Many people assume that value-added assessment started with Race to the Top.
Value-added assessment or value-added modeling means judging teachers by how much students scores went up.
Actually, it started in the 1980s, when William Sanders, an agricultural statistician in Tennessee, claimed that it was possible to measure student growth the way he was accustomed to measure the growth of plants, with the teacher as the independent variable.
In Dallas, at about the same time, a group of school district statisticians developed their own model to measure teacher effectiveness.
You would think that by now Tennessee and Dallas would be leading the nation, having figured out this stuff that the Obama administration has imposed on the nation. But they are not.
New York City started experimenting with a value-added model not long after Bloomberg took control. Marc Epstein, then a teacher at Jamaica High School, figured out that what the city was doing was shifting responsibility for learning from the student to the teacher. It seemed benign at the time. Now we can see this idea sweeping the nation, demoralizing teachers and turning schooling into a data-driven environment where learning becomes a numbers game. Anyone can play.
Marc, who holds a Ph.D. in Japanese naval history, is now a member of the large group of teachers in New York City called ATR (absent teacher reserve). His school was closed, through no fault of his own or any other faculty member. So with his long experience and deep knowledge of history, he floats from school to school. He is too expensive. A school can hire two young teachers in place of his salary. New York City’s Department of Education would prefer to keep teachers like him as ATR–collecting a salary without a real assignment–because…sorry, I can’t recall the reason. Maybe they hope he will go away, along with the hundreds or thousands of other teachers that have been displaced by a policy of closing schools and allowing new schools to maximize their budget by excluding veteran teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The ATR pool, like the “Lost Children” who roam NYC without a school that will take them, OTC’s – Over The Counter (students) – are the living, breathing definition of denial.
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No, Value Added doesn’t make sense, and even it’s proponents don’t defend it now. They just continue to legislate it, sense or nonsense.
Anthony Cody has an outstanding deconstruction of VAM up in his dialog with the Gates Foundation, and he asks them four hard questions:
“How can teacher effectiveness accomplish the Herculean task society has set for it, of eliminating the achievement gap, when the differences between teachers only account for, at most, about 20% of the variance in student outcomes?
“If you have seen the damage done by introducing competitive merit pay schemes, as suggested by Bill Gates comments, why have “no opinion” about this? Don’t you have a responsibility to actively reverse some of the damage your advocacy has done?”
“Is it not reasonable to assume that the damage done by competitive merit pay schemes will also be done by attaching high stakes to evaluations, especially using test-driven VAM systems that have been demonstrated to be highly volatile, based on student ‘data’ which is itself fraught with error, and biased against those teaching the most vulnerable students?”
“How can we build the foundation of trust we need for more effective evaluations and feedback for teachers when unreliable Value Added systems have already been imposed as a significant part of the process?”
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/responding_to_the_gates_founda.html
Readers can also read and comment on the dialog on the Gates Foundation’s own blog, but so far no answers have been forthcoming.
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/Responding-to-the-Gates-Foundation-How-do-we-Consider-Evidence-of-Learning-in-Teacher-Evaluations
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I’ve been saying for many years that the goal of the educational reformers seems to be that students that have great teachers can learn all they need to know just by sitting passively like “bumps on a log”. I’ve often asked at staff meetings why there were two words that were NEVER mentioned regarding improving education: Student effort.
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Can Marc offer to take a lower salary? My job security is that my salary is about 2/3 of the cost of a tenure track replacement and I teach 50% more than my tenure track replacement would teach.
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What a good idea! Maybe he could offer to go on welfare and keep teaching. Imagine him working for the same salary as the young kids with one or two years of teaching experience. That’s a great way to make professionals feel a sense of pride in their work and understand how valued they are!
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My life is not my salary. I value the opportunity to teach, and am willing to take a lower salary than people I work with to have that opportunity. I thought perhaps Marc values teaching as well.
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The comment above might sound harsher than I intended, but as I work for LESS than “the same salary as the young kids with one or two years experience”, I don’t really have to imagine it. I am asking if Marc can work for for a lower salary if he desires it. Surely there is some room between twice the starting salary of a beginning teacher and the minimum wage.
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The growth of plants? The model is based on that? There are many variables as to plant growth. Ask any farmer, gardener, horticulturalist, or plant enthusiast or hobbyist. Crazy!
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I’m of the philosophy that test scores are predominantly an indicator of socioeconomic status. Things can be done poorly or things can be done well. My first contact with value added was looking at schools with lots of high poverty students that were going to schools that were raising achievement significantly, that is trying to give the low poverty students the same achievement as middle class and affluent students. Value added at one point was about identifying exceptional schools.
What is being done now with value added is a total corruption of the original intent that I read about a very long time ago.
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