Sinquefield pushing it, but new study shows using test scores to evaluate teachers doesn't work

It appears likely that Missouri voters will soon decide whether teachers should be evaluated and paid based on scores their students make on standardized tests.

Retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield has poured more than $1.3 million into an effort to put the issue, coupled with the elimination of teacher tenure, on the ballot.

The push across the country to make teachers "accountable" has led to the creation of value-added formulas that supposedly show the contributions that teachers make to the test scores of their students. What most of them have shown is that the highest scores are posted by the teachers who manage to get the best students.

Furthermore, as you might expect, these formulas do not take into account any of the other factors that go into test scores- everything from a student's poverty level to abuse at home, emotional problems, or even being under the weather on the day of the big tests.

Even without the ballot initiative, Missouri has been moving in the direction of basing part of a teacher's evaluation on test scores and the reason is purely financial. The Obama Administration's Education Department has made it clear that if you do not make scores a part of the process, you are not going to be receiving any federal money, and that, of course, is the language that speaks with the most clarity to our state officials. The moves have also been necessary in order for states to receive relief from the horribly conceived No Child Left Behind.

So in order to rake in Race to the Top money and to satisfy billionaires who have made it clear that they are not friends of public education, we continue moving in the direction of a nightmarish scenario where even great teachers can end up losing pay or their jobs because of the luck of the draw on which students they receive. And with the stakes raised for teachers and administrators to improve test scores, we are already seeing increased instances of cheating.

What the "reformers" who are pushing for these so-called value-added metrics are conveniently ignoring is that studies are showing that the system simply does not work.

One such study, released Tuesday by the American Educational Research Association finds little correlation between these value-added measures between testing and effective teaching. The shocker is that the study is based on data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been pushing the new methods of teacher evaluation.

One of the researchers who released the study, Morgan S. Polikoff of the University of Southern California, says the results show that value-added metrics are nowhere near being ready to use in teacher evaluations. Yet we are moving full speed ahead.

As long as we continue to believe that all of education's ills come from having "poor' teachers and never address the many other factors that contribute to student failure we are doomed to shortsighted reforms that in the long run will damage public education far more than it will help it.

Ravitch: "Reformers" want to dismantle public education, teaching profession

In a blog post today, top education blogger Diane Ravitch, a former official in the Department of Education under President George H. W. Bush, offers her year-in-review, including some positive things that have happened in education in 2013.

However, she opens her post with this spot-on assessment of what has been occurring across the United States:

More and more parents and teachers are awakening to the realization that the word “reform” has been hijacked by people who want to dismantle public education and the teaching profession. Those who have boldly named themselves the “reformers” are all too often working on behalf of turning public dollars over to private interests and to strip teachers of any due process, any collective-bargaining rights, any salary increment linked to their experience or their education. These so-called “reformers” reify test scores, making them the be-all and end-all of education and are eager to fire teachers and principals whose students don’t get the test scores that the computer says they should, and equally eager to close public schools with low scores and replace them with privately managed schools that all too often escape the same scrutiny as the public schools they replaced. The “reformers” care not at all about class size, indeed, they say they would prefer larger classes with “better teachers,” even though teachers say they can be better teachers with smaller classes, especially given the diversity of students in most public schools today, some of whom have disabilities, some of whom are learning English.

Our educators and schools now live under a Sword of Damocles fashioned by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Those who cannot produce higher scores are doomed. This is madness. This is a game rigged to harm public schools, which is a fundamental institution of our democracy.
Check out her post to find out the successes people are starting to have fighting against the "reformers."

2013 in Review: A Warning to Young People; Don't Become Teachers

This post became my most popular on Huffington Post, with more than a quarter of a million Facebook likes at last count. Ironically, I submitted this to Huffington Post one day before I was removed from my classroom and escorted out of East Middle School by a police officer.

(The following is my latest Huffington Post blog.)

Nothing I have ever done has brought me as much joy as I have received from teaching children how to write the past 14 years. Helping young writers grow and mature has been richly rewarding and I would not trade my experiences for anything.

That being said, if I were 18 years old and deciding how I want to spend my adult years, the last thing I would want to become is a classroom teacher.

Classroom teachers, especially those who are just out of college and entering the profession, are more stressed and less valued than at any previous time in our history.

2013 in Review: Message to President Obama: My students deserve better

(From Feb. 13, 2013) It certainly was depressing last night to discover that the only reason I am standing in front of a classroom of eighth grade students day after day, year after year, is so at some point they can be delivered job ready to some employer.

Whatever happened to the loftier goals of teaching young people the thinking skills needed to succeed in life, the ability to function not only as members of a faceless workforce, but also as key components in directing the civic and political discourse of this country?

In one short paragraph during last night's State of the Union Message, President Barack Obama spelled out today's definition of high school education.