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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Death by Premeditated Statistics

Students across the nation will take the United States History Advanced Placement test today.  In honor of the event, I present a personal snapshot of "highly effectiveness."  Twelve years ago, I helped prep many of my kids to perfection and near-perfection.

When I received the 2002 scores, I rushed across the hall to make a photocopy.  I had no idea at the time that a band of deformers was assembling on the horizon to wage war on me.  I didn't even know that there was a Rhee, claiming great, but dubious, since vaporized, scores of her own, as she prepared to make my teaching life living hell.  

I was just overtly proud of my students.  I was so psyched  that I saved the copy (as I save some of the nice notes that students have written me over the years).  With fifty-eight students averaging a 3.828 out of a possible 5 and with 91.4% of them receiving a three or above, I must have seemed to be Miss Highly Effective herself.   The proof is below.  I, of course, omitted all names for sake of privacy. 


Of course, those beautiful stats fail to tell you the fact that as a teacher I am merely the head of a class; detached from my student body I would prove pretty ineffective.  It would be more than hubris to assume that I could transfer this type of success to a body of students living under extreme social and economic stress.  Only a modern-day ed. deformer could be so naive as to think so.

As I think about my APPR evaluation this year, I wonder if I will now swing to the dark side of the statistical spectrum through no fault of my own. I have read about teachers of the year, one year, labelled as ineffective the next year.  Heck, I've never been close to being a teacher of the year, but in my humble way I have always tried my best.  Here and there, a student has said "thank you" for helping to change his or her life for the better.  And, I know it wasn't done through test prep.

But, if my students do really poorly on their Regents this June, I may all of a sudden become highly ineffective.  My past record of success will count for little.  Can my school afford to keep a now highly ineffective and relatively highly paid teacher around?  VAM and, poof, I'm gone...like magic!  It is the magic of statistics at work!
    
Through no fault of my own, I could not have held onto AP scores like those of 2002.  The school has since been judged primarily upon the number of students enrolled in AP classes, rather than upon test scores. The ranks began to swell with students, some of whom lacked the prerequisite skills for this type of course.  In at least one instance, a student had trouble passing the regents.  Indeed, in the modern-way of thinking, I had become less effective. 

I pity the teachers who try to help the kids with the greatest needs. I pity the teachers who accept the $5,000 bonus to help the hard-to-staff schools.  They will be seen, through no fault of their own, as the most ineffective teachers due to their students' test scores.  And, I pity even more, the students who will watch some of their beloved teachers get the boot.  I pity the students who will never know some of the best teachers because they have fled this type of system of statistical injustice.

If we really want to help the kids with the greatest needs, we would put them in the smallest-sized classes.  They would be well funded.  Their teachers would be highly respected, well-paid and considered some of the most valuable members of society.  I'm not proposing anything here that hasn't been proposed before.  Sadly, I'm proposing an idea that no "ed. deformer" wants to hear.    

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