Time to Organize in Florida
A few weeks ago, a Florida reporter reached out to me for information about the nation’s value-added models (VAMs), but ialso as specific to the state of Florida. It seems that teachers in Florida were (and perhaps still are) being removed from teaching in Florida schools if their state-calculated, teacher-level VAM scores deemed them as teachers who “needed improvement” or were “unsatisfactory.”
More specifically, the state of Florida is using its state-level VAM to rate teachers’ VAM-based performance, using state exams in mathematics and language arts. If the teachers ultimately deemed in need of improvement or unsatisfactory teach in one of the state’s “turnaround” schools (i.e., a school that is required by the state to have a turnaround plan in place), those teachers are to be removed from the school and placed elsewhere. This is happening by state law, whereby the law dictates that no turnaround school may have a higher percentage of low value-added teachers than the district as a whole, which the state has apparently interpreted that to mean no low value-added teachers in these schools, at all.
Of course, some of the issues being raised throughout the state are not only about the VAMs themselves, as well as the teachers being displaced (e.g., two weeks or so after the school year resumed), but also about how all of this has caused other disruptions (e.g., students losing their teachers a few weeks after the beginning of the school year). Related, many principals have rejected these on-goings, expressly noting that they want to keep many if not most/all of the teachers being moved from their schools, as “valued” by them. I have also heard directly from a few Florida principals/school administrators about these same matters. See other articles about this here and here.
Hence, I’m writing this blog post to not only let others know about what is going on in CONTINUE READING: Time to Organize in Florida | VAMboozled!
