Linda Darling-Hammond and Edward Haertel of Stanford University explain why value-added assessment doesn’t work and how inaccurate it is.
Will John Deasy listen? Will the Gates Foundation listen?
Will the Los Angeles Times, which published their article, stop seeking names to publish inaccurate data about teacher “effectiveness”?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The best thing about this article is that it offers an alternative way to evaluate and mentor teachers: the PAR system. In general I think critics of using tests to evaluate teaching effectiveness would be more effective if they offered alternatives.
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is more than an alternative to the invalidity and in reliability of standard testing. It is proven to be effective and could be expanded or emulated for schools. No need to reinvent the wheel. It also eliminates standardization by its very nature. Standardizing teacher eval is no better than standardizing students.
I am not sure what you mean by standardizing students. It seems to me that there needs to be some commonality of curriculum across classrooms, schools, and school districts. Is that standardizing students?
Sorting students by chronological age is junk science.
Ungraded schools where students could be in the course for the approriate level for the subject would be a big improvement. [Ungraded does not mean that their homeworks and tests would not be assessed. They would be.] In elementary school my child was way below grade level in language arts and way above grade level in science and math. His life would have been less horrible in school if he could have taken classes approriate for his intellectual developmental stage. Fewer students would give up because they are trapped in courses above their chronological age grade level.
When I was a child I tried running in the yard flapping my arms trying to fly like a bird. I wasn’t able to fly, so I stopped trying to fly by flapping my arms. That is what all the children that need instruction at their developmental stage and don’t get it do.
I had been turned off by the social skills of Montessori, so didn’t enroll my son in the Montessori magnet. Now I see that it was a mistake. That would have moderated the insanity of our system of sorting students by birth year, not stage of intectual development.
I have a son who skipped a grade and began taking college courses at 15, so I am certainly not a big fan of chronologically based sorting, but there is some value to moving together as a cohort and similar social development.
I don’t think though that this is what the poster had in mind.
My point is that “bad teachers” is not the problem with education in this country. The so called reformers blame teachers for the mess of education in the U.S. I’m just saying the flawed system is the cause of the mess.
I certainly agree that there are many types of reforms that would increase academic achievement in schools, though I do think higher teacher quality is one of those reforms.
Would be nice if Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would recognize the junk science of high stakes standardized tests. The are hurting so many children with the tragic unintended consequences of high stakes testing. If I don’t vote Green tomorrow, I better bring a barf bag with me to the polling place. The President unfortunately is a flip flopper. He campaigned with a reasonable education platform and then gave us the junk science of high stakes testing and Arne Duncan.
Dump Duncan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Unintended?
George Lucas is gong to put his billions in Gates campaign. See story in Sunday Modesto Bee. Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2012 15:06:18 +0000 To: rke25@hotmail.com
The right way to evaluate teachers. http://www.examiner.com/article/the-goldurs-way-to-evaluate-teachers
Will the reformers listen? No, they will not. The reformers have a sunk cost bias that only a disciplined mind can overcome. Data, experience, and continued failure will never change these minds. Diane Ravitch is an extreme anomaly in that she overcame her own sunk cost bias.
Any efforts to get the current reformers to change their minds will likely fail. I suggest the only tool available to get them to retreat is shame.
Even then though, the reformers may walk away but they will NEVER admit they were wrong. The will declare victory and seek opportunity elsewhere.
Shame and ridicule.
Yes… The same thing that brought on the demise of dueling for HONOR . Steven Pinker’s latest: Angels of Our Better Nature: The Decline of Violence – is a great read if you have any interest in the subject.
In the eyes of rapacious education privateers and their apparatchiks, VAM is a useful weapon against teachers, who are one of the few obstacles to their control of the honey pots that school budgets represent. Insipid rhetoric and talking points aside, the kids are just collateral damage.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
(Darling-Hammond): “First, we found that value-added models of teacher effectiveness are highly unstable. Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next. For example, teachers who rank at the bottom one year are more likely to rank above average the following year than to rate poorly again. The same kind of wild swings hold true for teachers at the top. If the scores were trustworthy measures of a teacher’s ability, this would not occur.”
Would the proposed alternative, “rigorous, ongoing assessment by experts who review teachers’ instruction based on professional standards. Evaluators look at classroom practice, plus evidence of student learning from a range of classroom work that includes (but is not limited to) school or district tests that directly connect with the curriculum and students” exhibit greater stability? Consider the fads that issue from Colleges of Education: Whole Language methods of Reading instruction, Discovery methods of Math instruction, block scheduling, portfolio assessment, Critical Pedagogy, and so on, and on, and on, and try to imagine how any teacher maintains her self-respect while jumping through these bogus “experts” hoops. The stability of any teacher’s assessed performance measure would depend on her willingness to follow the current fad.
The State (government, generally) cannot subsidize education without a definition of “education”. Operationally, this definition will take the form of student performance on standardized tests or some other measure. The measure that Darling-Hammond proposes elevates the process over the end. If “the public school system” is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded construction and consulting contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers’ age 6-18 education subsidy toward post-secondary tuition or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified private-sector employer?
“What works?” is an empirical question that a competitive market will answer more accurately than will a State-monopoly enterprise. The most effective accountability mechanism that humans have yet discovered is a policy that empowers unhappy clients to take their business elsewhere.
“The stability of any teacher’s assessed performance measure would depend on her willingness to follow the current fad. ”
Boy, did you hit it on the nail! Save us from ““rigorous, ongoing assessment.” We know what good teaching looks like; we know it can look very different in each classroom. My favorite and most useful evaluation information came out of a peer system.