At a recent meeting in New York City, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that “we as a country don’t know” how much student test scores should count as part of teachers’ evaluation. He said it shouldn’t be zero, and it shouldn’t be 100%. But it should be somewhere in between. As to what the number should be, the secretary said, “we don’t know.”
Here’s a thought: What if the current methods of calculating value-added are inaccurate? What if they are fundamentally flawed? What if they say nothing about teacher quality? What if they reflect who is in the class rather than teacher quality?
What if, say, a few years from now, we look back and realize they are junk science?
How much should they count then?
And if we don’t know whether they are accurate, and we don’t know if they are a reasonable measure of teacher quality, and if we have no evidence that their use in evaluation helps teachers improve or students achieve, why are we counting them at all? Shouldn’t we wait until we have clear evidence that the methods we use to evaluate teachers and principals are accurate, fair, reliable and valid, before putting them into practice?
I know that “we can’t wait,” but shouldn’t we wait long enough to know that what we are doing will help and not harm?
Or, are we still building a plane in mid-air?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Governor Cuomo, NYSED Commissioner John King and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch should be asked these questions too.
Not because I think they care about the answers (they don’t), but simply to put them on record so that when the new “rank and yank” Cuomo/Tisch/King evaluation system, rubberstamped by the NYSUT and the UFT, is exposed for being as harmful to students, teachers and schools as the “rank and yank” evaluation system Bill Gates uses at Microsoft has been for that company, we can hold these people accountable for their policies.
Well said!
same goes for using them as student evaluation.. no?
especially since what they claim to measure (ie:school math, ability to memorize short term, …) isn’t what we think matters most in life…
“what they claim to measure” And that is all it is, a claim-certainly not supported by logical/rational thinking.
They are designed to evaluate students, so you’re on firmer ground there.
My experience with them is that you can’t get a good score by accident: that is, a student who scores in the top two groupings is doing fine and has some academic chops, whether developed at home, in school, at the library, or wherever.
My experience is that a student *can* get a bad score for any number of reasons: not knowing the material is only one of them, and even that is a superset of “was not taught the material.” Reasons a capable student might get a bad score include anxiety, failure to follow directions on the exam properly (like in filling in bubbles), a transcription error in putting answers in the wrong place, illness, lack of stamina for a long exam covering a year’s worth of material, perfectionism/overthinking questions, inability to handle trick/misdirecting multiple choice questions, difficulty with written english (which can interfere with math exams for example), and the like. A poor score suggests more investigation is necessary to understand what the student’s difficulty is, whether the material is truly not understood or whether the score is an outlier compared to the student’s other work.
We will know when there are massive teacher shortages, and who ever is Secretary of Education will say, “How can we make teaching attractive.” it will then be too late, and states won’t be able to afford the teachers who will be able to command large salaries. Everyone will say, ” What happened.”
Baby boomers will be leaving teaching in record numbers. Many started their careers when teaching was what women did. Those days are over. When this economy improves, teaching will be the last profession anyone will chose. No intelligent person will want to be a low paid test prep provider.
As in Louisiana with Jindal, they will just lower the requirements to be a teacher since it will become only test prep babysitting anyway. He even took away, or wants to, the requirement of a college degree. If you create more cyber charters you don’t even need a human at all or just one or two to man the technology.
We are going backwards, not forwards and these leaders believe they are leading and they are the smartest people in the room. We are screwed!
Here’s a proposal, since we’re being evaluated on tests, shouldn’t those same policymakers be evaluated on these same tests? If there isn’t sufficient growth nationwide , Arnie should go, King should go, and Tisch should resign.
NCLB is a disaster, yet no one is being evaluated on their support of it.
When will the public wake up and realize, it’s not about student growth, it’s about power, it’s about money, it’s politics, and it’s NOT about teaching.
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/142558715.html
Diane and Readers,
I wrote this article on testing for the Philadelphia Daily News in March. The VAM is nothing but junk science and another scam perpetrated on the public by the money people.
“What if, say, a few years from now, we look back and realize they are junk science?” No need to wait we already know they are junk “science” the same as eugenics was junk science.
“if we have no evidence that their use in evaluation helps teachers improve or students achieve, why are we counting them at all?” One quibble I have is with teachers and other educators using this concept of “raising student achievement” instead of attempting to increase student learning. These are two very different constructs/concepts with “raising achievement” implying an end product-outcome versus student learning implying a process and all learning should be about the process. We waste valuable time and effort by focusing on “output” instead of process.
First, I agree with rratto, “it’s about money, it’s politics, and it’s NOT about teaching.” These corporations and billionaires will eventually get bored and look for another investment that will provide them with a better ROI. At that point, they will move on. Being a former special education teacher in the inner city, I know it takes a great amount of TLC to educate children and that is something that cannot be measured on a standardized test.
Will we be destroyed before they get bored?
I propose we stop referring to VAM as junk science. There’s no science in it at all. VAM is junk math and junk statistics.
Read the article, Mathematical Intimidation by John Ewing: http://bit.ly/kIAEBz
And of course there’s the timeless Damned Lies and Statistics by Joel Best
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520219786
And last, read this choice bit of analysis by Jason Gots at The Big Think. It has a hilarious video embedded within it by John Cleese which puts the whole question nicely to rest.
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/you-are-not-an-equation
Whenever I get into a discussion with someone who supports using value-added to rate individual teachers, their argument centers on the need for improving teacher effectiveness and student learning. In response, I’ve begun citing the following:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/analysis-la-times-2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/a….
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/…
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/…
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/…
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com…
And that’s hardly an exhaustive list of the mathematicians and researchers who have demonstrated the problems with value-added models.
In those same discussions with value-added proponents, I make it clear I don’t have a personal ax to grind with value-added. In fact, last year I was rated a “5: Most Effective” for English III; it was the first year for the test. Next year if I wind up with a 2 or 3, I’m not going to feel like a less effective teacher.
SchoolFinance101/Bruce Baker is a very good source for discussion of the failure of VAM models to evaluate teachers, let alone to choose some for dismissal.
You know it’s a problem when you can predict a 5th grade teacher’s scores based on the scores of their students as 3rd graders.
Not only are we building a plane in midair, we as a country can’t decide what plane we’re trying to build, so we keep switching up the design while we’re trying to keep it flying.
Do Arne Duncan’s children go to charter schools? Did Bloomberg’s? Eva Moskowitz? Michelle Rhee? Bill Gates? When a rich person sends his children to Harlem Success Academy, I’ll believe that they are not just using our children as lab rats.
F.Y.I.:Arne’s bio says that he has two children who go to public school in Arlington, VA.
All this rhetoric about CAREER and college readiness…so where are the Common Core standards for manual trades and vocational programs?
College and career readiness in 21st century should mean a greater variety of learning experiences and “routes” to graduation…not fewer.
Let me get this right…a critical indicator of career/college readiness is the ability to read a college textbook and pass a standardized test….and that is according to the “experts” employed by companies and corporations that publish textbooks and print standardized tests. Does anyone else see this obvious conflict of interest?
CCSS evangelists insist mastery of college-level text is the key to success in life, so dyslexics like Edison, Ford, Disney, Einstein, Jobs, Branson, and Churchill were just lucky?
Wonder if David Coleman “tests” prospective contractors with a tier two vocabulary quiz before selecting one to fix the roof of his house or checks the ability of stone masons to comprehend an excerpt from McGraw-Hill college text before picking one to repair the foundation of his home?
If instruction is differentiated to accomodate student learning styles, shouldn’t we differentiate assessments to accomodate different testing styles?
Trying to measure the quality of a teacher by using his or her students’ test scores, is like grading a dentist based on the number of cavities his patients have…education is a shared responsibility.
Yes “content” is very important for preparing students for college and careers and that includes content of character.
Please read and SHARE this commentary on high stakes testing and the importance of character education, manual competence, and vocational programs…
http://www.learningfromlyrics.org/teachyourchildrenwell.htm
Oh, Diane. “Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.”
This is a common line used in edreform to back up the idea that “we can’t wait.” CCSS may not be perfect, but change is good. Dontcha know?
So,what does he know? A teacher comes up with an answer like that during a question posed during an evaluation, say when administrators are checking our data binders, we are ripped apart. So who holds the secretary of education accountable? He is supposed to be a leader in the education world so does this show his total and utter incompetence? Is this not cause enough for a supervisor to say, in the corporate model him and his puppeteers at the billionaire boys club favor so much,that he is not fit to do his job?
Reblogged this on Abelardo Garcia Jr's Blog and commented:
I guess at the level Mr Duncan is its OK to say something like this. God forbid an educator says something like this during a cursory check of our data binders by administrators.
“We don’t know.”
What?!?!
Think about this for a moment, folks. This is our nation’s “Education Secretary” saying this, in public.
Secretary Duncan: If YOU “don’t know”, then who does?
Eager student squirming in seat, raising and waving hand excitedly!!! I know!! I know!!
The answer is: none of the teacher’s evaluation should be based on student test scores, standardized or teacher made.
Now is that that difficult of a concept to understand? Asks the teacher!!