Of Course Teachers Should Be Asking a LOT of Questions

by now, if they weren't so goddamned chickenshit they would get written up or fired if they dared to speak out. With the publication of these inaccurate VAM scores to "measure" teachers, parents, who are often ignorant, will push to have their kids put in the "better" teachers' classrooms and remove their kids from the "worse" teachers. Administrators will no doubt kowtow to the parents as they almost always do at the expense of the teachers.

One of the reasons civil service protections were put in place for public school teachers was to prevent this very thing and the pressure parents can put on teachers to change grades. This kind of thing is routine in private schools since parents can merely pull their kids out of school if they don't get their way which hurts the schools' "bottom line." On the public school front, lots and lots of teachers have wound up without careers because they refused to compromise their integrity and "pass" a kid who didn't deserve it or give him or her an "A" that was unmerited or refuse to cheat on standardized tests for a principal worried about how he or she looked.

Some of the consequences of publishing these dumb measures:

My prediction: We will see a tremendous push by the most skilled, demanding, and well-resourced parents to get each year’s “highly effective teacher” and for district offices to “stick” the ineffective teacher in a class (or school) where the parents are less likely to complain. Each parent will make a valid case why their child needs the highly effective teacher, or should not be with a teacher who is “developing”, terms used in the New York State system. Is this ethical or good public policy? Of course not. But if you doubt that this will occur, read the work of scholars such as Jeannie Oakes, Kevin Welner and Amy Stuart Wells about how tracking systems and the high track advantage play out in the real world. High tracks are analogous to the highly effective teacher.

I also predict that student grades assigned by a teacher labeled less than effective will be challenged. One can only imagine the lawsuits that will arise. The evaluation scores given to teachers by principals who themselves are rated less than effective, will be challenged as well. Can a teacher be fairly rated by a principal who was rated ineffective that year? And when the “ineffective principal” is dismissed, who will agree to lead that school, if the ineffective rating was based in large part on student achievement? No administrator will risk that move — achievement cannot be turned around that quickly — and the students in struggling schools will lose again.

I predict that teachers with highly effective evaluations in hand, will head for the Gold Coast of Long Island to land a higher paying teaching job. Superintendents in well resourced districts will vie for the highest share of highly effective teachers in the state. Isn’t that the rule of the marketplace that the reformers embrace? Once again, students in financially struggling schools will be left behind.

Chances are the teachers labeled "highly effective" are the ones in the richer schools and have the easier class loads, while the "ineffective" teachers are more likely to be the veteran teachers who are the better teachers who are stuck with the toughest students in the toughest schools.

It's bullshit no matter how you slice it. Remember, this is all about the money and getting rid of veteran teachers to make way for cheap bimbos right out of college.