repeat. They clearly delineated their view of L.A. as us versus them along racial lines. One of the three resigned yesterday, and the other two, well, let’s just say they’d better resign soon because of the powerfully emotional backlash.
Who are these three? Charter school and standardized testing supporters. Resigned Council President Nury Martinez ran for City Council after her term on the LAUSD School Board during the first Obama administration. She brought failed policies of school choice and — gag — failed Superintendent John Deasy and all the garbage that came with him.
Council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo have also a long history of loudly supporting privatization and testing. They’ve had a heavy hand in appointing LACOE people who have opposed teachers at every turn, including and especially during the 2019 strike. The racist comments do not suggest this was an isolated incident; they reveal an underlying culture of hate in the city of “angels”. People think little of one another. The three council members are connected to many other politicians, including former and current school board members.
Racism is part of the culture of school “reform”. It is not enough for them all to resign in shame. A deeper investigation into the culture of charter and testing racism and hate is appropriate. Los Angeles must alert itself to the dangers of this culture. Brief anger is not enough. Change is needed. Progressive change is needed.
And Go Dodgers!
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Connecting anything to a standardized test is a fools mission. I quote my book “A FAILED SYSTEM “: “If that testing day is highly stressful for a majority of students in a single school, and they are piling that on top of a stressful environment, the school will become a low scoring school.”.
According to Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, “… we saw that a stressful environment really coordinates three kinds of responses in the body: an immune response, a metabolic response, and a behavioral response. … what I believe is early in life, children are getting this information, life is going to br tough. And they are kind of altering multiple systems to deal with hard life ”
Back to my writings. “Stress is not the only road block to learning. According to many studies, your cognitive function, attention span, and capacity to learn and think creatively all suffer when you trade ( away ) sleep or rest …
The schools whose students have more roadblocks to learning will be lower scoring schools. The difficulty is those schools will not know which students have those roadblocks so they must have high expectations for all. When some students are slow to respond in the classroom, teachers must adapt to taking kids from where they are constantly moving forward. The great teachers are the ones who adapt. The lower quality teachers are those who focus on test scores. They should write their tiny little brains around that.
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I agree with this!
Mental health needs are through the roof as is child and teen suicide and I do believe the culture of schools is feeding some of that.
Never has Pink Floyd meant so much!!
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