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US DOE Struggles to Prove That VAM Works, But It Doesn’t

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2014 //
12

As is well known, the U. S. Department of Education zealously believes–like Michelle Rhee–that low test scores are caused by “bad” teachers. The way to find these ineffective teachers, the theory goes, is to see whose students get higher scores and whose don’t. That’s known as value-added measurement (VAM), and the DOE used Race to the Top to persuade or bribe most states to use it to discover who should be terminated.

As we also know, things have not worked out too well, as some Teachers of the Year were fired; some got a bonus one year, then got fired the next year. In many states, teachers are rated by the scores of students they never taught. The overall effect of VAM has been demoralization, even among those with high scores because they know the ratings are arbitrary.

For some reason, teachers don’t like to “win ” at the expense of their colleagues and they can spot a phony deal a mile away.

But the U.S. DOE won’t give up, so they released a research brief attempting to show that VAM does work!

But Audrey Amrein Beardsley deconstructs the brief and shows that it is a mix of ho-hum, old-hat and wrong-headed assumptions.

It’s true (but not new) that disadvantaged students have less access to the best teachers (e.g., NBCT, advanced degrees, expertise in content areas (although as Beardsley says, the brief doesn’t suggest such things matter).

It is true, that “Students’ access to effective teaching varies across districts. There is indeed a lot of variation in terms of teacher quality across districts, thanks largely to local (and historical) educational policies (e.g., district and school zoning, charter and magnet schools, open enrollment, vouchers and other choice policies promoting public school privatization), all of which continue to perpetuate these problems.”

She writes:

“What is most relevant here, though, and in particular for readers of this blog, is that the authors of this brief used misinformed approaches when writing this brief and advancing their findings. That is, they used VAMs to examine the extent to which disadvantaged students receive “less effective teaching” by defining “less effective teaching” using only VAM estimates as the indicators of effectiveness, and as relatively compared to other teachers across the schools and districts in which they found that such grave disparities exist. All the while, not once did they mention how these disparities very likely biased the relative estimates on which they based their main findings.

Most importantly, they blindly agreed to a largely unchecked and largely false assumption that the teachers caused the relatively low growth in scores rather than the low growth being caused by the bias inherent in the VAMs being used to estimate the relative levels of “effective teaching” across teachers. This is the bias that across VAMs is still, it seems weekly, becoming more apparent and of increasing concern.”

VAM in the real world is Junque Science.

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, U.S. Department of Education

Reader: Whole Brain Teaching is Psychological Child Abuse

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2014 //
71

A reader posted the following comment about “Whole Brain Teaching.” By the way, I too recommend Elisabeth Bruehl-Young’s book Childism. It is an informative and in some ways a frightening book about how adults abuse children and think it is normal behavior.

 

This method of “conditioning” children with authoritarian fear and intimidation is “abusive”. It is the same as “bullying”. It’s purpose is to “break” children. Adults who use and teach this method obviously grew up in a dysfunctional environment of “bullying”, so it is “normal” for them, but it is NOT normal by society’s standards.

In Marine Boot Camp it is effective for training adults to be “killers”, but with young children it will condition them to become obedient and loyal to abusive authority. It will
condition children to become “slaves” or robots.

When young children are trapped in an environment of authoritarian fear and intimidation, they can be trained to do anything that the ‘master” demands. They can be “conditioned” to memorize facts to pass test, or clap their hands in unison, or become sex slaves.

Since “conditioning” is on a spectrum, the damage is determined by the amount of “control”. If children have this authoritarian method used both at home and at school, the psychological damage will be severe.

Another name for this method is “dominance” or the slave/master style of conditioning. Children will become “self-punishing” or masochistic. Many New York psychologists have started calling this “self punishing” behavior in children the “Common Core Syndrome”.

When these “broken” children become adults, they will have a “fragmented self”. They will not have their own identity or a strong sense of self, since they were forced as children to model after their abusers. Their identity will be codependent with their abusers. Their behaviors would most likely become in adulthood the psychiatric disorders of Borderline, Narcissistic, or DID.

This harsh authoritarian management style for training children is like a psychological plague that has become increasingly pervasive in schools for three decades. We can now see the products of this poisonous pedagogy in our adult society.

People who are in charge of children and are insecure with themselves (have paranoia and fear the children will get out of control), will have an obsessive need for control. This is the hallmark of a bully. It has caused our teachers and administrators to be more like gestapo than empathic humans. Unless we learn to recognize “bullying”, and call it what it is, we will allow this paranoia of “managing” and “training” children to bring on
“totalitarianism”.

A book that describes this method of”scapegoating’ children is called CHILDISM, by the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth young-Bruehl. I strongly recommend everyone read it.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Teacher: Who Is Destroying the Teaching Profession?

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2014 //
45

No Child Left Behind became law in January 2002. Twelve years later, it is a discredited law that remains on the books only because Congress can’t agree doesn’t know what to do next. They are trapped in the quagmire of a failed accountability system and they don’t know how to get out.

But Race to the Top compounded the basic error of NCLB–relying on testing and accountability to “reform” schools–and it added a new ingredient: a frontal attack on teachers as the primary cause of low test scores. Its effort to quantify the value of teachers by the test scores of their students has not only made testing the sine qua non of daily education but has destroyed the joy of learning and harmed the teaching profession. Race to the Top made teaching to the test a necessity. Every time you hear either President Obama or Secretary Duncan say that teachers should not teach to the test, but they should be rewarded for higher scores and fired for lower scores, remember that this is what hypocrisy sounds like.

To see the harm of Race to the Top through the eyes of disillusioned and disheartened teachers, read this comment:

I met a friend for lunch today. She was a colleague with whom I taught, up until last year, before I moved to another school within our district (an urban Title I District which serves a demographic of primarily Hispanic, English Language Learners). As we talked, we both discussed our disenchantment with a broken system and mused about moving to a mythical place where we would be afforded more creative freedom to teach in way that was deeply impactful and meaningful. We talked about how our anger had turned to apathy, and how we feared getting lost in the oblivion of bitterness and burn out. We talked about how the instruction of our students had been reduced to district directives putting our students at the mercy of mind-numbing computer tutorials and scripted skinnarian intervention programs. But mostly, we talked about how, through all of this, we have been slowly and systematically robbed of the relationship we have with our students.

Let me explain how I came to know this colleague. She is a middle school social studies teacher and, hands-down, one of the finest teachers with whom I have ever had the pleasure of working. I have drawn from her strength, as I witnessed her question the “status quo”, stand up against arbitrary policy, and show a depth of understanding for each and every student that crosses the threshold of her classroom. I was the special education teacher who supported the identified students on her team, for which she was the team leader. Never, in my twenty-four years of teaching, had I heard so many students express such a love of social studies, or a specific teacher, for that matter. When I would ask why, the response was generally the same. “I don’t know, she just makes it fun.” Or, “It’s just really calm in her classroom and you want to learn.” Or, “She just cares about us.” This came from Middle School Special Education students, many of whom were reading between a first and third grade reading level, but nonetheless, experienced success in her classroom.

So, why is this story significant? This year our district has taken Special Education and intervention to new heights. We have been directed to pull out our lowest twenty-five percent during science, social studies, and elective classes when providing support. Consequently, many students get one day per week in the classes that many typically thrive in and enjoy the most. We are over-dosing, yet essentially depleting, our most vulnerable, struggling students. When I questioned my administrator on this directive last year before leaving, her response was something like, “Well, who really needs social studies in life? Who needs to know where this country is on a map? It’s just not that important.” After attempting to recover from her flippant, uninformed comments, my response to her was, “But it’s the only class many students like and she teaches reading and writing through her content. Plus she is masterful at meeting the needs of every level of student.” She hemmed and hawed and finally conceded that that was just the way it was.

Now that I think about it, I believe the students just like my friend and feel safe in her classroom, regardless of what an excellent teacher she is. They are learning despite themselves. This, my friends, is not quantifiable. This is about relationship. Yet, given the new teacher evaluation mandates, she will be measured and evaluated on the progress of students who spend eighty percent of their week in front of a computer or being read scripted questions, verbatim, which must be answered on the cue of a bell or clicker; pre-packaged programs which, by their very nature, prevent inquiry, creative thinking, and most importantly, a relationship with a trusted teacher.

“Where do we go from here?” we asked each other. I don’t know. I do know that we have both found ourselves mourning a profound loss. Then my friend shared her own personal insight. “It’s like when you are in a bad relationship”, she said. “You start to compromise who you are. First, you let go of this. Then you let go of another thing. Pretty soon you realize that you just can’t go on because you aren’t being true to yourself anymore.” I am glad I met my friend for lunch, because she continues to give me the courage to find my own voice. She once said to me that people who have a gift for teaching urban middle school students have a moral obligation to continue the work. Now I see her wavering, not because she does not love her students, but because she cannot be true to the relationship, and ultimately herself. I am terrified that this will be yet another a piece of the carnage left behind in this battle–just one more casualty soon forgotten in the sweeping, dispassionate corporate take over of our American Public Education System. But even more, I am soul sick for the students who may never have the opportunity to cross the threshold of her classroom.

Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching

Your Introduction to “Whole Brain Teaching”

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2014 //
154

Prepare yourself.

 

Thousands of readers opened the “Confessions of a Teacher in a No-Excuses Charter School.”

 

Many were horrified. Some couldn’t believe what she wrote.

 

Some said that there are certain kinds of students who come from dysfunctional homes and need this sort of structure.

 

She sent me this video, which is a demonstration of robotic responses in “Whole Brain Teaching.” 

 

What do you think of this as education?

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Teachers and Teaching

NC: How to Waste Taxpayer Dollars on a Useless Bonus Plan

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2014 //
10

Governor McCrory has had a new idea.

Given the terrible morale of teachers in his state and the exodus of veteran teachers, it is important for the state to act quickly to support its teachers.

But that is not his idea.

 

He wants to use Race to the Top dollars to pay $10,000 each to 450 teachers across the state.

Since merit pay and bonuses have not had a positive effect anywhere else, consider this just a way of getting rid of RTTT money fast.

He previously announced a plan to pay new teachers more, which will be a boost for the TFA that the far-right governor and legislature are bringing to the state, but he has no plans to raise the salary of experienced teachers.

The proposal sounds similar to a plan McCrory floated last summer, when he announced his intention to use $30 million of Race to the Top funds for an Education Innovation Fund that would reward 1,000 top teachers with $10,000 stipends. That proposal was met with criticism by State Board of Education members at a meeting shortly after his announcement.

In September, NC Policy Watch reached out to Gov. McCrory’s education advisor, Eric Guckian, to see if the Education Innovation Fund was on the table. While the name seemed to have changed by then, policymakers were still moving forward with the idea.

“The goal of the Governor’s Teacher Empowerment Network is the same as the Innovation Fund was, to get the money in teachers’ pockets,” said Erin Gray, Guckian’s assistant. “However, the process of how the teachers receive this money is different. We want to be able to reward as many teachers as possible with this network and produce innovative [sic], master, leader teachers to not only benefit from the extra pay, but will be active to reform schools and lead other teachers.”

Today’s announcement about the GTN comes at a time when the state’s entire teacher workforce has not received a raise since 2008, with the exception of a 1.2 percent pay increase in 2010. Recently ranked 46th in the nation in teacher pay for the second year in a row, North Carolina is also dead last in teacher salary growth over the past decade.

– See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2014/03/24/mccrory-announces-plan-to-give-450-teachers-10000-bonuses-with-race-to-the-top-funds/#sthash.USLAC2Vj.dpuf

 

 

Categories North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

What Makes a Great Teacher? This Is What Students Think

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2014 //
22

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and the National
Council on Teacher Quality think they know what makes a great
teacher. A great teacher is the one whose students got higher test
scores this year than last year. A great teacher, they think,
brooks no excuses. In the no excuses charter schools, the teachers
snap their fingers and demand immediate compliance with commands.
Nicholas Ferroni, who teaches teenagers, decided to ask his
students what they think make a great teacher. He wrote about what
they said on Huffington Post. Here
are their answers. The answers that occur most
frequently are “caring,” “dedicated,” “kind.” No one mentions test
scores. Who do you remember as your greatest teacher? What did he
or she do that made them the best?

Categories Students, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

NC Loses Another NBCT Teacher

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2014 //
22

Governor Pat McCrory and the Legislature in North Carolina are doing their best to get rid of the state’s’s star teachers, and they are succeeding.

The state is losing large numbers of experienced teachers, because of low salaries. Teachers’ salaries have been flat for six years and are now 46th in the nation.

This National Board Certified Teacher quit, and she wrote a letter to the governor to explain why.

A 13-year veteran, Melissa Taylor wrote:

“To Whom It May Concern,

It is with great sadness that I submit my written notification of resignation from my teaching position with Wake County Public School Systems effective 3/14/14. I have found it more and more difficult to pay my bills every month and continue to fall further and further into debt, not to mention the feeling of absolute disrespect that I feel every time a new “expectation” is mandated for our classrooms while all of our resources are being taken away. I had no choice but to search for a job that will allow me to provide for my family and to pay back the thousands of dollars in college loans that I took to be a teacher. I find the condition of our education system in NC to be heartbreaking. It seems that our leaders and law makers have completely forgotten what is the most important thing here, the kids! We are failing our students, our teachers and our future. Please accept this letter as my official resignation from Wake County Public Schools.

Sincerely,

Melissa Taylor, M.Ed, NBCT”

Do you think Governor McCrory cares? Or will he gladly full her job with a TFA who will leave before vesting for a pension?

Categories North Carolina, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

Massachusetts Kindergarten Teacher: I Quit

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
48

I am really sorry to have to publish posts like this. I don’t want to see any teacher quit, especially the veteran teachers who are needed to help new teachers learn the ropes. And yet, there is a massive outflow of teaching talent from our public schools, caused by the soul-deadening testing regime that has throttled creativity and independent thought among teachers and students like. The spirit of standardization is alive in the land, and teachers feel they are under assault if they do not conform and comply. Some just can’t do it. I urge them to stay and fight, for the sake of the children, but for many teachers the conditions have become intolerable. I know that the modal year of teaching experience has dropped from 15 in 1988 to only one or two today; that is a frightening statistic. I have been in schools where no one had more than five or six years of experience. That is awful. Some education schools report a dramatic decline in enrollments. At some point, we must attribute the deliberate attacks on the teaching profession to the so-called reform movement that holds teachers “accountable” for everything wrong in the lives of children. Researchers state without question, even conservative researchers like Eric Hanushek, that the influence of family far exceeds that of the teacher, yet reformers have turned teachers into their targets while doing nothing to improve the lives of children or families.

This article was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post. As Strauss writes, “Susan Sluyter is a veteran teacher of young children in the Cambridge Public Schools who has been connected to the district for nearly 20 years and teaching for more than 25 years. Last month she sent a resignation letter ( “with deep love and a broken heart”) explaining that she could no longer align her understanding of how young children learn best in safe, developmentally appropriate environments with the testing and data collection mandates imposed on teachers today.”

Read Sluyter’s entire letter. It begins like this:

When I first began teaching more than 25 years ago, hands-on exploration, investigation, joy and love of learning characterized the early childhood classroom.  I’d describe our current period as a time of testing, data collection, competition and punishment. One would be hard put these days to find joy present in classrooms.

I think it started with No Child Left Behind years ago.  Over the years I’ve seen this climate of data fascination seep into our schools and slowly change the ability for educators to teach creatively and respond to children’s social and emotional needs.  But this was happening in the upper grades mostly.  Then it came to kindergarten and PreK, beginning a number of years ago with a literacy initiative that would have had us spending the better part of each day teaching literacy skills through various prescribed techniques.  ”What about math, science, creative expression and play?” we asked.  The kindergarten teachers fought back and kept this push for an overload of literacy instruction at bay for a number of years.

Next came additional mandated assessments.  Four and five year olds are screened regularly each year for glaring gaps in their development that would warrant a closer look and securing additional supports (such as O.T, P.T, and Speech Therapy) quickly.   Teachers were already assessing each child three times a year to understand their individual literacy development and growth.  A few years ago, we were instructed to add periodic math assessments after each unit of study in math.  Then last year we were told to include an additional math assessment on all Kindergarten students (which takes teachers out of the classroom with individual child testing, and intrudes on classroom teaching time.)

Every year, the mandates grew more academic and less child-friendly. The demand for standards and assessments grew more insistent, more detailed, more onerous:

There is a national push, related to the push for increased academics in Early Childhood classrooms, to cut play out of the kindergarten classroom.  Many kindergartens across the country no longer have sand tables, block areas, drama areas and arts and crafts centers.  This is a deeply ill-informed movement, as all early childhood experts continuously report that 4, 5 and 6 year olds learn largely through play.  Play is essential to healthy development and deep foundational learning at the kindergarten level.  We kindergarten teachers in Cambridge have found ourselves fighting to keep play alive in the kindergarten classroom.

Last year we heard that all kindergarten teachers across the state of Massachusetts were to adopt one of a couple of in-depth comprehensive assessments to perform with each kindergarten child three times a year.  This requires much training and an enormous amount of a teacher’s time to carry out for each child.  Cambridge adopted the Work Sampling System, which is arguably a fine tool for assessment, but it requires a teacher to leave the classroom and focus on assessment even more, and is in addition to other assessments already being done.  The negative impact of this extensive and detailed assessment system is that teachers are forced to learn yet another new and complicated tool, and are required to spend significantly less time in the classroom during the three assessment periods, as they assess, document evidence to back up their observations, and report on each child.  And it distracts teachers yet again from their teaching focus, fracturing their concentration on teaching goals, projects, units of study, and the flow of their classroom curriculum.

Conditions for teaching kindergarten children grew increasingly oppressive. Finally, on February 12, Susan Sluyter submitted her resignation letter. She concluded it in this way:

I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same:  to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom.  I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity.  I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away.  I felt anger rise inside me.  I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly.  I did not feel I was leaving my job.  I felt then and feel now that my job left me.

It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.

The so-called reform movement is destroying the lives of teachers and hurting children. It must be stopped. Soon, our classrooms will be filled with temps who come to teach for a few years, knowing only one thing: test scores matter most. None of the reformers would do this to their own children. Why do we let them do it to Other People’s Children–and to ours? This madness must end.

 

 

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Are You Attending American Education Research Association Meeting in Philadelphia?

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
13

If the answer is yes, please come to one or both of the two
sessions where I am speaking on April 3. I will give the
John Dewey Society lecture at the
Convention Center, 100 Level, Room 114, from 4-7 pm. (Lots of time
for discussion). My topic: “Does Evidence
Matter?” Fair warning: The room holds only 600
people. Before the Dewey lecture, I will join Philadelphia parent
activist Helen Gym and Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin
(chair) in a special Presidential session from 2:15 to 3:45,
on the same level in Room 121B The
title of the session is: Rising to the
Challenges of Quality and Equality:
The Promise of a Public
Pedagogy If you join me at the early session,
you will have to race with me to the lecture, and the room may be
full.

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Research, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: Why Standardized Testing Sucks

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2014 //
40

Peter Greene here explains what most teachers know about standardized testing. It is a monumental waste of time and money. It doesn’t reflect what students were taught or learned.

He writes:

“Standardized testing is completely inauthentic assessment, and students know that. The young ones may blame themselves, but students of all ages see that there is no connection between the testing and their education, their lives, anything or anyone at all in their real existence. Standardized test are like driving down a highway on vacation where every five miles you have to stop, get out of the car, and make three basketball shot attempts from the free throw line– annoying, intrusive, and completely unrelated to the journey you’re on. If someone stands at the free throw line and threatens you with a beating if you miss, it still won’t make you conclude that the requirement is not stupid and pointless.

“And so the foundation of all this data generation, all this evaluation, all this summative formative bibbitive bobbitive boobosity, is a student performing an action under duress that she sees as stupid and pointless and disconnected from anything real in life. What are the odds that this task under these conditions truly measures anything at all? And on that tissue-thin foundation, we build a whole structure of planning students’s futures, sculpting instruction, evaluating teachers. There is nothing anywhere that comes close in sheer hubritic stupidity.”

The only point he overlooks is that standardized testing mirrors socioeconomic status and distributes benefits and sanctions along the SES curve.

Categories Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching
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