According to the text of the Vergara decision, two expert witnesses for the plaintiffs were Professor Raj Chetty of Harvard and Professor Tom Kane of Harvard.
Professor Chetty, the judge said, testified that “a single year in a classroom with a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings per classroom.” Dr. Kane testified that students in LAUSD taught by a teacher in the bottom 5% of competence lose 9.54 months of learning in a single year compared to students taught by an average teacher.
Chetty, you may recall, is the nation’s leading proponent of VAM. Kane directs the Gates Foundation’s MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) Project.
The judge accepted these statements as fact, not knowing they are strongly disputed by other scholars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Junk science and mathematics at their best!
Kids are cows, dontcha know?
Chetty is a tenured professor at Harvard, is he not?
Chetty? Tenured?
Robert Rendo: I believe that both Chetty and Kane have tenure. Perhaps they should surrender it to demonstrate their bona fides.
My department would hire Chetty in a second, but I am not sure the dean university could afford him. He would probably end up at another private university like NYU.
Why?
My department would try to hire him because he is a highly skilled empirical economist. We would most likely fail because we would not be able to offer him a job with the resources and salary that NYU could.
Again, why would you hire Chetty? What value does he add? What are your performance criteria for a good professor? Does Chetty meet those criteria quantitatively?
He produces important first rate research.
Raj Chetty’s assertion that a bad teacher in one class room can cost a student $1.4 million dollars in lost lifetime earnings seems totally absurd to me. If true then if I had never had any bad teachers I should practically be as rich as Bill Gates.
Oh sorry, apparently it’s 1.4 million for a class of 30 students so about $50,000 per student. So maybe not totally absurd, still I'[m pretty dubious about that figure.
Again you didn’t answer my question. What objective measure do you go by in saying Chetty produces first rate reasearch?
If you really want the answer, I suggest you look at his CV (It can be found here: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/cv.pdf ). We might be able to use awards and honors to gauge others assessment of his research so far. I will include just a couple:
John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, 2013
Fellow of the Econometric Society, 2012
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2012
The John Bates Clark award is often talked about as the pre-Nobel prize award (The Clark award goes to the outstanding economist under the age of 40). The MacArthur Foundation grants, otherwise known as genius grants, I assume need no introduction.
We might also look at papers published in top ranked journals. He has five articles in AER, the top ranked peer reviewed journal in economics. None of the distinguished professors currently in my department have a single article in AER.
$1.4M in lifetime earnings per classroom…. what balderdash…. there are not enough decent-paying jobs for 2/3 of those 30 kids to make a living wage, let alone for them to collectively earn $1.4million over their lifetimes…
that didn’t come out right! What I meant to say is that with the current trend in job creation (misnomer), 2/3s of a classroom of 30 kids – even with degrees – wont be able to get jobs that make more than minimum wage, of which they would need three to make ends meet – pay the rent, buy food AND pay off student loans… in 30 years @ (high) average of $40K/yr, each MIGHT earn $1.2M…
The free market capitalist economy, rather than the quality of teaching will be what deprives them and their classmates of a lifetime share of that $1.4M…
Besides, even if it was true, $1.4M, divided amongst 30 kids, over 30 years working life, totals only a cost of $1,555 per kid…. is there such a quantitative and qualitative difference between $1.2M and $1,201,555 that all teachers have to have tenure taken away?
Sahilia.. your points are so logical! But since when is “logical” important? A good sound byte is of the essence no matter how foolish. These profs obviously live by this adage of sound byte over common sense!
Lets not forget the state defendant’s witness, Dr. Berlliner, who testified that about 1-3% of the teachers in California are grossly ineffective and that a 3-5 year probationary period would be better for both teachers and students.
Better how?
If I can use a sports analogy, teaching is more of a marathon than a sprint. Evaluating a teacher after a year and a half (teachers need to know the outcome of the evaluation by March 15) is a little like choosing your distance runners based on their time in the 400. Teachers who learn well from experience are dismissed before they can put what they have learned into practice.
You didn’t directly answer my question. How do probationary periods improve the quality of teaching?
Let me try again. Probationary periods 1) allow a better evaluation of individual teachers and 2) allow a teacher to grow and develop before an up or down decision is made on the teacher’s employment.
Are you really arguing that the initial decision to hire should be accompanied by tenure (or due process rights or whatever you want to call it)?
Let me help you out. How does a probationary period allow for better evaluation methods? If the goal is to help a teacher improve, are you saying that cannot occur outside probationary periods? Are probationary periods necessary for a teacher to “grow”?
Due process is not tenure or job-for-life. You are confusing the concepts. Yes. I think all jobs should have due process. It is a very American idea. Why not give a reason for dismissal and a fair hearing of the circumstances? Are you saying managers are infallible?
Once again, a longer period allows for more opportunity to gather information about the teacher’s performance and more opportunity for the teacher to grow into the position so the evaluation is likely to be a better gauge of how the teacher will be teaching down the road.
Never mind. You refuse to address my point. You can have due process without probationary periods. You can implement best practices and continuous improvement without probationary periods.
You are apt to make lots of errors when everything hinges on the job interview.
I was surprised by the two year probationary period. I started teaching in Michigan in the 1990s and ours was a four year period until tenure. (And in my school, not everybody made it through.)
That being said, job protections in a public job like teaching are important. Anyone who has ever had to deal with that overzealous parent will tell you that.
And Arne Duncan is engaged in Orwellian doublespeak. He has considerable nerve to talk about “respecting” teachers.
Again, how does a probationary period improve teacher quality, make it “better”?
I think the idea is that the longer the probationary period, the more information there is on which to base a decision whether to grant tenure.
And the better the chance that a teacher will develop.
Ok, how long and what information? At what point do we say “you have your license”? Should lawyers be on a 4, 6, 10 year probationary period after passing the bar and lose their license to practice based on performance (not disciplinary) criteria (are they?).
In our state, it is nearly impossible for lawyers to permanently lose their license, even for criminal convictions. And usually they get it back after a few years. Just to lose a law license takes hearings with appeals.
How does any length probationary period improve an individual teacher’s performance? Aside from any incentive effects, it probably doesn’t. What it does do is allow a longer evaluation period when choosing teachers and give individual teachers a chance to grow into the position.
I don’t know how long the probationary period should be, MathVale. I would assume that probationary periods could be too short or too long, for various reasons. As for whether 2 years is better than 3 years, or 3 years is better than 4 years, and so on, I don’t know. And I don’t think this is the kind of question that could ever be satisfactorily answered by a court or a jury, no matter how much evidence is placed before them.
FLERP! I agree. Courts can not and should not answer the question. This court did. At will employment is not without a downside. It causes people to avoid risk, cover up problems, and leads to anger and confrontation in the workplace. Teachers must make difficult and often unpopular decisions. Imagine if a business had to evaluate, discipline, and fail customers. Or maybe a judge kept his job based on losing plaintiff or convicted defendant evaluations. Yes, teachers need to be responsible for educating students. No, teachers should not be fired for doing their job and making tough decisions.
teachingeconomist – I don’t like the idea of unelected courts running the country. Granting tenure or not is a matter of administrative policy made by officials answerable to elected representatives. In my view when courts get involved in such matters they have become legislators instead of judges.
Personally I think granting tenure is poor policy but courts should not get involved in policy questions.
How about due process?
So any contractual provisions that result in discriminatory losses of earnings must be unconstitutional?
Hmmm …
I just had to play with this “loss of $1.4 million per class over a lifetime” stat for supposedly having “an ineffective teacher.”
Let’s say that the class has 25 students. (I realize that privatizers like Eric Hanushek who maintain that class size doesn’t matter would pack in a lot more students, but let’s keep it reasonable by seasoned secondary teacher standards.)
$1.4 million divided by 25 students equals $56,000.
Now let’s assume that the individual begins work at 18 years of age and retires at 65, which gives a work life of 47 years. $56,000 divided by 47 years equals $1191.49 per year.
Now let’s assume that the individual works five days per week for 50 weeks of the year.
This equals 250 work days per year.
$1,191.49 divided by 250 days equals $4.77 per day.
A grande Starbucks coffee costs more than that.
So, if a student gets that “ineffective teacher,” then no grande Starbucks for each working day of that student’s life. A tragedy, truly.
Perhaps the judge would have better understood this foolishness had it been presented as a Starbucks coffee word problem.
And what is the loss in stability of a school system if teacher turnover is left to capricious dismissal practices?
No answer there from Chetty and Kane?
Perhaps an even bigger waste of resources is the efforts we spend to minimize the number of ineffective teachers to begin with. If effectiveness is so overblown, why on earth do we require education degrees or pay more for graduate degrees?
Maybe degrees should be free.
Degrees are never free. At best, you might be able to get someone else to pay for it.
If you are really trying to tell us that personal caprice, favoritism, nepotism, and a host of other specious rationalizations for personnel decisions — all the things that led to tenure and unions in the first place — will really work better than due process for keeping the best teachers and weeding out the worst, then you are either a liar or a fool or both.
No, what I am trying to say is pretty well reflected in what I did say.
Maybe but the question here is what constitutes a quality administrator to make such decisions? I worked in business for years before teaching and saw numerous people with personal connections (or children of those with connections) who got jobs even though they were less than adequate. Then keep those jobs over people who were better when layoffs came around.
Neither system is perfect but I can tell you that an administrator in another school in our district has privately told people that he would gladly fire half his staff to replace them with loyalists.
What you miss is that due process protects way more good teachers than bad teachers. My job protections have allowed me to defy administrators (in a reasonable fashion) on numerous occasions. Not in highly disruptive public practices but rather in terms of district policy. I had a voice. Now it’s greatly diminished.
Teachingeconomist,
Using your same reasoning, you could also say that when facing lung cancer brought on by years of cigarette smoking, doctors’ effectiveness is overblown, so why require doctors to go to medical school.
Nobody here, nobody, is arguing for not trying to increase teacher effectiveness. Among the many facets of this situation that are being argued is that poverty is the big elephant in the room that so-called education reformers try to blow off as nothing compared to the almighty power of the classroom teacher. If you don’t believe poverty is getting blown off, just read some of the blogs/posts at Michelle Rhee’s Students First website, or check into The Skillful Teacher program.
Personally, what really hurts, and the main reason why I am short-circuiting my own public school teacher career at least three years earlier than originally intended, is that, in my ideal education world, there would be room for teachers to do close reading, emphasize nonfiction over fiction, have students keep data notebooks to monitor their progress, etc. etc. I would defend teachers taking these routes, plus trying all sorts of standardized testing on their class if they really believe that is going to help. However, in the world these so-called reformers are creating, the message has been loud and clear that there is no room for the likes of me, having my students play with puppets, trying to create as much joy of learning as I can muster up, filming movies they can take home with their scripts, etc. etc., because too much time has to be given over to mandatory testing and a micro-managed curriculum that sets rigid boundaires on the material I am supposed to rush through week by week, and how I am supposed to present it. By his own admission, one of the VAM study authors mentioned that good teachers might get the ax. I will tell you, under the increasingly fascist education regime getting set up, good teachers – many of my more admired colleagues – are axing themselves because it is not clear to them that doing what they are ordered to do is not inflicting more harm than good on their children.
They, and myself, have been faced with an impossible choice. God bless those teachers who feel they can somehow navigate all this crap and still remain true to their conscience and continuing to be nurturing for their children despite it all. Maybe I’m not smart enough, but I just haven’t been able to figure out how to do that.
If physicians were equally ineffective with all disease and traumatic injuries as they are with very late state lung cancer, I would agree. Fortunately for us, they are not.
Steve K makes some excellent points.
How many truly “ineffective ” teachers have you had in your lifetime?I may have had one who didn’t teach the subject at all. I had teachers who were coaches who could do anything they wanted because of their popularity. Guess what, it is still that way. My fellow classmates had many of the same teachers yet we all performed at different academic levels. One may score a 35 on the ACT and another an 18. This whole scare tactic about ineffective teachers is bs. The vast majority are professionals doing their jobs. The Vegara political decision won’t change one damn thing in urban schools.
Really, why spend money on college at all ? None of the jobs in business or economics require a college education — nothing at all a person couldn’t learn on their own from a book if/when properly incentivized. It should all be about whether or not they can cut it on the job — no one should be required to go to college.
It is my understanding that most corporate types prefer college graduates only because of the soft skills it requires of them, not because of technical knowledge — some of the sciences / engineering and perhaps journalism are exceptions to this.
And on the other hand, schools need people like me with advanced degrees to teach the college dual credit classes (colleges will only allow a high school teacher to teach a dual credit class IF the teacher has, like me, an advanced degree in the field rather than in education). Obviously, then, I’ll be compensated for that under either system — so let me close with I think people SHOULD be rewarded for being the type of person who is interested in furthering their education, no matter what field.
Steve K,
Same here. I worked for plenty of sons, daughters, cronies, spouses and nearly all had a kind of “tenure” no matter how incompetent. We constantly had to try and work around their decisions. Talk about wasting resources. And the “free market” never seemed to correct for these people. When layoffs rolled around, the good people working long hours and sacrificing were axed. Anybody who thinks private sector is even close to a meritocracy is a naive fool or one of these bumbling cronies.
Generally firms filled with bumbling fools do not do well in the market unless there is some protection from firms that are not filled with bumbling fools.
TE, you didn’t answer my question. If we are wasting resources and as you say education degrees are optional, why aren’t all degrees offered by volunteer teachers? Are you saying there is no value in an education degree?
No, I am not saying that. In fact, I am taking the position that good teaching has value. Good and poor teaching creates a cloud of impacts that follow students for the rest of their lives. Most of these impacts are difficult to measure, so Chetty looks to one of the parts of the cloud that can be measured and finds that yes, good teachers do seem to create this part of the cloud. There are no doubt other positive impacts that are not so easily quantified that we might well suspect are there as well.
I find it very very strange that a group of teachers is arguing that the evidence that good and bad teaching matters is trivial.
Teachers are not arguing the value of teaching. The misapplication of statistics and flawed models are the argument. Chetty engaged in grandstanding and junk science. Before his results were reviewed and critiqued, they are used in a court decision to make law. That should be cause for concern, not celebration.
The basic message of the Chetty paper is that even using these crude measures of teacher quality (standardized test scores of the students) and these crude measures of outcome (earnings) we can see how important it is to have good teaching in a school and avoid bad teaching.
Saying that we should not believe the results of Chetty IS to deny that we have any good evidence that good teaching matters.
TE, “Generally firms filled with bumbling fools do not do well in the market unless there is some protection from firms that are not filled with bumbling fools.”
Your faith in market theory is admirable. But there’s a reason for Dilbert cartoons. The only people who agree with you are some ivory towered academics far removed from the realities of the workplace, pampered trust fund elites, executive cronies, and a few rubes that still believe our current economic system works or ever really did.
Companies are not meritocracies. Connections and relations play a much bigger role. It is CYA with good kiss up that works. The people who take risks and responsibility are penalized. That is not bitterness, that is reality for anybody “at will”.
Think about the firms you know that are filled with bumbling fools. Why do these firms have customers? Why don’t these customers choose firms not filled with bumbling fools?
“Saying that we should not believe the results of Chetty IS to deny that we have any good evidence that good teaching matters.”
Crude (sloppy) methods lead to crude (junk) results. I prefer observation with conformation over belief. Leave belief for religion.
We SHOULD deny we have good evidence. We should conjecture good teaching leads to a better outcome and directly prove that or assume an absurdity and show the opposite.
Again, I question the methods and models. We are making law based on junk.
Crude is not sloppy. Crude is what we have to work with.
What will you observe? What outcomes will you count? What would you consider good evidence?
You tell me. Why do these firms have customers? Much of the shenanigans that goes on in a board room or executive retreat is compensated for by the people doing the day to day work. They get no golden parachutes.
Oh, so these firms are not filled with bumbling boobs, only some folks in the company are like that. The fewer bumbling boobs there are, the smaller the impact and the easier it is for the non-bumblers to make up for it.
TeacherJulie – College degrees are probably mostly a matter of signalling. What is actually learned in college (if anything) is rarely of any importance in real life.
One advantage to business’s relying on college degrees to screen people out is that if they used more subjective criteria they could be exposed to legal action for discrimination. By making a college degree a requirement for a job they can exclude a lot of people whom they probably wouldn’t hire anyway and have a simple defense against a claim of discrimination.
TE,
When you say that fortunately, physicians are more effective treating things other than lung cancer, are you making the parallel to how well U.S. public school students compare to students world wide when comparing affluent apples with affluent apples? And how about how those VAMs tend to find teachers of poorer students less effective than teachers of more affluent students? That’s the parallel I’m making to lung cancer patients. And if you’re going to argue that it’s the less effective, worse teachers that just happen to end up stuck with less able students, please offer specific evidence, evidence where the statistical difference isn’t so small that one group of researchers were able to find a correlation between student height and particular teachers (Bitner, Corcoran, Domina, Penner: “Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height”).
I am only commenting on your example with a physician and late stage lung cancer. If high levels of training (and the resource expenditure that creates the training) has not impact on X, we should not require training in order to address X. Luckily for us, high level of training in medicine does seem to have an impact on medical outcomes, so it is a worthwhile expenditure of resources.
Re why the “bumbling fools” have customers, maybe, for example in the fast food industry, they propagandize enough to lure people into handing over their hard earned money to wreck their health eating junk food.
But which one do you patronize? The one that always gets your order wrong, runs out of French fries, and is slow at filling your order?
TE,
Re the high level of training, exactly, just like a high level of education training leads to impressive results when the teachers aren’t dealing with extreme poverty (i.e. what is lung cancer to education). My point stuill stands.
They train horses, we educate teachers. Accountability, if done right and on a level playing field will assure quality teachers. If done wrong as per teach to the test, it will assure the most ineffective teachers. The choice is there. Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com to check the availability of my newest book when that info is available. What is “A” level achievement? You’ll find out
deutch29.. do not forget that currently top brass is promoting college for all. So perhaps in this “great loss” of money due to the hardship of a “highly ineffective teacher” we should consider the fact that the student will be up to his/her eyeballs in debt which he/she cannot pay off because he/she is unable to get a job that pays more than minimum wage despite the degree. College and Career ready instead should be labeled “College and Debt Ready”.. If a corporation or bank isn’t profiting, the student’s education is not “effective” to the business world. Ah but wait, could it be INEFFECTIVE GOVERNING AND BAD POLICY and not bad teaching that is the main contributing factor to a students’ future loss of income? Dare I suggest this!
The reason they want “college for all” is because jobs that didn’t require college (which you could support a family on) have been shipped overseas. We are fighting a losing battle as we tell our children they must have a college degree. How many jobs are really out there that will need a college degree? Teachers will be gone, manufacturing is gone, so no need to hire mid level managers. Health care is still an option, but how many jobs will it create? We are tying our children’s futures to debt they will carry for most of their life . It seems like diversion to the issue that our country has been sold out to a “global economy”. All for corporate greed that owns both sides of the aisle. The illusion that we have two parties is just that. An illusion. When corporations became people we all became hamsters. Once unions are gone we will become another third world country. Our generation never had the kind of working conditions our grandparents and great-grandparents did. We assumed a lot of privileges they worked hard to earn were just part of the job. Not. We will have children that can’t critically think, haven’t been taught like previous generations, and no real teachers left in the field. Then we can plug everyone in and control the masses. Everyone WILL be available to serve in the Armed “Corporate” forces. So the army to protect their interests will be teeming with people with no other choice.
To add to what jointherevolution said…
How better to control a person than to have them indebted to you. An entire generation of young college grads will be underemployed and in debt to the government and the banks. And will therefore be easy to control and less willing to risk what little they have to stand up against the overlords.
What had been spread about the study by Chetty et al., the president, the media etc. regarding this research was regarding an income gain. Now it’s presented in court as an income loss. The result in CA: no more due process for teachers.
Something similar happened with William Sanders and VAM in the late 90s/early 2000s. At teacher educator conferences, Sanders described how his research showed negative impacts from “three bad teachers in a row”. Later his research became popularized as being about “three great teachers in a row.” The result in my state: laws were changed to allow Teach for America to simultaneously teach in their own classrooms and get paid for it while earning credit for student teaching without being state certified.
Something is very wrong when researchers can reinterpret the conclusions of their studies according to the audience they are addressing and sensationalize the results in order to achieve “reform” goals.
RE: Sanders and his three year claims. When TVAAS was first being implemented in Tennessee, the State Auditor’s office commissioned two independent studies to analyze Sanders’ work. I am doing this from memory, as I have the two reports at home (I am at aschool), but one was I think by Wolfe and Bock from Ontario and the other was from Fisher, who at the time was Florida Commissioner of Education (might be spelled Fischer). What both analyses stated unambiguously is that Sanders’ claims about being able to see teacher effects for three years out were unsustainable based on the available data – in thsoe days Sanders phrased it as the effects of a good or bad teacher could be seen for three years.
I first examined the literature on VAM, including work by Mendro, Bryk, and a discussion with a technical person from NWEA, as part of work I did in a class with Iris Rotberg during doctoral studies in Educational Police more than a decade ago. I also wrote about the landmark policy brief put out by EPI (and c-authored by among others Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Eva Baker, Bill Linn, etc) which reviewed the available literature on value-added and on tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. Simply put, VAM has always been oversold, the problems with its use 15 years ago have never been addressed.
I remind people that one part of the original proposal for No Child Left Behind as posted on the White House website in 2001 was to offer a 1% bonus on Title I funds to schools that made the value-added scores of teadfhers available to parents. That did not get out of the House Committee chaired at the time by John Boehner.
At the teacher ed conferences I attended, Sanders said nothing about three great teachers in a row. It was all about three bad teachers in a row.
I am so tired of hearing this amount flaunted as if it would make a significant difference in the lives of people in poverty. The researchers had to calculate it for the entire class and spread It out over the course of a lifetime in order to make it sound large, but it still doesn’t matter. As the working poor, I can tell you that an additional $20 or $30 per week would not make a dent in the bills I have to pay just for basic survival. (People like me can’t afford Starbucks.)
Mercedes,
Any idea if that $56,000 figure is gross, before taxes? I’m guessing it is and that it does not take into consideration federal taxes and state taxes, since the latter varies by state, or local taxes.
So, I figured it out at today’s rates for someone in my area:
At the %15 federal tax rate, from the “$56,000,” deduct $8400 = $47,600.
At my state’s 5% flat tax rate for all, that’s another deduction of $2800 = $44,880.
Then, if you want to really know what kind of cash in hand we’re talking about, there are other automatic payroll deductions withheld for FICA (Social Security and Medicare):
Assuming the person is not self-employed, which would mean doubling the following rates:
At 4.2% for Social Security, deduct $2352= $42,528
At 1.5% for Medicare, deduct $840 = $41,688
Divide that by 47 years = $886.98 per year
Considering the fact that people who live paycheck to paycheck spend their money, usually on basic expenses for survival, and the sales tax rate in my city for general merchandise is 9.25%, deduct $82.04 = $804.94 per year
Now divide $804.94 by 250 days = $3.22 per day cash in hand
I didn’t even mention the excise taxes, since they’re often added to charges, but the average in my state is $696 per capita annually.
In today’s economy, this lifetime windfall ( or “loss”) of “$56,000” is truly chump change –especially to people like me, who have never been paid $56K in a single year since I started working in the 60s.
It’s ultimately all about union busting, denying teachers any job security, destroying collective bargaining rights and getting rid of the older more expensive teachers. In NJ, the probation or trial period is now 4 years in which the new teacher can be fired for no reason or any reason. But that’s still not enough for Christie who of course wants to KILL tenure, seniority and the last-in-first-out concept.
Christie is also trying to get rid of pensions and retiree health insurance while he is at it.
So, that’s it. This court judge just simply bought into the mythos of lifetime earnings that have nothing to do with school operation or quality instruction whatsoever. The verdict is indeed a product of VAMIFICATION. Pity his inability to think outside the box.
Maybe the judge should calculate how my lifetime earnings are affected by his decision.
There’s some psych study about opportunity and loss, and how people fixate on loss. So what about the opportunity? The judge could have used the same logic to order the state to offer 1.4 million lifetime bonuses to attract the best 1 to 3 percent grossly effective teachers out of the private sector or silicon valley to teach in poor and minority schools in LA.
Right. In game theory, the idea is that losing hurts more than winning feels good.
I want to give credit where credit is due. Loss aversion is a concept that comes from a branch on economics called behavioral economics, not game theory. Behavioral economists along with experimental economists, do often use the tools of game theory.
Steve K, I believe the theory ended with “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.
And how does tenure create ineffective teachers? That judge is dumber than a sack of hammers
The only way I can rationalize this judge’s idiocy is that he has no children. How else could he argue that there are THOUSANDS of “grossly ineffective teachers” just in California? I’m horrified and disgusted at the same time.
The idea is that because of tenure you get lazy as a teacher. You know, you just sit around and do little. You hand out packets, never teach, and let the class do whatever you want. You see, you cause these poor students to not like school and give up total responsibility for learning.
The judge clearly bought this “expert” testimony hook, line, and sinker, but then, he was inclined to do so. These oligarchs will not actually like very much the society they are building. They think that they want the neofeudalism, but it’s not pretty to live in a world of unmotivated and ignorant people who hate you.
A remarkable “tell” in this decision is his uncritical acceptance of the dollar cost of that “ineffective teacher” as measured by VAM. How many times does that crap have to be debunked? Purest pseudoscience.
Exactly. It is accepted as a given that our economy awaits with open arms and tons of dough for all, and lousy tenured teachers are the biggest roadblock for the little ones.
Bob, they use numbers! They must be right!
LOL. I know.
Data-driven decision making. Rheeformist numerology.
Why would they care if we hate them? You give them too much credit.
If you read the opinion closely, you will see that the judge betrays, early on, that he knows that he is completely biased with regard to the issue before him.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Doing away with due process confers absolute power.
“The judge accepted these statements as fact, not knowing they are strongly disputed by other scholars.”
Did the defense bring these disputed issues up during cross examination of Chetty and Kane? Did the defense have any scholars testify about VAM and MET in order to dispute these claims of Chetty and Kane? If not, why?
my thoughts exactly.
Bingo. That’s the process. The plaintiff puts on an expert witness to say X. The defendant can move to prevent the expert from testifying (because, for example, the expert isn’t qualified, or the expert’s opinion isn’t based on techniques that are generally accepted in the scientific community). The defendant can also cross-examine the expert and try to attack the expert’s credibility, methodology, conclusions, etc. The defendant can also put on its own competing expert witnesses to rebut the plaintiff’s expert testimony. The court’s responsibility is to (1) rule on motions to exclude expert testimony; and, in non-jury trials, (2) weigh the expert testimony along with the rest of the evidence in the case.
It’s not clear to me from either the judge’s decision OR the post-trial briefing whether the state or the union tried to challenge the underlying methodology of Chetty’s and Kane’s opinions. One reasonable conclusion to draw from that is that they did not try to challenge it.
Also, the post-trial briefing filed by the state and the union focuses almost entirely on legal questions. Very little discussion of the factual questions that the readers on this blog are most interested in. The plaintiffs’ post-trial brief is much more factual in its focus.
Well, neglecting to defend the interests of teachers is something the current misleadership excels at, When have they ever challenged the premises or pseudo-science of the so-called reformers?
Chetty may be a really good researcher, and his research methods may be sound (the use of VAM notwithstanding). However, I don’t believe the positivist epistemological assumptions underpinning his research are appropriate.
Then it seems to me that the defendant should be suing the lawyers for malpractice if they didn’t challenge every single word uttered by Chetty and Kane.
It can be difficult to challenge experts’ methodologies in dueling-expert cases that rely heavily on statistical proof, because it’s often the case that your own experts have used the same methodologies you’d like to challenge, either in expert opinions filed in other cases or in scholarly work.
FLERP!,
Well, why wouldn’t the lawyers have challenged the basis of these statements concerning standardized test scores, a la Wilson. It seems to me that the lawyers were/are either highly incompetent to not be able to weave Wilson’s errors and the resulting invalidities into this case. The lawyers appear to suffer the same syndrome so many have of not being able to connect multifaceted strands to make a case that the plaintiffs arguments are pure bullshit. They got their clocks cleaned. Where is Gerry Spence when you need him?
they should have called YOU as an expert witness.
The judge begins his decision by taking great pains to say that he was “NOT” basing the decision on a political point of view, though there will be others who will make political hay of it. LOL.
I was reminded of a lecture that I attended by the great medievalist E. Talbot Donaldson. His subject was Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. I remember him mentioning that one way you can tell that the Good Wife is lying through her gapped teeth is that she constantly is constantly swearing to her own veracity:
thus seyde he certeyn.
I woot,
Trowe
God woot,
I woot wel
I woot as wel as ye,
And certes
For wel ye knowe,
Trusteth right wel,
say ye no?
I sey this,
If I be daungerous, God yeve me sorwe!
I shal seye sooth,
I sey yow sooth.
And so on.
Really, she does. Honestly. You bet she does. You betcha. Would I lie to you? That’s the God’s honest truth. Rheelly, it is.
“The judge began his decision by taking great pains to say he was “NOT basing the decision on a political point of view…”
As journalist Claude Cockburn once said, don’t believe anything until you hear the official denial.
I do not credit the judge with ignorance, I credit the forces of the Free Market and the privatizers pulling it’s strings with the power to buy our courtrooms.
And what economists did the lawyers for the defendants hire to give testimony?
And these “professors” are academics? Hard to believe. And if they are tenured their “data” is so flawed and ridiculous (even to a layperson not seeped in the statistics behind this) you would think they are strategizing to make a point about getting rid of tenure at the university level too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wondering how much of their income is supported by Gates through paid research opportunities.. an endowed chair or whatever!!!
Why, yes. These are “the best academics money can buy.”
the judge accepting the statements by Chetty and Kaine without examining contrary research is similar to what Sandra Day O’Connor did in Zelman v Harris. Except in this case the judge has no excuse since he had live witnesses speaking to the research, starting with Linda Darling-Hamilton.
Have you seen a transcript of her testimony? I haven’t seen any transcripts. This is a great reverse-example of how technology can increase transparency, improve discourse, and strengthen democracy. The LA Superior Court’s electronic docket is terrible, so it’s essentially impossible to evaluate the evidence that the parties presented at trial.
Based solely on the judge’s decision, you would this was a two day trial with a handful of expert witnesses. And the judge’s decision reads like it was written on the back of a napkin, so it doesn’t inspire confidence. It’s certainly not the kind of opinion that was designed to show the appellate court that the trial court thoroughly considered all the evidence. To the extent that people are misunderstanding the legal issues or the court’s analysis, it’s the judge’s own fault for writing an opinion that looks like it came out of family court. This is a momentous case, and it deserves an opinion that reflects its importance.
Unions “create unequal conditions”.
Organized labor is apparently the biggest threat to this country ed reformers have ever encountered. Teachers unions and public schools are responsible for everything; income inequality, college affordability, housing discrimination, all of it.
What a joke. What a complete abdication of responsibility by powerful people.
Hey, when they finally get rid of those nasty labor unions maybe then we’ll hold someone who actually has some power and influence “accountable”, huh?
They should keep a couple labor union members around, as a convenient scapegoat. I don’t know what they’d do without that national punching bag and source of all our problems.
It’s lock-step agreement on labor unions within the ed reform movement!
As with everything else they promote, there are no dissenters.
What a rigorous, data-based and scientific “debate” we’re having! There’s the anti-labor side and, well, there’s only that one side.
And not just the ed deform movement. I saw an article on this case on CNN last night and read the comments after the article. The bashing of unions was appalling. Almost everyone was stating that unions have “ruined this country.” I guess they never learned about workplace safety, the 40 hour workweek, and ending of child labor. The propaganda against unions in all workplaces is disgusting.
They are paid trolls
Throughout American history, there have been badly-decided court cases. One need not be a historian to recall some of the national biggies from the past (Plessy v Ferguson, Buck v Bell, Korematsu v United States) or those that have taken place more recently (Citizens United, District of Columbia v Heller).
The Vergara decision came from Judge Rolf Treu, who was first appointed to the California bench by former Republcan governor Pete Wilson. Wilson is the prototypical “free” market conservative who subscribes to trickle-down economic nonsense. As governor Wilson pushed more standardized testing of students, his tough-on-crime policies led to Three Strikes legislation –– incredibly costly, with huge racial disparities, and resulting in stupidities and injustices like a life sentence for stealing golf clubs or a $2.50 pair of socks or 5 videotapes –– and he cut spending significantly on both infrastructure and public education.
Presumably Wilson appointed people who shared his conservative ideology as judges.
While serving on the bench, Treu has been characterized as being irascible and criticized for letting “his personal political agenda control his behavior and decisions” and for doing the entire “legal system an injustice.”
In this particular case, the plaintiff’s attorney told Treu in closing arguments that “most teachers are talented, hard working, doing a good job.” But he also told Treu that “echoes” of Brown v. Board filled the room, and that “evidence demonstrates overwhelmingly” that do ineffective teachers do “education harm” and “deprive: students of their rights to a good education.
The “evidence” was mostly this, As Judge Treu wrote in his decision:
“The evidence is compelling. Indeed it shocks the conscience. Based on a massive study Dr Chetty testified that a single year in a classroom with a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings.”
On the face of it, it’s a flimsy allegation. Think about it a slightly different way. Does one year of bad coaching, or of faulty coaching decisions, bilk a team of young players out of a million-plus bucks in potential lifetime sports earnings. Didn’t seem to interfere with Michael Jordan.
Rolf Treu cannot be said to be a “bright” man. Consider his pedigree. That he bought lock, stock and barrel the Chetty correlations as “overwhelming” proof is testimony enough.
This decision, like other bad ones from the past, will eventually be overturned.
Sadly, their are other politicians like Pete Wilson out there. And when they can, they’ll appoint conservative dogmatists as judges. .
Sadly, though, it took YEARS, and in some cases Constitutional amendments, to fix bad court cases. It was 50 years before Plessy was overturned; Dred Scott took TWO Constitutional amendments to fix, and, believe it or not, Korematsu has NEVER been overturned. Will it take that long to fix this case?
The use of the judicial system to set policy as is common in the US has, in addition to being highly undemocratic, the disadvantage of making it very difficult to undo or back off from bad decisions. The fiction of judges basing their decisions on legal principles means that when they mandate poor policies it becomes very difficult to reverse them even when they clearly do not work. Busing is an example.
I haven’t seen anything about this, but I think we might start looking at where the pre-K money is going.
It looks like it’ll be a real boon in terms of for-profit providers:
“The grant to run the local Head Start program will be split, with the majority going to Toledo Public Schools and the rest to a Pittsburgh-based, for-profit early education and child-care provider, according to U.S. lawmakers.
A TPS-led community collaborative will receive $8.1 million to serve 1,126 children, while Brightside Academy will receive nearly $5 million to serve 455 children, according to U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s office.
Additionally, TPS will receive $5.2 million this summer, with $1 million of that start-up funds, and the rest bridge funding until December; Brightside will receive $3.1 million, with $600,000 of that start-up funding, Miss Kaptur’s office said.”
With the ed reform antipathy to public schools and their vehemently anti-labor stand, I don’t see public entities getting a whole lot of pre-K funding. If even Marcy Kaptur couldn’t keep a national of state for-profit provider out of Ohio, it doesn’t look good.
It’ll be a huge influx of public money into private-owned, publicly-funded entities and that will only hasten the demise of K-12 public ed.
Look at NYC. It’s been clear from the get-go that the bulk of the pre-k funding was going to go to private service providers. The public schools don’t have the capacity. This is what the city bargained away its control over co-location decisions for — sending hundreds of millions of dollars to private service providers. But hey, it’s “progressive,” so you couldn’t say anything bad about it without risking being called a Bloomberg sympathizer. Now the prognosis for class sizes is even worse than under Bloomberg.
When states like mine decided to implement Universal PreK and serve every 3 and 4 year old whose family wanted them to attend, it was decided that the most facile thing to do was to situate it in existing programs. Since we didn’t have public PreK, except for children at-risk, the bulk of those programs are primarily in private child care settings, some non-profit and some for-profit, including family child care (e.g., home day care) programs.
The UPK program was never adequately funded here by the state though, so monies go first for children at-risk, regardless of location –and there’s not enough money to serve all of those kids either. Good luck getting the funds from your state.
Let’s keep in mind, judges are often voted in or appointed based on their political affiliations and agendas.
“The local Head Start program was one of dozens that HHS put up for competition in 2011 for the first time. None of the bidders, which included the Economic Opportunity Planning Association of Greater Toledo and TPS, was selected. The U.S. government bid it out again late last year.
Community Development Institute of Denver was given the grant on an interim basis while the federal government went through the bidding process. It’s unclear how many of CDI’s 280 employees will be hired by TPS and Brightside.
“Those of us who have worked long and hard to begin to re-establish local control of these important federal resources know that the community goal is always a better educated citizenry,” Miss Kaptur said.”
“Begin to RE-establish local control”. The Obama Administration put it out for bids to private contractors, in other words, and Kaptur only managed to get part of it back.
Is there anyone in that administration who isn’t madly in love with private contractors?
Why are we paying these people? Why don’t they all go work for the contractors?
Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2014/06/11/TPS-splits-funding-for-Head-Start.html#Oj9fovfehFP4PSeQ.99
I have been an educator for a long time, but I did not notice that a H.U.G.E % of so-called EXPERTS in Education are Public Policy folks.
Was I asleep, working with RealTeachers…RealKids…RealParents, not paying attention, didn’t ask…but, when did this shift happen? Since when are the Education Experts barely in their 20’s, with Economics or Public Policy backgrounds experts in Education?
I rarely hear the word ‘children’ mentioned anywhere.
Can someone shed light on this subject? We were afraid of TFA, CCSS, VAM, lame undereducated legislators, large class sizes…. We are not concerned about the number of PublicPolicyEconomists from Harvard making ALL RECOMMENDATIONS about Education? I review these EXPERTS’ credentials, and whoop…there it is, BS in PublicPolicy!
Are we as educators missing a huge piece of the puzzle, are surrounded with blind spots where we keep defending the needs of children, while these Harvard trained Experts call ALL THE SHOTS without ever thinking of or mentioning children?
What am I missing? I continuously get hung up on this.
Old enough to look for Education credentials.
Please advise…
Confused in ATL
The credentials of those spearheading corporate education “reform” with their “expertise” has been mentioned a lot.
Wendy Kopp has a BA in Public Policy from Princeton and she sent Michelle Rhee, who had a BA in Government, in to teach 2nd and 3rd graders. (Kids those ages do not learn much about government.) After TFA, Rhee went on to earn a masters in Public Policy from Harvard. Arne Duncan has a BA from Harvard in Sociology (though my guess is he got in on a basketball scholarship). The push for VAM etc. can be seen in 1970s publications from Eric Hanushek, an economist from the right-wing Hoover Institute at Stanford with major input in “reform”. (I wonder if he was a witness for the prosecution, too.)
Looks like they lined their faux education expert ducks in a row as part of a long-range business plan to privatize public education.
BTW, when Kopp was at Princeton in the 80s, she was on the board of the Princeton Tory (i.e., Conservative), a right-wing undergraduate magazine.
Kopp “proudly and repeatedly” said then “that she was a “corporate tool”:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/03/wendy-kopp-princeton-tory/
And she took that job for life…
The question is whether there was any evidence from the state’s or the union’s experts that rebutted this evidence or showed that this evidence was unreliable.
And what does the good judge saith about the administrator or board who axe a good teacher because neither have a scintilla of academic background or because VAM fails? Stands to reason that the child’s earning potential will be more influenced by an administrator’s judgment and a board’s follow-up than that loser teacher in the classroom. If Vergara is to stand, there had better be a push to make administrators and board members display comprehensive mastery of all subject areas before they take their positions. As it stands, those who can’t teach, administrate. The world is now in their hands and the center is flying apart.
FLERP got it right – if such testimony by Chetty and Kane was presented it should have been refuted from the stronger evidence-based research that could have objectively obliterated these arguments. This is indeed a game-changing decision happening in California as it did, and Sec. Duncan’s response is worrisome as well. Public policy wonks representing large companies are taking over environmental, educational, and health care functions of the public sector, where government should be working for the betterment of society (and protection). My rose colored glasses are getting somewhat foggy.
This judge is just acting politically. He doesn’t respect teachers. It wouldn’t have mattered what was presented. How on earth did they establish that these teachers were ineffective or the others in these schools. It is all a sham. The judge should be ashamed.
To generalize the point —
If anyone tries to say that personal caprice, favoritism, nepotism, and a host of other specious rationalizations for personnel decisions — all the things we had in spades beforehand that led to academic freedom, tenure, and unions in the first place — will really work better than due process for supporting the best teachers and weeding out the worst, then that person is either a fool or a liar both.
Jon Awbrey: in a nutshell—
You hit the bullseye, dead center.
😎
I just watched the video of the Finnish prof talking about Finnish education and now I’m either inspired or totally depressed by the comparisons between theirs and ours. I haven’t decided. Teachers have many fewer classroom hours per week, kids have 2 years less schooling than here, and, amazingly, teachers are able to teach and assess students very well.
Loaded dice?
Chetty’s evidence on which this extraordinary ruling is based hasn’t even appeared in any peer-reviewed journal – it was published as an NBER working paper. The charts he showed to the judge violate basic rules of scientific data presentation: the y-axes are all manipulated, the error bars and R-square values are missing. That a judge would accept such weak evidence to strike down statutes is disturbing and highlights the lack of scientific literacy of the judiciary. Maybe that too can be blamed on the teachers.
Actually the work is forthcoming as two papers in the American Economic Review, generally considered the most important and prestigious peer reviewed economic publication in the world.
Are they publishing the charts without error bars and r-square values and with manipulated y-axes?
I do not know what the final format of the paper will be like. It will probably be out in a year or so, publication lags are long.
Are you one of the authors of the paper? I cannot comment on a paper that hasn’t been published yet. I am commenting on the charts that HAVE been published and those violate scientific standards. I also point out that even if AER reviewed and accepted a version of that paper, that doesn’t make it “settled science” by a huge stretch. This evidence should be debated, critiqued and replicated among experts, not used as ideological fodder. To base a court decision striking down a half dozen state laws on a single “forthcoming” paper is grotesque. A conscientious scientist must also, if called to testify in a court room, be honest about the limitations of their findings. That too is a duty of a scientist: admitting that one could be proven wrong by further research.
I am not one of the authors of the paper. I was pointing out a factual error in your post that this work was simply a working paper. The authors seem to me to be very open, allowing anyone in the world access to their data set and SAS program used to do the calculations. If you can find the data manipulation I am sure that AER would be very interested in publishing your results.
Thanks. I was not making a factual error however. As of this writing, there is only an unreviewed working paper. The AER version hasn’t been published yet and none of us know what it will look like. I would still be interested in your opinion whether it is permissible to show these data as points without error bars, to show the regression line without r-square value, and to rescale the y-axis to exaggerate the purported effect 20-fold.
As I said, both papers have been reviewed and accepted. I think this is probably the second round. In the first it looks like the referees recommended taking the longer single paper and dividing it up into two papers.
As I said, publication lags are long, so it might be a while coming out.
Bruce Baker (http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/fire-first-ask-questions-later-comments-on-recent-teacher-effectiveness-studies/) also noticed the “super-elastic, super-extra-stretchy Y axis”: “the NYT graph shows an increase of annual income from about $20,750 to $21,000. But, they do the usual news reporting strategy of having the Y axis go only from $20,250 to $21,250… so the $250 increase looks like a big jump upward. That said, the author’s own Figure 6 in the working paper does much the same!”
I guess he would be as surprised as I am that AER would actually publish the “super-extra-stretchy” chart.
I dug a bit deeper about the Chetty et al. study. Here’s what I found:
The study was first published as an NBER working paper at http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.pdf in 2011. It was submitted to American Economic Review and accepted after being split in two papers. Preprints can be found at http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/w19424.pdf and http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/w19423.pdf.
All the charts in all versions of the papers violate scientific data presentation standards:
– all Y-axes are “super-extra-stretchy” (Bruce Baker), exaggerating the purported statistical effect by orders of magnitude;
– none of the charts have error bars or confidence intervals; if they were shown, the error bars would certainly exceed the purported statistical effect by far;
– no r-square values or correlation coefficients are given; the r-squares are likely to be very low;
– the sample sizes on which the regressions are based are not shown; although the study drew on millions of student records, most of the records were incomplete and the actual regressions are based on only a fraction of the records.
Criticisms of the working paper by Bruce Baker (http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/fire-first-ask-questions-later-comments-on-recent-teacher-effectiveness-studies/) and Moshe Adler (epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/download/1264/1033) are worth reading. Adler points out that Chetty et al. report a small (albeit visually wildly exaggerated) but statistically significant effect of teacher VAM on student earnings at age 28 *but they found no effect at all on earnings at age 30*. Explains Adler:
“However, although the result they found for 30 year olds is not statistically significant, the words “not statistically significant” are nowhere to be found in their study. Instead the authors write, “The 95% confidence interval for the estimate is very wide. We therefore focus on earnings impacts up to age 28 for the remainder of our analysis.” … Furthermore, they didn’t just “focus” on earning impacts up to age 28; instead they proceeded as if the result for 28 year olds, an increase in income of .09%, was also the result that they found for 30 year olds, and made the assumption that this would have also been the result for any subsequent age group. Based on this assumption, which is contradicted by their own evidence, they calculated a life-time benefit of $25,000 from an increase of one standard deviation in teacher value-added. … After conducting a study its authors cannot ignore the results; science does not permit cherry picking. The result that teacher value-added does not have a statistically significant impact on earnings at age 30 must be part of any conclusion drawn from the Chetty et al. study.”
Damningly, the AER version of the paper omits even mentioning the negative finding for earnings at 30. The language from the working paper has simply been removed from the AER version! The editors and reviewers of AER must answer some hard questions about their scientific standards.
Thanks, I tried to read the Chetty study on income mobility across generations, but my mind was spinning in circles pretty quick.
Basically, I would agree that good teaching increases future income. Trying to measure teachers against each other, or measure future income is fraught with peril, I believe, do to the fact that there are far to many variables to isolate to ever claim any reasonable amount of precision.
Plus, that whole zoom in on the graph thing, boo. I think that might have happened on a graph in the movie “inconvenient truth”, plus I’ve seen it a few other times. Distorting data is bad form at minimum.
Please note that figures 1c, 2b, 4, and 7 all include confidence intervals drawn in as dotted lines. Standard errors of all coefficient estimates are reported in the tables in parentheses below the coefficients. The response to Alder can be found here: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/Adler_response.pdf
I’m sorry but the confidence intervals are missing from most charts *and in particular from the ones that were shown to the judge* (which are easiest to view at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/10/a-california-judge-just-ruled-that-teacher-tenure-is-bad-for-students/). These charts represent binned regressions, that is, for each 5-percentile-band, a whole set of thousands of data points was reduced to one single point, and then a regression line was fitted through these 20 points. Each of these 20 data points needs to be shown with a box-and-whisker plot or at least error bars – omitting them is a serious fault and I reiterate that no real scholarly journal with editors and reviewers that actually understand statistics would accept that. Show me a single chart like that in Nature or Science and I’ll buy you a beer. (Note also that the binned data points actually don’t fit the regression line very well – it seems that the slightly above-average teachers produce better outcomes than the “superstars”).
Moshe Adler’s extensive critique can be found here: http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-measuring-impact-of-teachers with a response from Chetty et al. Part of the response is cringe-worthy: they admit that there is no statistically significant effect on income at age 30 but claim that “this does not mean there is no effect at age 30; rather, it means that one has insufficient data to measure earnings impacts accurately at age 30.” But the data are not insufficient – they are what they are. The method chosen by the authors come up with the result that there is no significant effect, hence the null-hypothesis cannot be rejected, hence there is no sufficient scientific evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis (that there is an effect). It is exactly as I thought: the statistical evidence is so thin that the authors deliberately left the error bars/confidence intervals *out of all their charts* and stretched the Y-axes to create the impression that there are clear effects. This is a clear no-no and borders intentional fraud.