Audrey Amrein Beardsley of Arizona State Is one of our nation’s leading experts on matters related to value-added measurement. In this rarified but important field, Beardsley has a stellar advantage: she was a classroom teacher. Imagine that!
She has been following the Vergara trial in Los Angeles closely.
She writes here about the testimony of Harvard professor Tom Kane, who advises the Gates Foundation:
“If I was to make a list of VAMboozlers, Kane would be near the top of the list, especially as he is increasingly using his Harvard affiliation to advance his own (profitable) credibility in this area. To read an insightful post about just this, read VAMboozled! reader Laura Chapman’s comment at the bottom of a recent post here, in which she wrote, “Harvard is only one of a dozen high profile institutions that has become the source of propaganda about K-12 education and teacher performance as measured by scores on standardized tests.”
“Anyhow, and as per a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Kane testified that “Black and Latino students are more likely to get ineffective teachers in Los Angeles schools than white and Asian students,” and that “the worst teachers–in the bottom 5%–taught 3.2% of white students and 5.4% of Latino students. If ineffective teachers were evenly distributed, you’d expect that 5% of each group of students would have these low-rated instructors.” He concluded that “The teaching-quality imbalance especially hurts the neediest students because ‘rather than assign them more effective teachers to help close the gap with white students they’re assigned less effective teachers, which results in the gap being slightly wider in the following year.”
“Kane’s research was, of course, used to support the claim that bad teachers are causing the disparities that he cited, regardless of the fact the inverse could be also, equally, or even more true–that the value-added measures used to measure teacher effectiveness in these schools are biased by the very nature of the students in these schools that are contributing their low test scores to such estimates. As increasingly being demonstrated in the literature, these models are biased by the types of students in the classrooms and schools that contribute to the measures themselves.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reverse the numbers and then 95% of the neediest kids have competent, dedicated teachers, hard working teachers. Therefore, why punish those teachers to get rid of the so-called 5%. Isn’t this the same as bulldozing all of Los Angeles so the next big earthquake won’t destroy it.
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Lloyd, your problem is that you suffer from an addiction to logic. I have been told that this is an affliction I also have!
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lol again…and again…and again…
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Do you mean by using logic based on facts to see the cause and effect?
As compared to those who don’t think and react through emotion. I read a study once that said 80% people make decisions based on emotion and not on logic.
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Bill Gates did a Value Added Measure of Harvard. He left, if that doesn’t say it all, what does?
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Kane cares about Lane…he’s pathological.
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well said.
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Vegara is the worst case of exploiting unaware, gullible students who are probably looking for a payday for themselves and their parents. The simplification of lack of achievement in public schools as the fault of bad teachers. This is a insult to intelligent, rational people all over the country. This deforming of public education for the benefit of private concerns and profit is sickening. The only people who really advocate and protect students in public education are the teachers. Demonizing them and attempting to cut their hard earned benefits is criminal. I think the wrong issue and people are on trial here, it should be the administrators and management of public schools who allow themselves to be co-opted by privateers who in turn exploit and bleed public education for their own profit. People need to wake up to this misdirection.
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What I wrote in reply on VamBoozled:
“. . . as measured by scores on standardized tests.”
“. . . that the value-added measures used to measure teacher effectiveness. . . ”
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay!
When, oh when, will not only educators but especially the politicos and these self important economists realize that standardized tests measure nothing as they are not “measuring devices”. Do they assess something? Yes, what that something is is highly contentious and nowhere near proven. Just because the psychometricians assign numbers (numerize) to the results does not mean that the process is one of “measurement”. The results used from these educational malpractices such as standardized test are, as Noel Wilson puts it “vain and illusory”, a chimera, a duende, a fantasy, etc. . . .
Until everyone realizes that these practices are illogical, irrational, invalid and unethical for all the harm they do to certain segments of the students, we will continue to harm way to many innocent children. And that indeed is very, very sad!
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Anyone disagree with Beardsley’s assertion that “[w]hat we do know from the research literature is that, indeed, there are higher turnover rates in such schools, and oftentimes such schools become ‘dumping grounds’ for teachers who cannot be terminated due to such tenure laws – this is certainly a problem”?
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Yes, I disagree. Link the research please.
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I disagree with Beardsley’s assertion that “such schools become ‘dumping grounds’ for teachers who cannot be terminated due to such tenure laws.”
When will people learn that teachers do not have total job protection regardless of the type of teacher they are. It’s obvious that this idea that teachers are protected is a meme created by the Wolves of Sesame Street—another misinformation campaign to smear teachers.
Teachers can be fired. So-called “tenure” does provide teachers with some job protection but that means they have due process—-administration has to prove cause. But only after the teacher has been judged competent after the first few years of teaching when there is no job protection at all. During those first few years, it is the job of administration to monitor new teachers to see that they are competent to teach. Evaluations are the norm and such evaluations don’t end after the first few years. Even after earning some form of job security that’s called “tenure”, teachers are still evaluated on a regular basis and if they are found to be off their game, the law allows administration to create an improvement plan that must be documented. If those tenured teachers who enter improvement do not improve, the district has cause to fire them.
For instance, one cause is when student enrollment goes down and teachers are terminated because they are no longer needed. Another cause of teacher termination is on moral grounds. If a teacher has an affair with a student, they can be fired and the unions do not get involved in sexual misconduct even before the accused teachers day in court. If the accused teacher is found innocent in court, then the teacher union will step forward—if needed—and demand the teacher be reinstated and paid back pay.
My second point: Teachers in tough schools have to be tough to survive or those kids who are tough will drive them crazy and out of the school. I taught in such schools for thirty years and saw teachers leave quickly who couldn’t deal with the challenging environment that poverty brings with it when kids walk in that classroom door.
Tough schools are not a dumping ground for incompetent teachers. They are a battlefield where teachers get burned out and broken or become better and tougher.
For instance, the first intermediate school I taught at had a reputation as the toughest school in the San Gabriel Valley due to the violent street gangs. Instead of dumping incompetent teachers at that school, the principal transferred them out and brought in the toughest teachers he could find to clean the school up and turn it around.
This turn around took place in the late 1970s and that school was called Giano Intermediate in the Rowland Unified School District. The principal’s name was Ralph Pagan. To start with, Pagan’s handpicked staff made sure the kids had no weapons by frisking them outside of class before starting. We found razor blades, broken glass hidden in girls hair, etc. We taught kids who were known shooters, kids who had killed kids in rival gangs. One teacher carr8ied a bucket and all the weapons went into the bucket.
Pagan also created a cooperative arrangement system where teachers had a say in how to run the school. Under Pagan’s management the school changed drastically and learning started to take place.
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Why does everyone worry about the alleged costs and harm to the children from these supposedly incompetent tenured teachers? Why doesn’t anyone address the problem of the vast number of inept and incompetent administrators? In over forty years of teaching I have seen numerous principals and assistant principals with little knowledge of academia; and no real background or understanding of education. Here in New York City we have numerous administrators who never spent any time in the classroom. Even Chancellors Joel Klein and Cathy Black never spent a day in front of a class of kids.
Has anyone done a study on how much money one incompetent administrator costs a student in lifetime earnings?
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The media love to constantly feed the public the big lie, which blames the ills of the public school system solely on incompetent teachers. If we can only fire all of the inept educators the school systems in America would be a utopia. The billionaires in control of public opinion never mention the main reason for dysfunction in education: INCOMPETENT ADMINISTRATORS.
Here in New York City under Mayor Mike we have witnessed a race to the bottom when it comes to the administration, with the mass hiring of principals, assistant principals, superintendents and chancellors who are totally clueless and incompetent. Amazingly, the leaders of our academia have neither background nor experience in education. Bloomberg, with fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, created the paradigm that the less you know about teaching, the more qualified you are to run the schools. If you have absolutely no knowledge about the inner workings of education you are highly qualified to barge in and reform the system. In this Kafkaesque, Orwellian world less is more.
As the old cliché goes, the fish stinks from the top. Each chancellor appointed by Mayor Mike (Klein, Black [her reign lasted six weeks], Wolcott) lacked any educational or teaching background. Would a person who knew nothing about medicine or hospital administration be placed in charge of a large inner city hospital? Eli Broad even formed a “superintendent’s academy” to train people without any educational background to run entire school districts.
Imagine if we had talented school leaders who were veterans of years of classroom teaching experience. Then wave a magic wand and envision administrators who want to help teachers; not write them up. Such an implausible scenario would inspire highly qualified and dedicated professionals to enlist in the teaching world. Moreover, the educators would want to stay in their jobs and not head for the exits. Even teachers in the most hard to staff schools would elect to stay if they were valued and supported
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Amen, that’s a great question, why is everything put on the teacher. Administrative failure to do their job of oversight should be telling. Most of the administrators at my schools know zilch about curriculum and are curious as evaluators of teachers. Many have to have specialist from the district come to the school to assist them in evaluating teachers.
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Economist Thomas Kane led the Gates-funded $64 million research project called Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) enlisting fellow economists at Harvard and Dartmouth as if these folks are experts in K-12 education.
The studies within the project used a version of the infamous VAM as the primary measure of teacher effectiveness, then ran correlations of those scores with two other measures. Attempts to randomize the assignment of teachers to classrooms failed, and the assumptions behind that effort were were naive. Most VAM scores assume that teachers are randomly assigned to classrooms. That is one reason why they are problematic.
Never mind. Kane et.al. ran correlations of VAM scores and ratings of videos of classroom performance. These ratings were based on Charlotte Danielson rubrics for classroom observations. Issues of reliability of the ratings of classroom teaching were not resolved.
Kane also ran correlations of VAM scores and student surveys designed by an economist who elected to use constructs that would favor teachers who invested time in test prep, routinely assigned and checked homework, and conformed to an image of teacher as instructor, hovering much like a helicopter.
The study was so sloppy and poorly reported that it would not have passed muster if it had been submitted to a research journal.
Never mind, This study said, in effect, that VAMs should be used to determine the validity of classroom observations and student surveys, a clear case of circular reasoning.
The Harvard aura and its publicity machine, combined with the PR assets of Gates, greased the wheels so Kane would present “expert” testimony on teacher evaluation, based on the MET project …to Congress, now in California
I have found no mention of a possible conflict of interest in extracting the $64 million grant from the Gates’ foundation where Kane served as a deputy director of educational programs in the US.
If you want an informed critique of the deeply flawed MET project–Measures of Effective Teaching, see Rothstein, J. & Mathis, W. J. (2013). Have we identified effective teachers? Culminating findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. (Review). Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013
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Ah, you answered my question on the validity (or lack thereof) of Kane’s research even before I asked it. Thank you!
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Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
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In the attached, Kane basically says that it is really important that student tests be designed in ways that would not prevent them from being used to evaluate teachers. Wag the dog, indeed! Page 21 http://ies.ed.gov/director/pdf/measuring_teacher_effectiveness.pdf
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It seems reformers have very high expectations of teachers. I think you would have to give these students more effective parents as well.
Of course, the government has spent years providing incentive’s for the behaviors that have led to the social crises that today has filled our schools with children unprepared to learn. This is what happens when good intentions free people of the consequences of their bad decisions.
Teachers have become the fall guys in this manufactured crisis. Parents were the first to have their roles undermined and many willing relieved themselves of their responsibility with the acceptance of “it takes a village”. Others imposed social pressures on those who rejected this attack on the family. The “village” wasn’t the grandparents, the neighbors or even some privately hired substitute though. “The village” became the anonymous guiding hand of the State. The teacher’s union was a willing participant in this trend to block parents from the arena of education and in many cases to assume the role of parent.
It is only now that bureaucracy has grown to the degree that the various agencies and Czars represent an extension of the executive branch who cannot be held accountable at the voting box that many are awakening to the reality that there is no democratic process in areas that effect the most vital of human needs: education, healthcare etc.
All indications lead to a sort of Plato’s Republic where those who consider themselves more “evolved” rule the rest of us “muggles”.
It may seem “conspiracy minded” to think this one thing, “Common Core”, is any way related to a larger plan for societal engineering. I believe it naive to think it is not.
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I happen to find Bill Gates and his wife rather likable so it’s difficult for me to suspect them of having bad motives for their educational philanthropy. That said, we know that the very best of intentions can lead to very bad consequences and that’s what is probably happening as a result of Gates money.
Possibly because of huge amounts of grant money, we can no longer feel confident about the educational research that is coming out of our best universities. Remember the charter school “research” that came out of Stanford a few years ago? It was very puzzling until one “considered the source.” Sad.
If Bill & Melinda are truly interested in sound educational results, they need to find a way to keep their money from affecting outcomes.
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