Obama’s former budget director Peter Orszag recently wrote an article claiming that teachers should be judged by the test scores of their students. He read about the Raj Chetty study and the Gates MET study, and that was good enough for him.
From what he writes, it is clear that he knows nothing of the research critiquing those two studies. Hundreds of millions of scarce dollars are being wasted to make VAM work. It is not working anywhere. The tests are not designed to measure teacher quality.
VAM is junk science.
Not to worry, Orszag is a banker so he knows how to evaluate teachers.
Here, Mercedes Schneider examines Peter Orszag’s assertions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whew! I thought our professional futures were going to decided by real research based methods. Now all I have to do is wait for the bail-outs when the entire system crashes. Worked for him and his cohorts.
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Can someone explain what tests they used by name and were they all from the same company without any changes? And secondly, how did they link the tests by name to income tax returns? Call me a skeptic.
From the Bloomberg piece: “An even more compelling rebuttal of the second critique, however, is found in a December 2011 paper by Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University. These researchers assembled a database of 2.5 million students in grades 3 through 8 along with 18 million English and math tests from 1989 through 2009. They then linked that database with income tax returns.”
I’m coming to the conclusion that the reason why privatizers like standardized tests is because that is one metric where they have the chance to game and influence the scores. It is also the SIMPLIEST way of measuring a teachers so-called ‘effectiveness’. They know nothing else about the other intrinsic measures of teaching and learning, and have no idea how to quantify it. They do know that they wouldn’t subject their children to this form of education and testing regime. Hence their fondness for private schools and academies. How so many smart and supposedly intelligent people can know so little is beyond me.
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I find it interesting that people can simultaneously believe that Obama is so smart but that he’s hopelessly ignorant. Based on his life accomplishments, I’m perfectly willing to believe the smart part. Therefore, the ignorance part has to be willful mendacity.
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Yes. Obama understands VAM perfectly well. He just hates public school teachers.
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Let’s see what his life accomplishments are. Pushing the national debt from 7 trillion to 17 trillion. Ruining public education. Playing 117 rounds of bad golf. Misjudging the Islamic radicals he supported. Leaving Iraq in chaos (well he shares that with Bush). Leaving Afghanistan is chaos. Ignoring the nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea. Enacting an economically devastating government health plan. Persistent public lying, or at least glaring self-contradiction. Setting liberals and conservatives at each others throats by his manner of campaigning. Permitting Fast and Furious to go forward. Concealing what happened in Benghazi. Pretending he was a foreign student to get into Occidental. Concealing his grades at Columbia. Graduating at the absolute bottom of his law class at Harvard. Sitting for 20 years in the pews of the racist church of reverend Wright. Getting Bill Ayers to write his first book. Doping for his last two years of high school.
On the positive side: finally supporting gay marriage, putting his children in the best private school in DC, staying thin, and letting Seal Team Six take out bin Laden.
What a brain!!!!!
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Special Ed. teachers have to have majored in both a core area and spec. ed. Anyone who teaches Special ed. kids have the credentials and training to do both. (I’m not sure when the teacher you knew was last certified. It may have been dif. then)
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Harlan, there’s plenty to criticize about our president, but many of your complaints seem to be taken from the mouths of Fox broadcasters. Looking at just one of your myths, graduating in the bottom 20% of his Harvard class, he IN REALITY graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School. Hardly the bottom. The Columbia grade lies were brought by some ANONYMOUS caller to some idiot RWNJ radio show. By your own aggrandizing, you taught gifted kids very well, so why can’t you google some info? http://theweek.com/article/index/231692/why-conservatives-are-obsessed-with-obamas-college-grades-4-theories
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Is it rational to fire the bottom 10% of teachers before they get tenure? Seems reasonable to me. But the debate seems to be over how to correctly identify that bottom 10%.
Or is the reality that no one here supports firing bad teachers, at least until we can reliably identify them?
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Harlan, what the research shows is that “bad teachers,” as judged by score gains, are the ones who teach children with disabilities, children who don’t speak English, and children who are gifted. “Good teachers” are the ones who teach in affluent districts.
We could fire ALL those bad teachers, but who will teach those children? Will you?
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Your point is well taken, Diane. My children had one or two “bad teachers” who never should have been hired in the first place. That’s merely anecdotal. I taught gifted kids and succeeded by challenging them, but I had the education to do it. And it seems sensible that “good teachers” are the ones who teach in affluent districts. Perhaps teachers who teach the disabled and ELLs should not be assessed by VAM. A little pragmatism. I have known one teacher with a certification in teaching the disabled who was scared to teach “regular” kids because she clearly didn’t have the education to do so. As for the gifted, surely we should place in such classrooms not the standard, everyday teacher, but teachers well above even the “good” level. As my grandfather use to say, “A place for everything, and everything in its [proper] place.”
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Harlan, VAM is likely to find most teachers of the gifted are “bad teachers” because the students are at the top and can’t make big gains on state tests. In my grandson’s public school, the teacher of a gifted class learned that her students entered with an average of 3.92 out of 4. The computer said they should leave with an average of 3.97. They only reached 3.95. The computer labeled her a “bad teacher.” Her principal says she is a wonderful teacher. Maybe she will be fired because she doesn’t have tenure. This is crazy.
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VAM should not be used on ANYONE, not just teachers of kids who need special attention for whatever reason. Most of us have plenty of ELL, Special Ed, and/or gifted students in the general classes. That’s how is SHOULD be, but Harlan, how would you propose sorting one kid from another so that our VAM scores somehow work?
And let’s not even start with kids being kids and not really paying much attention to the boring tests in the first place…
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VAMadness has become so prevalent that [unfortunately] Diane can pick an example that has a direct personal connection.
Isolated incidence? Anybody remember “Carolyn Abbott, The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher In New York City, Victim Of Her Own Success”?
Her story appeared on a number of blogs.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/carolyn-abbott-the-worst-_n_1521933.html
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Thank you, Diane. I didn’t think carefully enough. It is insane.
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I still say that if you taught in Ann Arbor schools you are the biggest hypocrite since thousands of teachers apply and would love to teach there. You were in a great district.
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I would venture to say that Obama understands EVERYTHING that is going on in education reform, but he ignores it because it is what he wants. He is just as “corporate” as the old boys’ network, and he is the president of privatization. He is a product of private schools.
There are NO suprises here when it comes to his view of education.
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