My Letter to Iowa Senate Education Committee Members

Here is the letter I sent to the members of the Iowa Senate Education committee as they take up the Governor's education "reform" proposals. In this letter, I focused on the creation of "value added models" to our state education system. Make sure you are all advocating to your legislators early and often so they hear our voices! - A. Rasmussen, DMEA Executive Board

Dear Senator,

I am a veteran teacher of 17 years. I have devoted those years to teaching social studies to urban students in Des Moines, many of whom live in poverty. I am proud of my service to the community and I am proud to tell people I am a teacher. Recently, with the release of Governor Branstad’s education reform proposals I am feeling like policy makers do not have the same pride in our state’s teachers.

The premise of many of the reforms contained in Senate Study Bill 3009 seem to be that Iowa is awash in mediocre to terrible educators. The sense of crisis that the governor and his secretary of education have created in the state points at teachers as the cause of what the governor sees as stagnating student achievement. His solutions seem to lie mainly with making it easier to find all these mythical bad teachers (mainly by looking at student test scores) and then making it easier to get rid of them (mainly the experienced veteran teachers). I am very opposed to this mindset being the driver of improvements to our education system in Iowa.

In particular, I would like to point out that the development of a “value added system” to judge educators and schools is fundamentally flawed. Value added assessment of teachers has a wide margin of error and is unstable from year to year. Studies of VAM have shown that a teacher can be judged “valuable” one year and the very next year be judged as a failure. The key component that changes is the students that the teacher gets in their classroom and how adept at taking standardized tests those students are. The ratings of teachers can end up differing based on the test given. The VAM method leads to a narrow focus on tests and a scramble among teachers to get the “good kids” in their classes.

The latest study of VAM by New York University economist Sean Corcoran finds that value added assessments in Houston and New York had a margin of error so large that a teacher at the 43rd percentile (average) might actually be at the 15th percentile (below average) or the 71st percentile (above average). “The promise that value-added systems can provide a precise, meaningful, and comprehensive picture is much overblown,” argues Corcoran, “Teachers, policy-makers and school leaders should not be seduced by the elegant simplicity of value-added measures. Given their limitations, policy-makers should consider whether their minimal benefits outweigh their cost.” The study should be read by every member of your committee before they dash off and agree to Governor Branstad’s VAM proposal. The study can be found at the following link…

http://annenberginstitute.org/sites/default/files/product/211/files/valueAddedReport.pdf

Judging teachers on student test scores, which seems like an easy way to go about judging teacher performance, is fraught with unfairness. Standardized tests do not measure all students equally. Some students just don’t do well on standardized tests while performing better on other assessments, like projects. It is also dubious to tie a teacher’s evaluation and pay to the past background of a student. Am I as a teacher to blame for students whose parents due to circumstances I cannot control end up struggling in a school setting? I am unable to go back in a time machine and change a student’s past and family background. I am unable to right the gross injustices of childhood poverty, which the governor has no proposals to fix. It seems like the proposals in the Senate Study Bill want to tie many flaws of society and parenting to a teacher’s pay and career. That is patently unfair.

If our pay and evaluations are tied to student test scores, then the state will be creating a lowest common denominator education system that forces teachers to teach to the test and avoid creative projects and other activities not directly tied to test scores. The last thing we need to help our students in the 21^st century is a narrow focus on bubble sheet testing skills.

I urge you and the members of your committee to hesitate before adopting any proposals that create value added measures or tie teacher pay or evaluations to student test scores. If that is the system we end up with I am not sure I will be able to say I am proud to be a teacher when I am frantically doing test drills and worrying about getting too many “difficult kids” in my class. Please read the study I mentioned and find out the truth about these so called reforms that do not move our education system forward.

I hope to be able to talk with you and the members of your committee more about this topic. I am confident that you will make the right decisions for our state’s children and educators.

Thank you for your service,

Andrew Rasmussen