Sorry, I forgot the link! Here it is:
This video was created by Herbert Bassett.
Herb Bassett is a Louisiana music teacher who also holds a math minor. His principal asked him in October to investigate Louisiana’s school performance scores. Since then, Herb has also done work to explain and expose Louisiana’s value added modeling (VAM),
The teacher evaluation model in Louisiana is based overwhelmingly on student test scores. A single year rating of Ineffective can get a teacher fired.
This is wrong. Those imposing this punitive and inaccurate approach should be held accountable for their errors and for demoralizing the state’s teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I personally enjoyed the comments by Robert Shepard under the Feb. 11 post, Have you been calibrated yet. Some of his comments:
And, if these idiot technocrats wanted to apply real learning from business measurement to education, they would do well to scrap VAM and think, instead, in terms of worker-directed continuous quality control of the kind implemented, famously, in the Japanese auto industry, in which the workers on the line did their own evaluations, in concert, and were rewarded for their successful innovations (rather than having their autonomy removed and being themselves robotized). The great pioneers of quality control–William Edwards Deming and Joseph Moses Juran, were first and foremost humanists. They understood that work is done by humans and that humans require autonomy and intrinsic motivation. Key principles of Deming’s Total Quality Management movement included “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively,” “Eliminate slogans, exhortations,and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity” for “such exhortations only create adversarial relationships,” “Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factor floor,” “Eliminate management by objective,” “Remove barriers that rob the worker of his [or her] right ot pride of workmanship.”
People who know nothing of the history of industrial quality control and of its astonishing successes will be surprised to learn that such learnings as these are what the engineering types who studied quality improvement in the workplace and turned it into a true science came to. Exactly the opposite of what these idiot technocrats are now doing in our schools. Amusingly, the technocrats aren’t even familiar with the basic principles of modern industrial management, which run precisely counter to all that they are doing.
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Is the video available? I did not see a link. Thanks.
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I think this is it:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0Pq4gPXaWVySjRZTXN3a200Vkk/preview
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no video link
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In my investigative experience administrators are the biggest problem not teachers. Yes, there are teachers who should not be in the classroom. For those teachers who just do not work out and have tried but just do not fit this job to relieve the costs of termination and in humanity and compassion I have suggested for a few years that there become an agreement to train them for another field which fits their capabilities. This would save a lot of mental harm to students, teachers, staff and all others concerned along with saving a lot of money. At LAUSD administrators are the ones who blow away the money and act illegally constantly. Multiple times I personally have been prevented from recording a public meeting even when I have had my press pass with me. The last time even after I sent a letter to the General Counsel’s Office on CORE-CA letterhead that I would be there and giving them the law allowing me to do such and the laws against them prevent me from doing such. They had 9 LAUSDPD, a canine unit, Earl Perkins, Assistant Superintendent and Greg McNair. #2 in the General Counsel’s Office waiting to stop me. We just happen to have the entire incident on audio and video. This is how administrators act. Do teachers do this often?
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The Video by Dr. Noell on VAM is some of the most important video for the real long run I have seen. The implications to real people with false use of information as he points out clearly is outrageous. I might ask what does one look have to do with three? Everything the guy who is supposed to have created this program on how it should work to be good is not in the implementation. I am going to send this out.
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Thanks for recognizing the importance of the video of Dr. Noell. Here is a link to get to his uncut video testimony before the Advisory Committee on Educator Evaluations of Feb 23, 2011. The part I used is his response to a question asked at about 25:00 in on part two of the video:
http://www.act54.org/acee-video-02-11.html
In the ACEE report of January 2012, presumably written by Noell and others, on page 14 it is noted:
“The data demonstrate moderate stability across years. However, the level of correlation across consecutive years suggests using caution in reaching conclusions from any single year’s data.”
The legislature simply ignored this in passing legislation to strip tenure from teachers based on a single VAM rating of “ineffective” – without even considering the observation portion of the teacher evaluation.
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The bitter irony is that this is happening in Louisiana, the state that got the highest marks from Rhee’s group for implementing the deformer policy agenda including this joke of a teacher evaluation system. I guess they just want to be sued down there as was done in DC after Rhee fired teachers without due process. $7.8 million settlement as I recall. I wonder if during the litigation, Rhee’s lawyers tried to make the case that the use of VAM (Impact) was equivalent to due process. I hope that they did.
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They just want to “churn” the teachers. No one will ever get paid too much, and no one will reach any kind of a pension. This all makes sense if you think about it in this way. Teachers will become like temp workers. Since experienced teachers are much more effective, it will lead to a degraded school system. If I were a teacher in LA, I would move away quickly or quit.
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I just saw a segment on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” It was at 6:50am EST on March 1. Hopefully they will post it online. In the meantime, here is a story posted about it a few days ago (http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/02/26/massachusetts-schools-send-kids-home-with-letters-saying-they-are-too-fat/). It was about a school (or district) in Massachusetts that sent letters home to students warning them about obesity based on the Body Mass Index (BMI). These were personalized letters that either told students they were fine or they were at risk because of their BMI.
The parent of a normal weight looking kid received a letter saying that her child was at risk based on BMI. At the end of the segment, she went on to say that any good doctor will tell you that you cannot base someone’s health on BMI alone. The host seemed to agree.
Why isn’t that logic applied to education? Why do people, including the hosts, bow in support of measuring educational quality on test scores alone? When will someone who comes on that show or any popular show talking about education nowadays be able to make the same argument about education and not have their credibility or loyalty to kids questioned?
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Anyone read this book,”Value-Added Measures in Education: What Every Educator Needs to Know” by Douglas Harris and Foreward by Randi Weingarten? http://www.amazon.com/Value-Added-Measures-Education-Every-Educator/dp/1612500005
So Randi Weingarten supports VAM?????
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Chi Res,
I don’t support VAM under any circumstances. It is junk science invented by economists and statisticians to measure what they
don’t understand.
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Diane, does this mean you don’t think that value added measurement can help provide useful information about progress students in a school are making? I understand your concerns about using this measure to assess individual faculty. But do you also oppose VAM to provide one form of information, not the only, but one form of information about what progress students in a school are making?
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The only people who should see a student’s test scores are the student, the teacher, the principal or department chair, and the parents. Like a doctor’s tests of a patient. Not the state.
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If VAM is “junk science”, why would you make an individual student’s information available to students, teachers, principals or dept chairs & parents?
How do you feel about making the aggregated value added data for a school (not any individual student’s score) available to the general public as one part of an overall description of a school?
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Every reputable research organization–from the National Academy of Education to the American Education Research Association to the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment–has said that VAM measures which students are in the classroom, not teacher quality. The teacher who teaches ELLs and low-income students will be a “worse” teacher than the one who teaches affluent students.
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