Attack VAM before it is too late

Classroom teachers and building principals must join together and attack Value-Added Modeling (VAM) as a method for classroom teacher evaluation much less a measure of student performance and teacher effectiveness.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, joined together to say that “the state could no longer tolerate a public school system they said was failing students” and ratcheted up their attacks on teachers’ unions and school administrators.

Gov. Cuomo, declared that “we have to realize that our schools are not an employment program” and he vowed to press for the speedy establishment of a statewide teacher evaluation system. Later, both Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg each identified their real concern, that a stalemate over teacher evaluations is endangering a billion dollars in federal education aid.

Mayor Bloomberg’s headline education proposal from his “State of the City” address last week was to fire up to half of the teachers in dozens of low-performing schools.

According to the New York Times, Gov. Cuomo will announce that he will require the creation of an evaluation system as a condition for school districts to receive a scheduled increase in state education aid. In 2010, the State Legislature approved the framework of a new evaluation system that would be more specific and would allow for tougher sanctions against teachers who are rated ineffective, but efforts to put that system in place have stalled in New York City and elsewhere over issues like the appeals process for teachers and the role that student test scores would play in teacher evaluations.

Gov. Cuomo vowed to force the evaluation issue to secure the $700 million that is in jeopardy because New York has not instituted an evaluation system, which it promised to do when it sought money through the federal Race to the Top program. Under his plan, Gov. Cuomo will effectively order the statewide teachers’ union and the State Education Department to settle a continuing legal dispute over evaluations and to agree to standards for the evaluation system. If they cannot, he will seek to impose an evaluation system as part of the state budget. Once the evaluation system has been set up, either by agreement or by fiat, school districts would have until January 2013 to put it into effect. At that point, the official said, any district that had not done so would lose the promised increase in state education aid.

The responses from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which represents city teachers and the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) show that the teachers unions in New York State do not speak with a common voice. The UFT President told reporters that his union had “no disagreement with the governor over the evaluations,” and did not object to tying the increase in education aid to the creation of the evaluation system.

The Lawsuit

The NYSUT action is not looking to dismantle or even negate the new evaluation process and procedures that it helped to create through a “partnership with the New York State Department of Education (SED) partnership in May 2010 as part of New York State’s attempt to join the federal Race to the Top. The NYSUT only asked the Court to strike down just six specific provisions of the new Regulations. Even if these six portions of the regulations are declared invalid, the rest of the regulations will still mandate that schools, BOCES, and school districts move forward with planning for the new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) procedures to enhance teacher and principal effectiveness.

Three of the six challenged provisions are changes that were recommended in the Governor’s May 13, 2011 letter and included in the revised regulations approved by the Regents at its May 16 meeting.

What kind of settlement can classroom teachers and principals expect?

From past experience it should be obvious that any settlement will be political not educational; expedient, not principled. In return for allowing the Unions to continue to represent the teachers and foregoing any attempt to curtail the collective bargaining rights of teachers as some States have already done, the unions will accept an evaluation program that will allow summary dismissal of up to 50% of the teachers in our “underperforming” schools today. Teachers who have been doing their best with little support from parents, administrators,, elected officials, and the general public and who have devoted their lives to trying to make a difference in schools where social and economic conditions conspire to thwart their every effort.

Why? Because all those teachers will be replaced and the dues check-off will continue so the Unions will see no change in their revenues. As long as the jobs are there, so are the dues. In this struggle, teachers have been come interchangeable fungible commodities.

The State Education Department will continue to grow ever more powerful and authoritarian as it continues to lick the boots of the United States Department of Education, ultimate source of funds to maintain their growing bureaucracy.

And what about the classroom teachers and the building principals?

Very few of you are old enough to remember the plight of public school teachers from the start of the Great Depression through the conclusion of the Korean War—the days before teachers were permitted to join together and exercise collective bargaining rights. I am just old enough to remember the end of those days and the first glorious days of organizing classroom teachers into collective bargaining units—unions.

Before there were teachers unions, classroom teachers were nothing more than medieval serfs. There was no job security, teachers served at the whim of school boards which could create and impose rules and regulations that require teachers to behave as the all-powerful school board dictated. There were certainly standards and accountability of teachers in those days. The school board set the standards and the teachers were accountable. The ultimate standard of accountability was whether an individual teacher “pleased” the school board. If not they were terminated and often denied the opportunity to teach elsewhere in the same region. Women teachers were paid less than men regardless of their qualifications and the excellence of their teaching. Why? Because that is what the men on the school board believed.

Today, new teachers are more like the indentured servants of colonial America. Their overwhelming student loan debts require them to work regardless of the conditions and stifle any meaningful challenges to working conditions or standards imposed upon them.

Soon, if the federal and state Departments of Education, the economists, our elected officials and the special interests they serve have their way, the crown jewel of American democracy and the engine of the American free enterprise system—our public school education system—will be little more than a pile of rubble on the dung heap of history.

What can our classroom teachers and their principals do?

Now, while there is still time, demand that your collective bargaining representatives, your unions, take immediate direct legal action not just on behalf of the teachers and principals but on behalf of the teachers and principals as the advocates and representatives of the students who are so unfortunate as to be in danger of serious, permanent, and irreparable damage by the inappropriate standards, regulations, and procedures imposed upon our public schools, their classroom teachers and building principals by an unaccountable totalitarian federal and state bureaucracy. These are meaningful and substantive Constitutional issues not trivial discussions about procedural Regulations.

The classroom teachers and their principals must challenge the basic premises of the two major federal programs, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. The classroom teachers and their building principals must demand national goals for excellence in education that will assure all people of the United States for generations to come that our next generation of 18-year-old voters will have gained sufficient knowledge during their years in the public schools to cast informed, intelligent votes on complex issues of long-standing import and effect while actively and carefully evaluating the qualifications of those seeking elective office.

The classroom teachers and their building principals must demonstrate to the American public that they are the last remaining advocates of and for the children in their charge. Only classroom teachers can educate the children in our public schools.

The public has a right to the best qualified and most dedicated classroom teachers that can be found throughout the country. The public also has the non-delegable duty to support those classroom teachers everyday.

Public support for our classroom teachers and our public school system is more than just sending money to governments at all levels and taking back a small portion to distribute, generally inequitably, to each public school district. Public support for our classroom teachers and our public school system requires total commitment from every family to their child in school and the teachers who are being asked to educate them.

The public and the parents of our public school children are the ultimate evaluators of teacher effectiveness yet they are totally excluded from the process. It is about time that the classroom teachers and the building principals reached out beyond the Parent Teachers Associations and into the community for support.

Only classroom teachers can explain the failings of the education reforms being proposed by every elected official seeking reelection and every talking head looking for convenient essentially inarticulate scapegoat. Only classroom teachers, while there is still time, and while they still have substantial community respect, can challenge the educational bureaucracy at the state and federal level and all of the economic leeches which feed off their “Regulations”.