A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida | VAMboozled!

A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida | VAMboozled!:

A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida

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), “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 themselve, they were nonetheless deemed fit to A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida | VAMboozled!: