One of the wisest and sanest voices in the nation on the subject of teacher quality, teaching quality and teacher evaluation is Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. Linda has been involved for many years in studying these issues and working directly with teachers to improve practice. During the presidential campaign of 2008, she was Barack Obama’s spokesman and chief adviser on education, but was elbowed aside by supporters of Arne Duncan when the campaign ended. The Wall Street hedge fund managers who call themselves Democrats for Education Reform (they use the term “Democrats” to disguise the reactionary quality of their goals) recommended Duncan to the newly elected president, and you know who emerged on top.
Linda, being the diligent scholar that she is, continued her work and continued to write thoughtful studies about how to improve teaching.
After the 2008 election, the issue that predominated all public discussion was how to evaluate teachers. This was no accident. Consider that in the fall of 2008, the Gates Foundation revealed its decision to drop its program of breaking up large high schools. Recall that the foundation had invested $2 billion in breaking up big schools into small schools, had persuaded some 2,500 high schools to do so, and then its researchers told the foundation that the students in the small high schools were not getting any better test scores than those in the large high schools.
Gates needed another big idea. He decided that teacher quality was the big idea. So he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a tiny number of districts to learn how to evaluate teachers, including thousands of hours of videotapes. Where Gates went, Arne Duncan followed. The new Obama administration put teacher quality at the center of the $5 billion Race to the Top. If states wanted to be eligible for the money, they had to agree to judge teachers–to some considerable degree–by the test scores of their students. That is, they had to use value-added assessment, a still unformed methodology, in evaluating teachers.
In response to Race to the Top and Arne (“What’s there to hide?”) Duncan’s advocacy, many states have now passed laws–some extreme and punitive–directly tying teachers’ tenure, pay, and longevity to test scores.
No other nation in the world is doing this, at least none that I know of.
The unions have negotiated to reduce the impact of value-added systems but have not directly confronted their legitimacy.
After much study and deliberation, Linda Darling-Hammond decided that value-added did not work and would not work, and would ultimately say more about who was being taught than about the quality of the teacher.
The briefest summary of her work appears in an article in Education Week here.
She recently published a full research report. Here is a capsule summary of her team’s findings about the limitations of value-added assessment:
“Measuring Student Learning
There is agreement that new teacher evaluation systems should look at teaching in light of student learning. One currently popular approach is to incorporate teacher ratings from value-added models (VAM) that use statistical methods to examine changes in student test scores over time. Unfortunately, researchers have found that:
1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable:
Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.
2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Assigned to Them: Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are ad- vantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and students with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students. Students who teach low-income stu- dents are disadvantaged by the summer learning loss their children experi- ence between spring-to-spring tests.
3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress: –––Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores.”
The application of misleading, inaccurate and unstable measures serves mainly to demoralize teachers. Many excellent teachers will leave the profession in frustration. There will be churn, as teachers come and go, some mislabeled, some just disgusted by the utter lack of professionalism of these methods.
The tabloids will yelp and howl as they seek the raw data to publish and humiliate teachers. Even those rated at the top (knowing that next year they might be at the bottom) will feel humiliated to see their scores in the paper and online.
This is no way to improve education.
Diane
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The new Common Core State Standards may help foster
teacher collaboration, says Darling-Hammond.
“If we’re successful in implementing the Common Core
standards in a productive way, there will be curriculum support for teachers to draw upon. This should give teachers a
common platform . . . and a better sense of learning progressions that students are expected to learn. If I have a student
who is ‘here,’ then I can work with other teachers to figure out
how to move him to ‘there.’
Unfortunately, Darling-Hammond’s work on Common Core Standards also includes her praise of PARCC assessments. This rural teacher doesn’t quite feel the ‘love’ for her views of national testing and a national curriculum. Surely, she is aware that the “adoption” of CCSS (forced by RTTT promises of money yet unseen for many) is essentially the same as a national curriculum, which violates the US Constitution, and further will only increase the amount of high stakes testing, as well as the abuse of those scores to evaluate students, teachers, principals, and schools.
Yes, it may sound like it is necessary to respond to people who criticize you (and others) about your critique of VAM, all of which I can agree (this critique is not really that new and highly intuitive for educators “on the ground”). However, I believe, Diane, that you place way too much “value” on the work of Darling-Hammond regarding “better” approaches to teacher quality. In reading her work over the years and her more current conclusions, it seems clear that Dr. Hammond, while effective in countering the present arguments about VAM, provides nothing more than a second failed approach–the use of “professional teaching standards” (I note that it seems a bit disingenuous to claim others have not made good on their claims by touting something you–meaning she–helped to create instead). These standards, as D-H notes, have been used for some time through the NBPTS and local/state initiatives. The “quality” of that result has not created single iota of motion in improving the learning of those historically marginalized and currently failing by “high quality” teachers, “non high-quality” teacher, “better” or “worse” educational systems or the abysmally unimplementable process of “teacher performance assessment” (previously known as work sampling). The facts of the matter are that children of color, working class children, students with disabilities, English language learners–that is, anyone who has NEVER benefited from public, private, or charter schooling–remain, I believe, purposely disadvantaged by the present system of education that is based on the interests of maintaining social class relations and permanent rule of the bankers, billionaires, and their puppets in the Twin Parties of War and Plunder. The disparity in the kinds of education one receives–Regardless How “Effective” The Instruction–is purposeful and designed for the extant results we have. Darling-Hammond, like other liberal purveyors of a “third way” between the interests of labor and capital, seem to believe that improving education will come with better innovations to a system designed to do exactly what it already does. Indeed, IF teachers engage in “effective” instruction and “better” approaches to documenting that effectiveness then the results we see when their diverse students display diverse, and, to the point, Disparate, Inequitable, and Segregated results disadvantaging the already-disadvantage children could “only” be attributed to The Students; either that or some hemming and hawing about “social factors” as an argument of last resort. By the time you get to that hemming and hawing, the demagogues and ideologues of class rule will have already taken the “common sense” road of blaming the victims and made “social” arguments too “esoteric” to hear from “gifted intellectuals” such as LDH or you.
You are correct, Dr. Ravitch, VAM is “no way to improve education”. Unfortunately, the Only Way to Improve Education is to Improve Society, take it out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and their henchmen in the capitalist parties, and building a truly democratic approach to building communities of education systems based on the deliberations of the people directly in every form of community and mass organization. Yes, I know that this “solution” seems to esoteric to some. That is because such an order is too tall to fill in the context of reform, reformism, and the status quo of “progressive” education. The example of Cuba is too much of a reach for too many liberal educators and, to be sure, building a truly educative system in a large country like ours with its extreme levels of heterogeneity in our populations requires more than mere “examples”. I suggest that what is needed now–besides your excellent work in discussing, and educating, about the issues–is a much stronger commitment by educators to engage politically in building a movement with parents, working people, and, dare you be so bold, the children and youth who have such a direct stake in the future of education. I suggest THAT is why organizations such as PURE in Chicago can be effective, That is why it is important to connect such a movement for free public education through college with the movements against wars and austerity, and the removing the entire population from the shackles of the capitalist-imposed debt slavery on college students through loans and working people through the usury of credit and home mortgage scheming by the bankers and billionaires.
In Short, There Is No Easy or “Quality” Way to Improve Education But To Challenge the VERY Reason Education Exists in Capitalist Society–To Maintain Capitalist Rule. The first step in improving teacher quality has to be opposing the rule of 1% and extricating teachers and their organizations from the influence of the mouthpieces for that 1%–the Democratic and Republican parties. Every other initiative in the “quality of education” is a treading of water and the keeping of one’s job for sustenance. Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking otherwise.
Manuel Barrera, PhD
I really appreciate both of these responses–from Dr. Barrera and ruralteacher. They get to the critical question we do not ask enough in these discussions: what is the purpose of education and public education in particular? LDH’s vaunted Teacher Performance Assessment, besides making an entryway for Pearson Inc into teacher education, rests on ideas of education as reproductive including its uncritical demands for ‘academic language’ and its rigid demands for ‘correct’ answers that fit the given rubric rather than open and uncertain reflection upon practice. I understand that there are longstanding collegial and maybe even personal relationships that make critique difficult. But there is a larger assault taking place that must be addressed, and this means uncomfortable conversations. I am hoping Diane that you might listen to those who are actually experiencing the colonization of our minds and practices through these ‘standards’ and ‘rubrics’ and consider that core values of teaching and learning as emerging from human relationships, as about fostering democracy, empathy, and a larger more uncertain world view are being lost. This loss is being fostered by teacher educators who have abandoned a commitment to the human core of teaching and learning in an effort (it seems at best) to appease critics whose interests are not the public good, the deepening of democratic communities, or the opening of our hearts and minds, but are to corporate profit and preparation for life in our capitalist society. Why we need foundations class–and why they are taking them away. This is philosophical work, work of being, and not work for anyone’s VAM or 11 point rubric, and certainly not work to measures by calibrated scorers paid by piece by the largest assessment company in North America. Would love a real conversation about this.
Linda Darling Hammond in 2011 is against high stakes testing: ” Meanwhile American students, who now spend weeks of every school year from 3rd grade to 11th grade bubbling in answers on high-stakes tests, currently perform well below those of other industrialized countries in math and science, and have more trouble writing, analyzing and defending their views, because they have much less practice in doing so.”
“Expect teaching and curriculum to be narrowed further as teachers focus more intensely on these tests. The current desire to attach scores from a burgeoning battery of tests to teacher evaluation could make matters worse.” http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/05/30/testing-students-to-grade-teachers/execessive-testing-is-a-dangerous-obsession
Linda Darling Hammond in 2013 is profiting from the Common Core and high stakes test that will accompany it in many states (i.e. Smart Balanced Assessment (SBA) or PARCC): Sits on the Committee of the Smart Balanced Assessment Technical Advisory Committee. http://www.smarterbalanced.org/about/advisory-committees/
It seems to me that she has SOLD OUT to the corporate educational reform movement. Sigh.
Hello Jessica,
Thank you for the URL. You ARE correct! I’ve never understood the LDH fan club. I am even less convinced now. I would consider her to be very much an advocate of Common Core and all that accompanies it.
LDH is not only a member of the Smart Balanced Assessment group, but specifically, sits on their Technical Advisory Committee with an emphasis on computer enhanced testing. This is a direct link to her activities.
* BarryLane55 and Barbara Madeloni are mostly correct too, in my opinion.
Children are more than numbers. http://www.barrylane,bandcamp.com
I don’t care how much money Pearson offers me, I will not sell out our children and teachers. Alternative assessments will never work till we give the power back to classroom teachers and abandon this top down, punitive approach to reform. Oh wait, Pearson just offered me 2 million dollars to come up with a new way to evaluate teachers. They may have a point. Money and power does talk. Perhaps I can work with them to change the system from within and at the same time…… We can make better tests and teacher evaluation systems. People don’t seem to like these ones. We can…… Oh wait, it says in my contract i can’t criticize publishers and test companies in public…..I will reform the system from within. Diane Ravitch is reforming against the tide, I can reform with it..This Common Core can be a way to show what they are teaching …. Who am I?
What was Linda thinking…..