Letter to the President

To my readers:
The following is a letter I am sending on behalf of myself and many Louisiana teachers to president Obama as part of a campaign sponsored by Diane Ravitch from her blog and Anthony Cody of the blog Living in Dialog. I am urging any educator who would like to write a letter to the President to do so by sending a copy to Anthony Cody at the email address anthony_cody@hotmail.com. Please send it before the deadline of October 17 so it can be included in the package to be sent to President Obama.

Dear President Obama:
I am a retired teacher who writes a blog for educators in Louisiana. I am absolutely appalled by the attacks on public education and the teaching profession that you and your Secretary of Education have helped to promote in Louisiana. The Race to the Top fiasco which doubled down on some of the most destructive elements of No Child Left Behind law has been promoted in Louisiana by Secretary Duncan to force the most destructive polices I have ever seen on our public education system.

Your Secretary of Education actively campaigned for the appointment of John White, an unqualified privatizer of public education to be appointed as our State Superintendent of Education. This individual was also preferred by Governor Bobby Jindal, the greatest enemy of public education and teachers Louisiana has ever seen. As I write this letter, thousands of proven highly competent and dedicated Louisiana teachers are being forced to neglect their teaching duties to prepare for a silly dog-and-pony show John White calls a teacher evaluation program. You and your Secretary have pushed for the implementation of a value added system for measuring the performance of teachers in Louisiana that is so poorly designed and erratic that a disproportionate number of teachers in some of our highest performing schools are being rated as “ineffective”. The new value added system pushed by your administration requires that a certain percentage of our teachers be rated as ineffective each year for an undetermined number of years, basically decimating a huge portion of our teaching force without considering the professional opinion of their school principals. That's because the value-added “ineffective” rating overrules the principal's evaluation. One of our regional newspapers declared in an editorial that such a policy bordered on the immoral!

Your U.S. Department of Education specifically approved this policy as part of the Louisiana application for waiver of ESEA standards. As part of this waiver your Department approved Louisiana keeping the ridiculous unscientific goal of 100% proficiency for all Louisiana students by the year 2014. This is a goal that was left over from the No Child Left Behind standards that has been universally discredited by experts in tests and measurement. It is just one part of making our state a laughing stock in the eyes of the world education community.

Finally, and most destructive of all, your administration has not raised a single objection to the mass privatization of education in Louisiana pushed by Jindal and White which takes funding for this privatization directly from the Minimum Foundation Formula for our public schools. This plan subjects many Title I students to educational abuse at the hands of greedy preacher/administrators who teach creationism instead of science and who place children in primitive, substandard classrooms. So Louisiana, with the full support of your Education Department has kept the most harmful parts of the previous failed reform while adding the most radical destructive changes ever seen to our public education system.

Arne Duncan is still pushing the closing of schools and conversion of public schools to non-accountable charters and virtual schools, many of which are skimming off obscene profits from our tax monies dedicated to public schools. Studies have shown that the closing of schools in Chicago (by Duncan) and in many other cities and the firing of teachers and principals have not benefited the students involved in any way, yet it continues and is promoted and funded by your administration. Many parents in our poor neighborhoods are now realizing that their legitimate concerns for their community schools have been ignored and mocked by the privatizers. Your Education Secretary continues to help push these destructive policies down our throats here in Louisiana and in many other states.

A careful analysis of the testing data comparing American students with students in the countries with the highest performing educational systems shows that when our students are compared with similar demographic groups in other advanced countries our students perform equal to or better than similar students in those countries. We have many public schools in Louisiana that are demonstrating world class performance by students. Our problem is not with our schools or our teachers.

Our problem is simple. The students from our high poverty communities are performing at levels much below what is needed to adequately prepare them for a good life and a career. This is particularly serious in Louisiana because our poverty rates are among the highest in the nation. This fact was no reason to blame and trash the entire public education system and to force punitive counterproductive reforms on our teaching profession! As a lifelong Democrat, I am appalled and disgusted by your abandonment of democratic principles as they relate to public education.

Why doesn't your Department of Education help states provide incentives for the best teachers and most effective principals to take on the revitalization of the schools in our poor communities with emphasis on support of parents and community leaders? This means that you and your Education Department should stop blaming and start helping and supporting the dedicated educators who are willing to tackle these challenging educational communities. It also means funding for extended day, extended year, enrichment activities, music, arts, physical education and career education in addition to the much over-emphasized college prep curriculum. There is abundant evidence to show that not every student can or should aspire to a standard 4 year college education, yet the present reform agenda overvalues 4 year college degrees and stigmatizes the many other educational training options where opportunities abound in our job market.

I implore you to order your Education Secretary to immediately discontinue the destructive policies of his department and instead convene a task force composed of professional educators to design a true reform of our public education system that will support the teaching profession and focus laser-like on the pressing problems facing some of our schools while preserving our successes and building on the historical strengths of American public education.

Sincerely,

Michael Deshotels, blogger at louisianaeducator.blogspot.com

Serious Flaws in VAM

The subject of this post is extremely critical to teachers and principals in our public schools.  The new laws connecting teacher evaluation directly to layoff, salary, and tenure should require that any evaluation system be as accurate as possible.  But it seems like our education hierarchy at the state level comprised as it is of rank amateurs, is destined to make one blunder after another. I believe the evidence presented below demonstrates that the Value Added Model portion of the teacher evaluation system now being implemented by LDOE contains serious flaws that can unfairly destroy the careers of many good teachers and principals.

I mentioned in one of my recent emails that there was ample evidence coming directly from Dr George Noell (the father of VAM in Louisiana) that the value added model is erratic and unreliable in measuring good and bad teaching. Today I would like to discuss with you the clear evidence for this conclusion.

Wayne Free, Director of Instruction and Professional Development for the Louisiana Association of Educators has just written an extremely good analysis of Louisiana's Value Added Model. From this analysis we can easily conclude that the Louisiana VAM should never be used to evaluate the performance of teachers, should not be used to deternine the order of lay off of teachers, for freezing a teacher's salary, or for removing tenure and placing teachers on a path to be fired. Yet despite all the evidence I am about to present here, all of these actions that are so destructive to the teaching profession and to the education of our children will soon start happening. Please click on this link to the LAE website for Mr Free's analysis. For this post I will just summarize one of the most critical findings in his study.

The most damning evidence that this VAM is far from ready for prime time comes from several answers to direct questions posed by Mr Free to Dr Noel. Here is the most outstanding one:

Free asked: "What percentage of the teachers rated in the bottom 10% by the VAM in one year would be expected to be rated again as ineffective the following year if they did nothing to change their teaching from one year to the next?" ( The following is my comment) I believe that if this system is accurate in identifying ineffective teachers, the answer would be somewhat close to 100%, especially if the system is considered reliable enough to destroy a teacher's career. Right? ... Wrong!)

The percentage possibility of a repeat of an ineffective rating in the succeeding year according to Noell is only 26.8%. And that is assuming the teacher does not change his/her teaching. This was shocking to me. The fact that there is only a one in four chance of the same result the following year means that the system is erratic and may have incorrectly identified large numbers of teachers as being ineffective in the first place. It means that contrary to the assumption in the legislation, that the process will be deliberative and free of gross errors, such teachers will immediately be placed first in line for layoff, have their salaries frozen, and those rated ineffective next year will permanently lose their tenure and be placed on a path to dismissal. But the most damaging result of such an incorrect determination I fear, is that the local newspapers will somehow get the list of the teachers rated as ineffective and publish it in the home town paper where a teacher's reputation will be permanently destroyed and parents will be demanding that their children not be assigned to that teacher's class. This could easily happen this year to a teacher with 20+ years experience and a previously perfect evaluation record!

One of the most unfair requirements of the evaluation system, is that even if a teacher gets a great evaluation on the qualitative (Compass) from her/his principal, but gets an ineffective rating on VAM (quantitative) the final result is required to be an automatic overall ineffective rating. This rule is in direct violation of Act 54 which states that VAM is supposed to make up 50% of the overall result. (not 100%) This is sure to result in numerous lawsuits. I suggest that all teachers vulnerable to VAM join their teacher association/union now so that their lawsuits can be funded if necessary.

A perfect example of how crazy the results can be is the strange outcome reported in an editorial published recently by the Lake Charles American Press. The American Press editors were appalled by the fact that the VAM system is set up to find 10% of all teachers evaluated as ineffective no matter how well or how poorly they actually perform. This is called grading on the curve, and is not allowed in any public classroom. We measure and grade our students by how well they master the material. If 80 or 90 percent of the students master the material, that many will get an A or a B, and if no student fails, then that is something we celebrate. Not so with the teacher evaluation system. It has been predetermined that a minimum of 10% of our teachers must fail. The American Press editors say that such a system borders on being immoral!

But it gets worse. The editors found that for some strange reason, in the pilot program that was run recently by LDOE, one of the best performing school systems in the state (Jeff Davis) had only 3 percent of its teachers rated as highly effective, and a disproportionately high percentage rated as ineffective. In fact several of the highest performing districts in the Lake Charles area had some of the lowest teacher VAM scores. How can that be? This system is both illogical and destructive! See the editorial in the American Press. Not only are teacher evaluations adversely affected by this tendency, but their principal's evaluations could also be damaged because of the number of "ineffective" teachers in their school.

 The Baton Rouge Advocate carried a story recently about the teachers of a high performing school in Shreveport also getting disproportionately low VAM scores in the pilot program. Our amateur Superintendent White is quoted as characterizing this as an isolated glitch which can easily be corrected. Maybe his 12,000 per month (part time) PR person can somehow spin this fiasco as a positive.

What's worse, as is implied by White in the Shreveport situation, the LDOE managers of VAM can change the complicated formulas that produce the value added results at will without consulting anyone. So they can manipulate the results. They are probably doing just that as this post is being written and you and I have no way of knowing. I wonder what group of teachers will be penalized next time after the formula has been tweaked to take care of Shreveport? And your professional career depends on this foolishness?

For more information on flaws in VAM in general as it is used in several other states you may want to read an analysis by Gary Rubinstein. Thanks to Cathy, one of our readers for suggesting this link.

If you as as outraged by this as I am, would you please send an email to your legislator, who can easily change this in the next legislative session before it affects anyone. In my last post I gave you a link to the legislative ID system that gives you email addresses of your legislators. I know many of you meant to send emails at my last request but you may have been too busy. I know how busy you are but this is critical!

Here is a sample email: Dear (insert your legislator name), The most recent information available about the new Act 54 evaluation system clearly shows that it is an unreliable system for rating teacher performance. I hope you agree with me that the stakes are too high and that professional educators should not be rated by a system that is flawed. Please take whatever steps necessary to stop this evaluation system immediately and not implement it or any other evaluation system until it is proven reliable. Thank you for supporting your professional educators in this critical matter.
Signed: ____.

There is one more thing I am asking you to do right now. If you have not already done so, submit your contact data to me so you can become a part of my Defenders of Public Education data base. The educators, school board members and parents in this data base will receive timely notices of upcoming actions at BESE and the legislature so you can contact your representatives before they vote. Believe me all of us together can make a difference! Just send me an email at louisianaeducator@gmail.com with your home address or if you prefer send me the district numbers for your representative and senator (it will save me the trouble of looking them up). Include your preferred email address so that my emails can reach you anytime your help is needed.

Believe me we can change this is we just stick together and speak as one!

Thanks again for all you do as an educator or parent or school board member. We can never thank you too much for your valuable contribution to public education.
Michael Deshotels

Outrage!

Our state Department of Education keeps finding new ways of insulting the teaching profession in Louisiana. First our Superintendent and Governor claimed that education credentials mean nothing and changed the law so that persons without education certification will be allowed to teach in Louisiana charter schools. Then while public school teachers are being laid off because of loss of state and local funding to voucher schools, the State Superintendent started spending 12 thousand dollars per month to hire an additional public relations specialist.

But the action that demonstrates the most contempt for professional educators is the recent appointment of a TFA Corps member to manage the evaluation of 60,000 public school teachers and administrators. It turns out this person has never served as a principal, or evaluator. In fact she has no real teacher credentials, and taught for 2 years in a school that was considered by the Department to be a failing school. As far as we know, she has never demonstrated the ability to improve the education of students. Yet she will rule over a system that will evaluate persons with Masters and PhD's in Education and decades of teaching experience. She will have the power to order the firing and destruction of the careers (even terminate the certification) of thousands of qualified teachers. The person who held the position over the Act 54 evaluation system before her also had no teacher credentials, and never taught a day in the classroom yet was allowed to train principals in the new VAM and COMPASS systems. Educators who have put up with numerous attacks on the profession by Jindal and White are now expressing outrage over these latest humiliations of the teaching profession.

Please click on this link to The Advocate story about the credentials (or lack thereof) of the state director of the teacher evaluation system. Take the time to read some of the many comments at the end of the article by present and former teachers and by members of the public. One of the commenters pointed out that this is like letting an intern rule on the employment of experienced physicians. Would Doctors stand for this? There is not one positive comment on this issue and no defenders of this action. Educators have a right to be outraged!

Superintendent White keeps saying in his speeches that he wants to “empower” teachers and school administrators, but his actions are only “empowering” amateurs to make decisions that affect the careers of the real educators. I just heard a description of one of the evaluator training sessions last week where this amateur teacher (state director of COMPASS) took it upon herself to fuss at highly experienced and qualified administrators. What an insult!

But what is the point of the outrage if we don't channel it into productive action? Why not communicate our outrage to BESE and to the Legislature who created this mess? Our elected representatives could stop this insanity. But it will not happen until they hear from their constituents! There are 60,000 teachers in the state that are subject to humiliation and possible career destruction by this ill conceived evaluation system that is being run by amateurs receiving obscene salaries. Principals who have demonstrated many years of effective management of employees are being subjected to the humiliation of being “trained” and lectured to by neophytes with no education credentials. Please consider taking one or all of the following actions now.

1. Sponsor a petition at your school. The following is a sample petition to BESE:
The undersigned professional educators are acutely aware that the new educator evaluation system mandated by Act 54 of 2010 and Act 1 or 2012 could have a great impact on the careers and welfare of many public school educators. We believe that proper credentials and educational experience are important requirements for any managers at the Louisiana Department of Education level who are charged with the implementation of this program. We therefore respectfully request that BESE require that all managers of the evaluation program have proper education credentials. In addition, only persons with extensive classroom and supervision experience should be allowed to administer the teacher and principal evaluation programs. Any lesser requirements will amount to disrespect for the education profession in Louisiana and will discredit the entire evaluation program.
Mail the petition to Ms Penny Dastugue, President, BESE, P. O. Box 94064, Baton Rouge, LA 70804.

2. The following is a sample email to BESE and to our legislators:
Dear BESE or ( Legislative member): Teachers and principals in our school are outraged that the new educator evaluation system mandated by Act 54 of 2010 and Act 1 of 2012 is being managed by persons with no valid education credentials. We refuse to be humiliated by having our careers put in jeopardy by persons who are not qualified to judge our work. Please take all necessary actions to correct this unfair situation. Get the BESE email addresses by clicking on this link. Get your legislator email by looking him/her up by clicking on this link.

3. Email to Governor Jindal: (same as above) Send to; www.gov.la.us or go to the following web site: http://www.gov.la.gov/index.cfm?md=form&tmp=email_governor

I appeal to all educators. Please do something to show your pride and support for your profession. Don't let the enemies of public education beat you down or push you into early retirement. The children of Louisiana need real educators.

Thanks for all you do as an educator,
Michael Deshotels