Vote Down the Teacher Evals

Junk Science in the Service of Union-Busting

New York City schools chancellor Dennis Wolcott has set a deadline of December 21 for the United Federation of Teachers to agree to a “deal” for teacher evaluations including student scores on standardized tests, in order for the city to qualify for $250 million in federal funds from the “Race to the Top” program of the Obama administration. At today’s UFT Delegate Assembly, the M.O.R.E. caucus will (try to) present a motion for a referendum to let teachers vote on whether or not to accept an agreement on teacher evals. We definitely need to vote on any deal that is cooked up, and not just in the D.A., which is to democracy as junk food is to nutrition. However, a “referendum” falls short.  We need to decisively vote it down in every school in this city, and then enforce that resounding “no” with mobilizations of union power.  Because there are thousands of jobs at stake.

Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg and his paid front groups like Educators4Excellence have been blasting their anti-teacher trash talk in the tabloids. Bloomberg said last week he’s not signing off on any teacher evals that doesn't “hold their feet to the fire”!  This whole charade is based on a lie, attempting to blame teachers for the failings of the public school system. No, those responsible for the increasing dysfunctionality of the school system are capitalist politicians like Republican Bloomberg and Democrats Obama in the White House and Cuomo in the state house, and the big business forces behind the whole corporate education “reform” movement who are deliberately creating chaos in order to privatize public education. They want to turn the billion dollar education industry into a “profit platform.” The hedge fund operators are funding charter schools because they see them as a cash cow with steady cash flow. The people who wrecked the economy in 2008 want to take a wrecking ball to the schools. And teacher evals are a key part of their plans.

Many teachers posting on the blogs are concerned that a pending UFT deal on teacher evaluations will be a sellout.  In fact, agreeing to any version of the plans for a four-point rating system will be entering on a slippery slope designed to push teachers out of the system. All link student test scores to teacher evaluation. At issue is only what percent will be standardized tests, what percent other phony measures of “student progress.” It’s not just the percentages, the whole concept is a hoax. Pedagogically it's garbage. These supposedly “objective” scores are bogus science in the service of union-busting. The UFT should have said “no”  to this from the get-go, but the leadership has tried to deal with this attack the way it always does: give in to most of what the educrats and their Wall Street bosses want, then claim a victory because they didn’t give up everything. But the UFT membership should take a strong stand against the fraud of “value added” teacher evals, and tell Wolcott, Bloomberg, Obama and his education “czar” Arne Duncan to do you know what with their RTTT bribe money. We won’t be held hostage.

Why are these schemes junk? Most teachers took courses on “Testing 101” in education school, where we learn fundamental principles of test reliability and test validity. The tests used for the “value added model” teacher evals are worthless on both counts. Test Reliability means can you reproduce similar results under similar conditions. Not with the tests administered by the NYC Department of Education. The test questions are often perverse (remember the talking pineapple!), and they have zero predictive value. All you have to do is look at the excellent and devastating research by Gary Rubenstein who rips this apart (see http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/). Take a look at his diagram showing the correlation between NYC teacher test scores from 2009 and 2010. If the tests were reliable, you should see a close correlation with a clustering of dots.

See the pattern? No you don’t, because there isn’t any. It‘s little different than what you would get from a random number generator. Or as Diane Ravitch put it earlier this year, flipping a coin would be more accurate (see the CSEW leaflet, “‘Value-Added Deal a Betrayal,” March 2012). Moreover, the windows for pass, fail and in between are liquid and fraudulent, and the grading is on a curve which ensures that a certain percentage of teachers will fail. Which is the whole point of this exercise: to drive out teachers.

Test Validity means a test is only valid if it is used for the purpose for which it is designed.   If students take a test in, English comprehension, if it is effective, that is what it measures. It doesn’t measure their writing or math skills, or the effectiveness of the teacher. In particular when tests that are designed to be diagnostic are instead used for exclusionary purposes or to measure supposed productivity, it can only be to accomplish another agenda. The City University of New York did this in 1999 when it took the Freshman Skills Assessment Tests (FSATs), intended to identify areas needing improvement or remediation, and turned them into admissions tests. The purpose was to get rid of the remnants of open admissions and keep a whole layer of students out in the name of raising “standards.”

In addition to scores on standardized tests, the union has been discussing how many points of the Danielson “rubric” for teacher evaluations should correspond to different ratings: 6 points, 3 points, all 22 points? This is crazy. The Danielson criteria were not designed to test teachers’ effectiveness, they were supposed to be diagnostic, to help find areas that could be improved. But then the education “reformers” figured out the scores could be used as a supposedly “scientific” basis to smear teachers as “failing.” And the Danielson rubric is only a particular take on education. A teacher who is terrific lecturing to students and holds their attention but doesn’t go in for collaborative learning would get a lousy score. But she or he wouldn’t be a “bad teacher.” 

In fact, as any honest education researcher will admit, the number of really ineffective teachers is relatively small, for a simple reason. If they aren’t a good fit for teaching, their own students make their life unbearable, and many quit as a result. Teacher evaluation should not be linked to pay, tenure, layoffs or any other job security issue, and it should not be left to the administrators, many of whom are now being drawn from management academies and barely spent a nano second of their lives in the classroom. Real evaluation of teacher effectiveness can only be done by other teachers along with students, school workers and parents. They all have an interest in getting real excellence in education. The DOE and its bosses are interested in destroying education, by destroying teachers’ lives. These phony tests are only part of it. Then comes leaking the results to the press, which mercilessly vilifies individuals. And the UFT tops refuse to fight it tooth and nail.

The schools should be run not by some dictatorial city bureaucracy, high-priced consultants and a mayor who would be king. Class Struggle Education Workers calls for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. Such councils of those actually involved in the education process should evaluate and select the school administrators instead of the other way around. In the meantime, we must fight these fraudulent high-stakes tests and phony teacher evaluations down the line. And don’t stop with a vote in the D.A. British teachers have struck against these fraudulent tests. In Mexico and Brazil this year, teachers struck to prevent such exams from being administered and have even occupied warehouses where the test booklets are kept to prevent them from being used (see “Teachers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Stop Work to Stop High Stakes Test,” The Internationalist, Summer 2012). This is a make or break issue for the future of teacher unionism. The bosses know it, and they’re acting accordingly. We must do no less.