Audrey Amrein-Beardsley has started a valuable new blog where she reports the latest news on VAM and interprets the latest research. She is one of our best researchers on the topic and, time and again, she has put a pin in the inflated hope that teachers can be measured like potatoes or corn.
n this post, she dissects Mathematica’s recent research on the value of moving highly experienced NBCT teachers to low-performing schools. She agrees that it makes a difference, but disagrees with the comparison group (which included 20% brand new teachers) and doubts that policymakers would be prepared to carry out the lessons on a grand scale.
What if we found that a class size of 10 was optimum for low-performing students? Would we be willing to implement the policy implications?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think the answer to your hypothetical questions depends on what we have to give up to get class size down to 10 for low-perfoming students.
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Wars, universal surveillance, corporate welfare, crony capitalism, corruption….
I think a majority of Americans would be okay with those sacrifices.
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It would be helpful to try and put a number on it. According to Brookings, Reducing average class size by one student would cost about 12 billion dollars a year in increased teacher salaries. I know that we are only discussing doing it for low-performing students, but the 12 billion dollar number does leave out increases in back office staffing to support the increased number of teachers, school expansion required to increase the number of classrooms, etc. Lets say it costs something on the order of 180 billion dollars a year to do this. Can we talk about specific spending reductions that would allow us to transfer these funds to class size reduction?
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TE,
Can you put a link in for that Brookings study. Just off the top of my head that 12b figure seems rather out of whack.
Thanks,
Duane
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I am not getting the URL to show up, but if you google this you should find it: Class Size: What Research Says and What it Means for State Policy
Here is the simple footnote from that page:
[9] Presently there are 3.2 million teachers serving 49.3 million students in the public schools, which corresponds to 15.3 students for every teacher. Decreasing the pupil/teacher ratio to 14.3 would require hiring 226,000 additional teachers, which at $55,000 per teacher would cost $12.4 billion/year in salary costs alone.
[10] These per-pupil cost estimates are very conservative compared to others in the literature that try to account for all costs of teachers, including fringe benefits and facilities. See, e.g., Douglas N. Harris, “Toward Policy-Relevant Benchmarks for Interpreting Effect Sizes: Combining Effects With Costs,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 31(1): 3–29 (2009).
Sorry for not getting the URL. I am in the middle of roasting some poblano peppers.
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A ballpark estimate is 50 million students at 10K per year, 500 billion.
Reduce class size from 25 to 24 would be a 4% cost.
.04 x 500 = 20 billion.
How much to fund basic education of yesteryear? Maybe that costs 50% more, like 750 billion. Less luxuries and entertainment for rich and poor alike I’m sure would pay for it. But, that is a cultural choice, and doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.
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Hope those peppers came perfectly toasted!
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VAM is the spawn of stack ranking. Look at this article from yesterday.
http://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-axes-stack-ranking-massive-overhaul-employee-review-process/
Read the comments, especially this one,
Stack-ranking and truth are mutually exclusive terms. It rewarded the worst aspects of corporate culture at the expense of innovation and morale. At worst it fostered lying about your direct reports’ qualities; at best it forced managers to scour and find something, anything that could be used as a mark against hard-working employees.
Only sociopaths and misanthropes would defend stack-ranking as good practice. I’ll let you decide which one of those you are.
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I can’t wait to hear the spin from Gates and friends on how VAM is so very different from Stack Ranking. My bet is he tries diversion by slipping in the multiple measures straw man while trying to keep us all from seeing how those multiple measures are nothing more than crutches meant to keep VAM ambulatory all the way to the bank.
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“. . . to keep VAM ambulatory all the way to the bank.”
TAGO!
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This is from the proposed early childhood bill in the House:
“States are prohibited from using the funds to use a single assessment as the primary or sole method for assessing program effectiveness; or to reward or sanction children or teachers.”
Unfortunately it’s also loaded with language that means “testing” although the term is never used because obviously teachers and parents are sick to death of testing.
I just thought it was amusing that they now anticipate that the data freaks will go completely nuts with measuring what they manage and managing what they measure and cut them off with a stern “no rewarding or sanctioning allowed” 🙂
http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/blog/strong-start-americas-children-act-bill-summary?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+edlabordems%2Fblog+(EdWorkforce+Journal)
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“States are prohibited from using the funds to use a single assessment as the primary or sole method for assessing program effectiveness; or to reward or sanction children or teachers.”
They must have gotten Loophole Larry to write that.
Anyone see the “hole”?
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Sure.
Single, primary, sole.
There’s a lot of additional weasel words in the bill as well, including a requirement for states to put forth learning standards for 3 year olds- which will of course be measured with standardized tests. The standards have to be aligned with the K-12 standards, blah, blah, blah.
There’s also the now-obligatory special mention of charter schools, although I’m told over and over that charter schools ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and….we are all agnostics! We don’t play favorites!
I’m thus understandably confused why the entire US public policy apparatus seems to focus like a laser on these SPECIFIC public schools.
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Not only are there the holes you point out, but by putting lipstick on the VAMpig they’ll claim that they’re not doing what they’re doing. Nudge nudge wink wink.
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Thank you all for pointing these things out!
I used to wonder if the edufrauds were more devious than they were dishonest—or vice versa.
I’ve stopped wondering. They can be all the wrong things to all the wrong people at all the wrong times.
And still have the energy to, well, Paul Vallas said it best for them: “I go in, fix the system, I move on to something else.”
Fo those denizens of RheeWorld who suddenly find themselves on Planet Reality, I provide an English-to-English translation: “I sneak in, put the fix in, move on to other prey.”
Link: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Paul-Vallas–213999671.html
😎
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