Here is an idea: Monetize your son or daughter.
A reader suggests:
I am thinking maybe I should auction off the placement of my daughter, an excellent test taker with consistently high scores, to the highest bidding teacher.
The teacher gets to keep their job and I get to add to the college fund.
Win Win.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Do the teachers make enough to make it worth your while?
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Probably not, but teachers could set up an arrangement where parents get a percentage of the value added pay increases that will result from attracting so many good test takers.
It’s this kind of innovative, free-market thinking that keeps America great, and will surely impact the achievement gap!
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This scenario makes the point. We’d be shocked if Win Win auctioned off her child to the highest bidder but we are not shocked when we watch it happen, and pay for it to happen with taxpayer $$, within the smoke & mirrors network of poorly regulated, highly selective charter schools.
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Wow. You hit the spot!
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Love it. We need more smart people like whoever wrote this.
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As a teacher I find this post quite offensive. I realize that it was made in jest to mock this whole ridiculous system. However, for all to many, our livelihoods will depend on how well our students can take a test. That is not funny.
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No, it isn’t funny.
Using test scores for teacher evaluations is inaccurate and imprecise; it’s a terrible way to evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness and impact.
In addition, it erodes the relationship between teachers and students, to say nothing of how it impacts the classroom environment needed to teach, learn, and grow in ways that are both healthy and effective.
So, speak up. Don’t take it. You have a voice. The use of test scores to evaluate teachers isn’t funny. It’s tragic and absurd. Use your voice, your experience, and your specialized knowledge to fight back, and articulate alternatives.
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Humorous… while at the same time making the point without beating around the bush!
THX
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Even better–we will put all low achieving students in special education so we get extra credit under a VAM. Doesn’t matter if they are really handicapped, we need the points. If a child is doing great and does not need special education any longer, we will keep him in. We need those VAM points.
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Our Special Ed student must all take the state test. The are measured on a 4-1 scale with 4 being the top and 1 being the bottom. Cam does not apply.
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Under this evaluation system using value added, even if a disabled student makes supposedly some progress, one is awarded more points. Therefore, why would you decertify an achieving LD student? The opposite also applies . If one makes a low achieving student disabled and some progress is made, one is rewarded more points. A student who does not achieve and remains a general education student becomes a statistical liability. Of course my original point is in jest. these formulas are utter nonsense. No child is a liability. Great teachers work hard with all students.
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Pretty soon you won’t have any special education teachers. VAM will take care of them if budget cuts haven’t already.
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The only ones who will get the points will be special Ed students in high achieving schools.
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Parents shopping for teachers takes on a whole new perspective!
Sent from my iPad
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While I’m sure this parent meant to be humorous, I wonder what her child is thinking.
As a science teacher in public NYC high schools, I have heard the following comments from students–all bright, self-aware and woefully undereducated.
“We are going to be guinea pigs again.”
“All they [our admin] care about is the test scores we get and how we make them look good.”
“You don’t understand, miss. No school graduates 95% of kids like me without making sure it happens. Don’t worry, I’ll pass this summer.”
“Miss, you should leave this school cuz you care and they don’t.”
Oh, and the superintendent for hs explaining the closure of our school one year after Joel Klein presided at the graduation ceremony, praising our successes, “well, you know, things could be better…”. And the statement from our union–nothing, they didn’t bother to show up to the meeting. This was at one of the first big high schools closed with lots of media coverage. No public reaction. No union reaction. It took two more years for an opposition voice to arise. Too late.
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Rather than extort chump change from some hapless, intimidated-on-all-sides teacher, this edupreneurial parent should instead auction her to child to a charter school. Given their recent cliff dive on the NYS exams, I’m sure their backers would be willing to pay a hefty premium for a 4 in her prime test-taking years.
Better yet, the parent should contact Whitney Tilson of DFER, and suggest to him that she/he become a headhunter for high test-scoring kids. Then, combining the value they add to the charters that enroll/employ them – resulting in ever more expansion, tax credits for Board members, federal DOE patronage, etc. – Goldman Sachs can create a market for Test Score-Backed Securities.
Then teachers pension funds would buy them, and Goldman would make more money by shorting them.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Anyway, this parent is thinking way too small, and obviously has no serious future in the most Excellent Bold Miraculous Disruptive world of education reform.
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Creative disruption!
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Those in the NYC area may remember the Great Neck scandal where a very bright student was paid gobs of money to take the SAT’s.
Not all that different than the mom auctioning off her daughter.
In the case of the mother, daughter, and teacher-the teacher agrees because of loss aversion but the daughter and mother are simply exercising the capitalistic approach of supply and demand.
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I watched a DIY competition show recently where the contestants and hosts were constantly talking about how much value they were adding to homes by their renovations and decorating, based on the increased selling price they could ask for the houses. This notion of value-added in regard to homes makes a lot of sense to me, but I can’t readily generalize that understanding to other situations.
I know there’s a formula for determining VAM in education, but I just don’t get how this concept applies to people. Why would we even want to try to measure how much value people add to other people? Do we want to know how much value parents are adding to their children? And how about friends… and spouses…?
Honestly, I think this is utter nonsense, especially in regard to children, each of whom should already be considered extraordinarily valuable from birth.
Why this notion of adding value to children is so accepted by politicians is just beyond me. If this is truly valid, why aren’t we regularly measuring how much value politicians add to our lives?
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Citizen Concerned About Kids, you hit it out of the park with your comment.
I would argue that politicians have no value whatsoever while venture capitalists who screw regular folks have negative value [unless they’re turned into fertilizer]. Teachers, nurses, doctors, and others in helping professions add value, but these besotted reformers have a perverse set of values.
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If the notion of adding value (I preference to think about it as capabilities) makes no sense, why do we have students progress through different grades?
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Children progress through different grades because they are growing and developing due to a variety of biological and environmental factors, including cultural, home, peer and school influences, as well as their own efforts. (Are the 2/3 home influences sorted out by VAM, to level the playing field for teachers of lower and higher income kids, as well as all the other out-of-school factors?)
I do not see children as becoming more “valuable.” I find reducing kids to commodities and monetizing them as if they are houses going up for sale to be thoroughly disgusting capitalist notions –and not all that much different from how communist governments have aimed to create workers for the state.
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Surely students advance from one grade to another because of what they have learned as well, not simply because of biological changes.
I think you might be getting confused with the way some folks, like economists, use words like value or costs. When an economist talks of cost it is not really about money, it is about what is given up. The cost of going out to dinner, for example, is the next best use of the money spent on the dinner and the next best use of the time spent on going out. For economists, all vosts are opportunity costs. In the same way “value added” is not really about money but the gain to an individual.
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TE, I am surprised that you have not endorsed a proposal made by several teachers on the blog: Switch the teachers in a so-called failing school with those teachers in the district’s highest-performing school and see what happens.
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That seems like a fine idea, but could school districts force teachers to change schools? I don’t know the details of how school assignments are made under teacher employment contracts. I also imagine that for most places in the country differences between schools in different school districts are larger than differences between schools within a district. Could teachers from one district be assigned to schools in another district?
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I imagine people have proposed this experiment because the high-performing kids will continue to perform well and the low-performing kids will continue to perform not so well. What would this prove? It sure would give ammunition to those who think we should abolish or drastically scale back the extent and costs of compulsory education.
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teachingeconomist,
Try looking up the definition of “value-added.” It specifically refers to adding (monetary) value to a product or service before it is sold to a customer.
In the grotesque world of so-called education reform, the products are children, and the customers are future employers.
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Economists generally use these terms much more broadly than they are generally used. Costs, for example, are opportunity costs, the things you give up. When you spend money on X, the cost is the other things you might have spent the money on, not the money itself. When you watch a movie on television, the cost is what you might have done with that time if you were not watching the movie.
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Leave it to an economist to assume one would ever think no learning occurs when kids are “growing and developing.” Unless they’re a vegetable or in a coma, learning is a given component of human maturation.
Whether measured in dollars, time, resources or any other asset, children and learning should not be reduced to inputs, outputs and cost-benefit analysis. That is business speak and just gives a lot of jobs in education to economists and corporate suits who depersonalize their connections to humanity.
A compassionate culture invests in its children because they are already highly valued, not because it aims to make them more valuable.
Remove the business model from education, which is more inclined to exploit our progeny than nurture it!
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Yes, the comment was meant to be in jest. The absolute absurdity of tying teacher pay to standardized test scores needs to be treated as just that a jest. I have two children, both gifted in their own way, one tests at the top of the scale and their other hits slightly above average. They are both excellent students that are engaged and self-directed learners. We have been fortunate to have wonderful teachers that see them for more than their test scores and encourage them grow not just in their academics but as a whole person.
My children understand that they must take these tests. We let them know that it is important for them to do their best, but as far as a measure of their academic success, the work they do in the classroom tells us and their teachers everything we need to know about their progress.
Our state and district has not yet had to experience VAM but I know that the day it is implemented I will be opting my children out of any and all testing. Not only does it do a disservice to the talented dedicated professionals that work with my children day in and day out but it guts any possibility that my children will receive the education that they deserve.
When this happens my daughters will also see their mom standing in front of the school board, rallying other parents and fighting for their education. Not sure if that will add any value to their test scores but I am sure it will help them to value their education.
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kidmade, you sound like a wonderful parent AND a great public school/teacher supporter. Good for you!
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Why not buy an MA or Ed.D? It is more of a sure thing.
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Is that how you acquired your degree?
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No, but there was no guarantee of a job, much less a raise, that came with my degree.
Teachers are forced to split the raises that they get with an education school.
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Nonsense. The only people guaranteed of a job are those going into the family business and elites who stand to benefit from preferential treatment –with or without a degree .
And if I had ever gotten a cut from the raises of my students, I would not have struggled financially for so many years and be constantly facing the prospect of becoming homeless.
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Guarantee is perhaps strong, but a teacher in the Chicago public school system or my local public school system can calculate the increased salary that a graduate degree will earn them down to the penny. If school boards were to double the increase in salary, do you have any doubt that schools of education would increase tuition proportionally?
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Ridiculous. Chicago teachers can work for 40 years and know that they will never, ever earn a six figure income. Suburban New Trier Township teachers typically make low six figure salaries. That may sound high, but these areas are not cheap to live in, the taxes are high and we are talking about people with decades of experience and service, not just advanced degrees.
Schools of Education in the Chicagoland area, which typically serve both city and suburban populations of teachers, usually keep tuition low for Education students precisely because they know that most teachers will work their entire careers and never get rich.
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My point here is that many public school teachers can calculate down to the last dime how much a graduate degree will increase their earnings. This is different from most occupations.
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Silly point, since it only means that most teachers can calculate how they will never be able to afford an upper-middle class life-style and many teachers can just calculate when they might finally be able to afford a middle class life-style. Do YOU earn a six figure income as a teacher?
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Median household income in the US is about $52,700. Does a middle class “lifestyle” require twice the median household income?
I earn about $75,000 after 25 years teaching at my university.
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It all depends on where you live and what the cost of living is there.
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I’ve been teaching in higher ed for 20 years (and I taught in lower ed for 20 years before that) and, except for one year when I had a consulting job & got a lot of overtime pay, I’ve never earned more than $40K. Most of those years I earned much less than that. And I live in an area where the cost of living is high.
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‘Diploma Mills” and there are administrators all over the USA that have received these Fake PHD’s.
A news story that will be worth listening to in the near future
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Good idea! The teacher with the most money will win.
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Great post. Perhaps a website of students who test well to be auctioned off a la eBay?
eVAM – eogTakers – eBestonTest – eSavingyourjob – eCollegefundtesters – eShowgrowthorarefund
The possibilities are endless.
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Love it, Ms. Cartwheel.
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Thank you.
http://www.wral.com/act-majority-of-nc-students-not-meeting-college-readiness-benchmarks/12799587/
We may need to import some high achieving students here in NC. We are dead last in the country on ACT composite scores with every high school senior in the state taking the test. This goes to show that: 1. Not every child needs to go to college, 2. What will future scores look like if we fail to pay teachers a living wage? 3. A lot of money could have been saved by not testing all the students and NC might have been able to save face in spite of our education budget and policies.
Oh wait, didn’t you get in trouble for stating number 1?
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NC is dead last .
Have you heard the people working in the Big City in NC defend these tests?
They say around every corner.”All students can score well on these tests”..including the ones with IQ’s below 60!!!!
Of course..if you give all of these special students a test some of them will luck out with the right choice given A-B-C-D….as did happen two years ago…
NC gave the ACT to every student…..they should only be compared to the other states that gave the test to all of the students..
They have the ‘One-Size-Fits-All” mentality..What a shame!!
Students have told me that the athletes can leave early for any away game but if they need to leave early for a choral concert it is forbidden…
The arts have been thrown out of the door.
The DOE needs to be replaced with Real Educators of Real Humans and not a bunch of Plastic-Data-Driven-Quality-Control Dictators.
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My 5 yr old is entering public school kindergarten in Pennsylvania. During orientation tonight the vice principle touted their new EXPERT program for our kids to learn called Step by Step Learning. She kept mentioning how much help they would be getting from this group of EXPERTS that it made me suspicious.
Then her teacher mentioned it was based on Dibbles testing. Do you know anything about the Step by Step Learning program or the Dibbles testing? Feel free to answer at your earliest convenience via the email I provided, thank you.
Scott
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Scott, read this about DIBELS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIBELS
I bet other readers can advise you. We have many readers who teach kindergarten.
I think he is too young to be pressured. Read to him. Read fun books. Play word games. Read Dr. Seuss.
Don’t worry.
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Bravo – finally, a parent is thinking the same way the reformers are! There’s that entrepreneurial spirit they want you to have.
As for teachers, I have no idea what keeps you going every day at this point (other than the obvious – it’s a lousy job market and you have rents and mortgages to pay.) It must be terrible to be discussed as “the reason” our schools are failing. You more than earn your pay, health care and pensions.
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Did I say no learning happens as kids are growing and developing? Surely some learning happens because they are in schools.
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You implied the OP overlooked that and only focused on biology when environmental influences on growth and development were described.
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