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The state of Florida is another one of our state’s to watch in that, even since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) last January, the state is still moving forward with using its VAMs for high-stakes accountability reform. See my most recent post about one district in Florida here, after the state ordered it to dismiss a good number of its teachers as per their low VAM scores when this school year started. After realizing this also caused or contributed to a teacher shortage in the district, the district scrambled to hire Kelly Services contracted substitute teachers to replace them, after which the district also put administrators back into the classroom to help alleviate the bad situation turned worse.

In a recent post released by The Ledger, teachers from the same Polk County School District (size = 100K students) added much needed details and also voiced concerns about all of this in the article that author Madison Fantozzi titled “Polk teachers: We are more than value-added model scores.”

Throughout this piece Fantozzi covers the story of Elizabeth Keep, a teacher who was “plucked from” the middle school in which she taught for 13 years, after which she was involuntarily placed at a district high school “just days before she was to report back to work.” She was one of 35 teachers moved from five schools in need of reform as based on schools’ value-added scores, although this was clearly done with no real concern or regard of the disruption this would cause these teachers, not to mention the students on the exiting and receiving ends. Likewise, and according to Keep, “If you asked students what they need, they wouldn’t say a teacher with a high VAM score…They need consistency and stability.” Apparently not. In Keep’s case, she “went from being the second most experienced person in [her middle school’s English] department…where she was department chair and oversaw the gifted program, to a [new, and never before] 10th- and 11th-grade English teacher” at the new high school to which she was moved.

As background, when Polk County School District officials presented turnaround plans to the State Board of Education last July, school board members “were most critical of their inability to move ‘unsatisfactory’ teachers out of the schools and ‘effective’ teachers in.”  One board member, for example, expressed finding it “horrendous” that the district was “held hostage” by the extent to which the local union was protecting teachers from being moved as per their value-added scores. Referring to the union, and its interference in this “reform,” he accused the unions of “shackling” the districts and preventing its intended reforms. Note that the “effective” teachers who are to replace the “ineffective” ones can earn up to $7,500 in bonuses per year to help the “turnaround” the schools into which they enter.

Likewise, the state’s Commissioner of Education concurred saying that she also “wanted ‘unsatisfactory’ teachers out and ‘highly effective’ teachers in,” again, with effectiveness being defined by teachers’ value-added or lack thereof, even though (1) the teachers targeted only had one or two years of the three years of value-added data required by state statute, and even though (2) the district’s senior director of assessment, accountability and evaluation noted that, in line with a plethora of other research findings, teachers being evaluated using the state’s VAM have a 51% chance of changing their scores from one year to the next. This lack of reliability, as we know it, should outright prevent any such moves in that without some level of stability, valid inferences from which valid decisions are to be made cannot be drawn. It’s literally impossible.

Nonetheless, state board of education members “unanimously… threatened to take [all of the district’s poor performing] over or close them in 2017-18 if district officials [didn’t] do what [the Board said].” See also other tales of similar districts in the article available, again, here.

In Keep’s case, “her ‘unsatisfactory’ VAM score [that caused the district to move her, as] paired with her ‘highly effective’ in-class observations by her administrators brought her overall district evaluation to ‘effective’…[although she also notes that]…her VAM scores fluctuate because the state has created a moving target.” Regardless, Keep was notified “five days before teachers were due back to their assigned schools Aug. 8 [after which she was] told she had to report to a new school with a different start time that [also] disrupted her 13-year routine and family that shares one car.”

VAM-based chaos reigns, especially in Florida.