A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida
Posted by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley: 15 Sep 2016
Within a recent post , I wrote about my recent “silence” explaining that, apparently, post the passage of federal government’s (January 1, 2016) passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that no longer requires teachers to be evaluated by their student’s tests score using VAMs (see prior posts on this here and here about “Value Added Measurements), “crazy” VAM-related events have apparently subsided. While I noted in the post that this also did not mean that certain states and districts are not still drinking (and overdosing on) the VAM-based Kool-Aid, what I did not note is that the ways by which I get many of the stories I cover on this blog is via Google Alerts. This is where I have noticed a significant decline in VAM-related stories. Clearly, however, the news outlets often covered via Google Alerts don’t include district-level stories, so to cover these we must continue to rely on our followers (i.e., teachers, administrators, parents, students, school board members, etc.) to keep the stories coming.
Coincidentally — Billy Townsend, who is running for a school board seat in Polk County, Florida (district size = 100K students) — sent me one such story. As an edublogger himself, he actually sent me three blog posts (see post #1, post #2, and post #3 listed by order of relevance) capturing what is happening in his district, again, as situated under the state of Florida’s ongoing, VAM-based, nonsense. I’ve summarized the situation below as based on his three posts.
In short, the state ordered the district to dismiss a good number of its teachers as per their VAM scores when this school year started. “[T]his has been Florida’s [educational reform] model for nearly 20 years [actually since 1979, so 35 years]: Choose. Test. Punish. Stigmatize. Segregate. Turnover.” Because the district already had a massive teacher shortage as well, however, these teachers were replaced with Kelly Services contracted substitute teachers. Thereafter, district leaders decided that this was not “a good thing,” and they decided that administrators and “coaches” would temporarily replace the substitute teachers to make the situation “better.” While, of course, the substitutes’ replacements did not have VAM scores themselves, they were nonetheless deemed fit to teach and clearly more fit to teach than the teachers who were terminated as based on their VAM scores.
According to one teacher who anonymously wrote about her terminated teacher colleagues, and one of the district’s “best” teachers: “She knew our kids well. She understood how to reach them, how to talk to them. Because she ‘looked like them’ and was from their neighborhood, she [also] had credibility with the students and parents. She was professional, always did what was best for students. She had coached several different sports teams over the past decade. Her VAM score just wasn’t good enough.”
Consequently, this has turned into a “chaotic reality for real kids and adults” throughout the county’s schools, and the district and state apparently realized this by “threaten[ing] all of [the district’s] teachers with some sort of ethics violation if they talk about what’s happening” throughout the district. While “[t]he repetition of stories that sound just like this from [the districts’] schools is numbing and heartbreaking at the same time,” the state, district, and school board, apparently, “has no interest” in such stories.
Put simply, and put well as this aligns with our philosophy here: “Let’s [all] consider what [all of this] really means: [Florida] legislators do not want to hear from you if you are communicating a real experience from your life at a school — whether you are a teacher, parent, or student. Your experience doesn’t matter. Only your test score.”
Isn’t that the unfortunate truth; hence, and with reference to the introduction above, please do keep these relatively more invisible studies coming so that we can share out with the nation and make such stories more visible and accessible. VAMs, again, are alive and well, just perhaps in more undisclosed ways, like within districts as is the case here.
Source: VAMboozled! A blog by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley
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