"Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

[Anonymous]

A moratorium? This hasn't been rushed, IMHO. States started working on Common Core in 2007 (NOTE:THIS IS LONG BEFORE OBAMA AND ARNE DUNCAN WERE EVEN IN OFFICE) and the first draft standards were in state administrators' and teachers hands for review in 2009, schools have already had almost 6 years to read and review the standards, and to know what was coming down the pike. How much longer do you want? 20 years?

I don't know any teachers who saw these in 2009 and have had 6 years to look at them.

[Anonymous]

This paper gets at some of the real problems in education:

http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/FixingOurNationalAccountabilitySystemWebV4.pdf

The test-based accountability system
now universally mandated in the United
States—a system that reflects in every way
the blue-collar conception of teaching as
an occupation—has had ten years to prove
itself. The result is very low teacher morale,
plummeting applications to schools of
education, the need to recruit too many
of our teachers from the lowest levels of
high school graduates, a testing regime that
has narrowed the curriculum for millions
of students to a handful of subjects and a
very low level of aspiration. There is no
evidence that it is contributing anything to
improved student performance, much less
the improved performance of the very lowincome
and minority students for which it
was in the first instance created.

[Anonymous]

Every veteran teacher knows this part from the above paper:

For a long time, the United States has
operated its schools on the assumption that
it could get the teachers it needed while
calling them professionals but paying them
far less than it paid most professionals,
often less than it took to support a family.11
Americans evidently thought it was perfectly
okay to take a teacher trained in one subject
and have them teach another—any other—
subject, which could only have been true if
Americans thought that it did not make any
difference whether their children were taught
by someone who actually knew anything
about the subject being taught.12 Legislatures
routinely waived the very weak standards for
entering the teaching profession in the face
of a shortage, but we never do that for the
professions requiring expertise that matters
to us, like medicine, civil engineering and the
law. In those professions, when a shortage
develops, the market raises compensation
until we have enough professionals to meet
the need. But we have never been willing to
allow the market for teachers to operate that 9 www.ncee.org
@ctredecon
way. Evidently, the only thing that really
mattered was that there was a warm body
facing the students. In recent years, the
United States had been celebrating programs
that put recent college graduates in front of
students as teachers with only a few weeks
of teacher training.13, 14 School boards,
acting as if a teacher’s skill and experience
made no difference at all, were giving the
toughest teaching assignments to the most
inexperienced teachers. On the theory
that one teacher was the same as any other,
many were often eager to hire two cheap
new teachers right out of teachers college to
replace one experienced teacher whenever
they could.15

[Anonymous]

^ I don't disagree that we should value teachers as professionals and pay them well but I'd also point out that in most cases we pay teachers more than we do many other important professions, for example nurses and paramedics...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^ I don't disagree that we should value teachers as professionals and pay them well but I'd also point out that in most cases we pay teachers more than we do many other important professions, for example nurses and paramedics...

The question is not, how much do teachers get paid, compared to nurses or paramedics -- or plumbers, retail store managers, graphic designers, long-distance truck drivers, civil engineers, lobbyists, or circus trapeze artists. The question is, do teachers get paid enough to attract a sufficient number of highly-qualified people into teaching and to keep them in teaching?

What do you think the answer to that question is?

[Anonymous]

This paper is pretty much on the money:

They describe what they are experiencing as
a process in which, piece by piece, they are
being told what to do and how to do it by
people who are not teachers and have little
respect for teachers or the work that teachers
do. They see policymakers embracing
one nostrum after another that their own
professional experience tells them will not
work. They know that the real motivation
behind the vogue for teacher evaluation
is to fire teachers who are deemed to add
insufficient value to a student’s education,
but they think that tests used for that
purpose measure very little of what they
think a good education is and even less of
what a good teacher does for the students
under his or her care.27

Nurses and paramedics rarely have the same long term relationship with their charges that teachers have. Teachers who stay in teaching, despite the low pay, stay because they feel appreciated and because they feel they are making a difference. Once they are made to feel insignificant, the money is not enough to keep them there. Unless, of course, you have a teacher who really doesn't care. Those kinds will not speak out and will probably stick around.
I

[Anonymous]

More background from the paper:

When the Obama administration came into
office, the ground shifted. The overall design
of the No Child Left Behind legislation
had been discredited. Some states were on
a path to having all their schools declared
to be failing under the terms of the law.
Everyone understood by then that, among
the law’s fatal flaws, it contained strong
incentives for states to lower their student
achievement standards rather than raise
them. But Congress could not agree on a
fix for these and other problems. So the
Obama administration stepped into the
breach, using a feature of the law never
intended for this purpose to grant waivers
from the law’s punitive provisions if the
states applying for those waivers would agree
to certain requirements posed by the Obama
administration. Prominent among those
features was one asking the states to include
in their reform plans a plan for evaluating
their teachers and to base that evaluation to
a significant degree on calculations of the
value added by individual teachers to the
achievement of their students. It was clear in
the context that the administration expected
the states to offer plans that would use these
value-added methods of teacher evaluation
as an important input into a process that
the state would use to identify and fire their
worst teachers.

This was a momentous shift in public policy,
from a clear focus on school accountability
based on “adequate yearly progress” toward
a fixed standard at a fixed time, to a very
tough-minded version of test-based teacher
accountability.
I can easily understand how emotionally
satisfying it must have been for policymakers
responsible for No Child Left Behind to
stick it to an education establishment that
appeared to have taken federal funds for
years without perceptible result, and it is just
as easy to see how emotionally satisfying it
must have for the Obama administration a
few years later to stick it to the worst of our
teachers—people they must have perceived
as having burnt out years earlier, just putting
in their time, waiting for the day when they
could make maximum retirement so they
could walk out the door.

What these accountability schemes have
in common is their unstated presumption
that our schools would be functioning at
much higher levels if the nation could only
find ways to provide stiff penalties for nonperforming
schools and teachers, identify the
non-performers and, if threats do not make
them perform, get rid of them, by closing
down the schools and firing the teachers.
They threaten poor performing schools with
public shaming, takeover and closure and
poor performing individuals with public
shaming and the loss of their jobs and
livelihood. The introduction of these policies
was not accompanied by policies designed
to improve the supply of highly qualified
new teachers by making teaching a more
attractive option for our most successful high
school students—a key component of policy
in the top performing countries. There is a
lot of federal money available for training
and professional development for teachers
but no systematic federal strategy that I can
discern for turning that money into systems
of the kind top performing countries use to
support long-term, steady improvements in
teachers’ professional practice. I conclude
that policymakers have placed their bet on
teacher evaluation, not to identify the needs
of teachers for development, but to identify
teachers who need to be dismissed from
the service. And, further, that the way to
motivate school staff to work harder and
more efficiently is to threaten them with
public shame and the loss of their job.

[Anonymous]

Teachers have always wanted better pay. We have always had good teachers. Listen to them. The Common Core developers did not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Teachers have always wanted better pay. We have always had good teachers. Listen to them. The Common Core developers did not.

Yes, the developers of the Common Core standards did.

[Anonymous]

Yes, the developers of the Common Core standards did.

Nope. False claim.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Yes, the developers of the Common Core standards did.

Nope. False claim.

No, your claim is false.

Do you think that this is a productive dialogue?

[Anonymous]

No, your claim is false.

Do you think that this is a productive dialogue?

No. But, you believe a lie.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

No, your claim is false.

Do you think that this is a productive dialogue?

No. But, you believe a lie.

No, you believe a lie...

I'm not posting links to teacher input to the Common Core standards because I have already posted them multiple times and I have had enough. What is your reason for not posting evidence to support your claim?

[Anonymous]

I'm not posting links to teacher input to the Common Core standards because I have already posted them multiple times and I have had enough. What is your reason for not posting evidence to support your claim?

LOL! You keep posting the common core website which insists that teachers were involved. Oddly, there are not any teachers on the list of developers. Two are on the list of the workgroups. That's it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I'm not posting links to teacher input to the Common Core standards because I have already posted them multiple times and I have had enough. What is your reason for not posting evidence to support your claim?

LOL! You keep posting the common core website which insists that teachers were involved. Oddly, there are not any teachers on the list of developers. Two are on the list of the workgroups. That's it.

No, I don't. There have been multiple posters posting information about teacher involvement. Some of that information was from the Common Core website. A lot of it wasn't.

Also, which is your claim, exactly? That there were no teachers on the development committees, or that no teachers were involved?