Louisiana Educator: Educators Speak Up Now or Forever Live With VAM and The Dog and Pony Show Called COMPASS

Louisiana Educator: Educators Speak Up Now or Forever Live With VAM and The Dog and Pony Show Called COMPASS:

Educators Speak Up Now or Forever Live With VAM and The Dog and Pony Show Called COMPASS

Note to readers: Legislators got so many complaints from both teachers and administrators last year on the new teacher evaluation system and the use of VAM to evaluate teachers that they passed Act 240 by Rep. Hoffmann which sets up a special subcommittee of the Accountability Commission with the assignment of recommending changes in the teacher and principal evaluation system. That subcommittee has representatives of teachers and administrators who are actually working in the trenches of education, selected by the legislature to work with the regular members of the Accountability Commission to recommend a revamp of the evaluation system to make it more effective. I will be getting the email addresses of all these members and their home parishes so that those educators who are most concerned about the possible flaws in the new evaluation system can relay their concerns to one or more of their representatives on this special subcommittee. If you don't contact them and tell them your recommendations for change, you may be doomed to suffer the flaws of this system for a long long time. The Subcommittee meets on November 7, 2014 to consider changes in the evaluation system. Be sure to contact them before that date.

Do you sometimes wonder why most of the education reform programs in recent years have been such boondoggles? Why is VAM so erratic and unfair to so many teachers? Why is so much of each school administrator's valuable time being tied up in watching teachers perform a dog and pony show that is not always related to real teaching? Why are some of the teachers in the highest performing school districts getting some of the lowest evaluations? Does the new teacher and principal evaluation system mandated byAct54 of 2010 have any connection to reality in our public schools?

Here are my observations about what may have gone wrong:

1. The whole COMPASS and VAM system was designed and implemented under the direction of a person who had absolutely no teaching or school administrator experience and who had no training whatsoever in education. Her name is Rayne Martin and she was appointed to design and administer the new teacher evaluation program by former Superintendent Paul Pastorek. She now heads up one of the fake grass roots organizations (an AstroTurf Louisiana Educator: Educators Speak Up Now or Forever Live With VAM and The Dog and Pony Show Called COMPASS: