Matthew Di Carlo dissects the latest effort by Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst to sell the idea that evaluating teachers by test scores is accurate, unbiased, and necessary.
Di Carlo analyzes the “myths” and discovers that some of them are facts.
This is embarrassing. Rhee really needs to hire a competent research department.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Di Carlo also mentions “well-designed value-added models.” I’ve never seen or heard of one. Have you?
Massachusetts uses the “student growth percentile” as its value-added measure (but recently has noted that because it’s based on percentiles half of the students will be below 50). I’ve tracked the measure by teacher and it’s pretty consistent that the measure reflects primarily the students the teacher has in that particular year. For example, one teacher’s median SGPs were in the 30s one year when she had students with disabilities, and in the 60s the next year when she did not. Yet they are requiring the use of this measure in evaluations.
Perhaps official myths have a role in public policy …
Rhee has lots of competency behind her. The problem is what kind of competency. Theirs is in psychological warfare and marketing wherein any lie is good if it accomplishes their goals no matter what the truth is. Just make it look like the truth through the research on the human mind and marketing it to the common public just like everything you see on T.V. and the lies the government tells you to continue this outrageous taking of all of our rights and money for the very elite. That is all this is about and they have many Rhee’s out there that will sell their soul to the devil for pocket change to the billionaires who are really wanting to become trillionaires at our expense.
One of the things about competition is that many of the reformy types have a stack goal – that is, they assume that at any given school that a certain percentage are excellent teachers and a certain percentage are poor teachers.
There’s no reason to believe this is true, by the way, that teacher ability is evenly distributed across schools, and certainly not that every school has someone who should be fired.
Microsoft is actually famous, infamous, for this stack ranking technique – the idea that there is a poorest performer on every team who should be fired. It’s intensely destructive.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/03/the-terrible-management-technique-that-cost-microsoft-its-creativity/
quote:
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“Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
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Matthew Di Carlo bent over backward in his commentary on the StudentsFirst claims. He still found them sorely wanting.
It is more than unfair and misleading to set up such strawman arguments: it is so transparently flimsy that I almost feel sorry for whoever put those talking points together. They pertain more to the category of catchy marketing slogans and commercial hype.
This belongs in the same category as Eric Hanushek’s opening remarks on March 19, 2013, on the blog BRIDGING DIFFERENCES that, well, I will let him speak for himself:
“In our conversations about accountability, we have skirted around the issue that I think drives the most heated debate—namely, that accountability involves evaluation of teachers and administrators. And teachers and administrators are “agin it,” period.
Can’t we pare through some of the smoke and move the discussion forward to a better place?”
This from one of the intellectual pillars of the charterite/privatizer movement. To say that he is totally at odds with simple-to-verify facts re evaluations and who is fer ‘em and who is agin ‘em, actually made me sad. I do not know the man personally, but I took no pleasure in seeing someone so thoroughly wound himself by his own remarks.
Please click on this link if you feel I am in error: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2013/03/dear_deborah_in_our_conversati.html
After following ed blogs now for over four years, I have come to the conclusion that in the main [there are minor exceptions] the intellectual foundations of the charterite/privatizer movement rest on “proof by assertion.” If they say, they believe it, and they believe we should automatically believe it too. They quite literally find it impossible [and I must add, inconvenient] to conceive that anyone with good sense and a good heart could disagree with their self-interested patchwork narrative of how to achieve educational $ucce$$.
So let’s stay on the high road and stick to facts, logic and civility. We can’t, and shouldn’t, try to match their hype and spin.
🙂