New Mexico Lawsuit Update
As you all likely recall, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), joined by the Albuquerque Teachers Federation (ATF), last fall, filed a “Lawsuit in New Mexico Challenging [the] State’s Teacher Evaluation System.” Plaintiffs charged that the state’s teacher evaluation system, imposed on the state in 2012 by the state’s current Public Education Department (PED) Secretary Hanna Skandera (with value-added counting for 50% of teachers’ evaluation scores), was unfair, error-ridden, spurious, harming teachers, and depriving students of high-quality educators, among other claims (see the actual lawsuit here). Again, I’m serving as the expert witness on the side of the plaintiffs in this suit.
As you all likely also recall, in December of 2015, State District Judge David K. Thomson granted a preliminary injunction preventing consequences from being attached to the state’s teacher evaluation data. More specifically, Judge Thomson ruled that the state could proceed with “developing” and “improving” its teacher evaluation system, but the state was not to make any consequential decisions about New Mexico’s teachers using the data the state collected until the state (and/or others external to the state) could evidence to the court during another trial (initially set for April 2016, then postponed to October 2016, and likely to be postponed again) that the system is reliable, valid, fair, uniform, and the like (see prior post on this ruling here).
Well, many of you have (since these prior posts) written requesting updates regarding this lawsuit, and here is one as released jointly by the AFT and ATF. This accurately captures the current and ongoing situation:
September 23, 2016
Many of you will remember the classic Christmas program, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, and how the terrible and menacing abominable snowman became harmless once his teeth were removed. This is how you should view the PED evaluation you recently received – a harmless abominable snowman.
The math is still wrong, the methodology deeply flawed, but the preliminary injunction achieved by our union, removed the teeth from PED’s evaluations, and so there is no New Mexico Lawsuit Update | VAMboozled!:
