The indefatigable Paul Thomas of Furman University wrote an opinion piece for a major newspaper in South Carolina, warning against the error of evaluating teachers by test scores.
This, he says, is a bad idea that won’t die. In other words, it is a zombie policy.
Thomas carefully reviews the research on this idea for a lay audience, explaining what they need to know about the inaccuracy and bias inherent in this method.
He draws on the excellent research synopsis of Edward Haertel, the distinguished psychometrician of Stanford University.
Thomas writes:
For example, Edward H. Haertel’s Reliability and validity of inferences about teachers based on student test scores (ETS, 2013) offers yet another analysis that details how value-added methods fail as a credible policy initiative.
Haertel refutes the popular and misguided perception that teacher quality is a primary influence on student test scores. As many researchers have detailed, teachers account for about 10 percent to 15 percent of student test scores. While teacher quality matters, access to experienced and certified teachers as well as addressing out-of-school factors dwarf narrow measurements of teacher quality.
He also concludes that standardized tests create a “bias against those teachers working with the lowest performing or the highest performing classes,” which makes it hard to justify using student test scores as anything more than a modest factor in teacher-evaluation systems.
Instead, Haertel calls for teacher evaluations grounded in three evidence-based “common features”:
“First, they attend to what teachers actually do — someone with training looks directly at classroom practice or at records of classroom practice such as teaching portfolios. Second, they are grounded in the substantial research literature, refined over decades of research, that specifies effective teaching practices…. Third, because sound teacher evaluation systems examine what teachers actually do in the light of best practices, they provide constructive feedback to enable improvement.”
Haertel concedes that value-added methods may have a “modest” place in teacher evaluation. That’s no ringing endorsement, and it certainly refutes the primary — and expensive — role that they play in proposals to reform teacher evaluation in South Carolina and across the country.
Haertel concludes that test scores should not be a set percentage of any teacher’s evaluation, but South Carolina wants it to be 50%. A huge mistake.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fifty percent. Just like RI.
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Tests are really just a vehicle fir a company to make money and ruin lives.
http://time.com/15199/college-president-sat-is-part-hoax-and-part-fraud/
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50% at my school in Ohio, too. Legislature initially mandated 50% as a minimum (school districts are allowed to make it 100%). I believe the minimum value has since been lowered to 35%, but I don’t know of any school districts that have lowered to this level.
One nearby school district (Indian Hill, one of Cincinnati’s wealthiest suburbs and best school districts) is battling with the union over wanting to rank every teacher from best to worst (based largely on test scores, I believe) and paying accordingly.
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Good news. Judges rescue Kansas public school kids from politicians:
“The Kansas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state is not spending enough money on its public schools, ordering an increase in two types of aid by July 1 and more lower-court hearings on how much the state must boost its total education spending.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/things-kansas-school-funding-fight-22813149
What’s interesting about the effort by politicians in Kansas to destroy public schools is how unpopular this is, yet the politicians continue to attack the schools:
PublicPolicyPolling @ppppolls Feb 21
2 issues causing Brownback big trouble: his tax plan (only 26% think it’s been a success), education spending.
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The education policy makers are meeting as we speak to grade states on teacher grades.
I’m not kidding. They actually gave the states grades on teacher grades. Next they can give each other grades on how they grade the states on teacher grades.
These people are obsessed with grades:
“It’s clear that we all see the utility of these rankings and grades, but also the need to really figure out implementation and how to be thinking about that in a different way,” said Anne Hyslop, policy analyst for the education policy program at the New America Foundation. “One of the takeaways… is how can we move from policy adoption to policy implementation and incorporate that also into our work? That’s going to be what really drives whether we see the achievement results that we want.”
“It’s clear that we all see the utility…”
In my work, when a lawyer writes or says “it’s clear” when they’re stating an opinion, we call that a “weasel word”. She doesn’t want you to question her premise, so she states the foundation of her argument as a settled issue: “it’s clear…” then she states an opinion.
It’s a red flag for a dishonest, deceptive argument.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/06/education-policy-analysts-look-to-states-for-reform/#ixzz2vJggGCi6
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You know, I taught 30 years. Within that time, we had various grading systems. The absolutely best and most effective years of my experience were when we used rubric grades, not letter grades. The problem was in getting parents to understand that these grades were a PROGRESSION to mastery, nor an average of good and bad grades, but an indication as to whether the student had mastered what he/she needed to know. But people want to compare their kids to other kids, to gloat, or to complain. That should not be our purpose as parents or a society. All this comparison is a deliberate means of sorting to say, “My kid is more worthy and successful than yours.”. I detest that kind of thought.
But now we have a system where some feel justified in “grading” teachers in the same punitive manner, regardless of real facts, but based on scores on tests that honestly mean nothing.
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Ah, other weasel words: “studies show.”
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50% of a NM teacher’s evaluation is based on the test scores from the year before the evaluation. In other words, for the convenience of the state.
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Think about all the things that are proclaimed from the state or local districts. They do what is EASIEST for them.. Accuracy doesn’t matter at all. They don’t even view teachers as people with feelings. You/we need to stop whining and do our jobs, don’t you know that????
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Did Haertel also conclude that legislators who use evidence to inform and construct policy will thereby fill their campaign coffers?
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NY governor Andrew Cuomo calls the CC aligned tests, “premature and unfair”
He is on record telling students and parents that “scores will not be held against them”
Yet this fool of a man remains adamant about using the same “unfair” “anxiety provoking” scores that student have been told “will not count”, as a major piece of his vaunted teacher evaluation policy.
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Appalling.
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The full TV campaign ad transcript is below. The bolder the lie the harder to believe it is one; I suppose. Keep in mind this comes after years of defunding schools, capping property taxes, and putting over 20,000 teachers out on the street. Under his anti-teacher, anti-union watch we have watched class sizes explode and special needs and ELL students suffer great harm. Now when his poll numbers are dropping, he becomes the great protector of children; a self-proclaimed “lobbyist for students”. He has lobbied for no one but himself.
“Hello, I’m governor Andrew Cuomo. For all of us there is nothing more important than our children, and their education is everything. While the state’s new Common Core curriculum is headed in the right direction, testing on it is premature, it creates anxiety, and it’s just unfair. I won’t let our children’s scores count against them. Please tell your legislator to join me in protecting our children because education is about helping kids, not hurting them.”
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Reblogged this on onewomansjournal and commented:
Evaluating teachers by student test scores is ridiculous!
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Indefatigable at self-promotion, that’s for sure.
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This is being fought over right now here in Washington State. Rather than granting us another waiver from the NCLB fiasco, Arne is ordering us to change the wording in our teacher eval legislation so that instead of saying test scores CAN be used in teacher evaluations, it has to say MUST be used in teacher evaluations or we will lose $38 million. (Alternatively, we can not have our waiver, declare every school in the state as failing, and still have our money.)
WA State has worked hard to develop a good system for evaluations and after several pilot years, has started in earnest on the first year of eVal. There are minor differences at the local level as to whether or not student test scores are used as part of the evaluation; most indicate use of multiple measures to show student growth. These things were all decided at the local level, worked on and agreed upon by committees of teachers, district admins, and even parents in some cases.
Unfortunately our governor met with Arne-boy and sold us out. Now there are multiple new bills in the legislature to change the wording – and in some cases make things even worse than they are now. The usual players – StandOnChildren, League of (anti)Education Voters, Democrats For Education deForm, as well as many parents – are blasting teachers and the union for objecting to the changes. Even some teachers are saying they are fine with being evaluated based in student test scores. (Most of them are new, clueless, or work in high income schools, where kids go home to tutors, music lessons, long family vacations, etc.) Reality is that Washington State has been spared much of the crap the rest of the nation has dealt with, and our families and teachers are less aware of many of the issues. That is all about to change, however, as we are about to take the fast track into education deform hell.
While some of our legislators are enlightened, and understand what is at stake – loss of local control, dumping a system we’ve worked jointly on for years because of a top down mandate from a fool holding the purse strings (my words, not theirs), guaranteed teaching to the test, loss of good teachers, low income schools become even harder to staff, realization that student test scores aren’t a valid measure of teacher quality, divisiveness among staff, competition among staff for higher achieving students – others are more worried about the fact that we might have to send out letters to all the schools in WA State saying that our schools are failing and the “hassle” that might cause.
So our Gov would rather implement bad policy and sell out teachers and kids than take a stand, tell Arne no, and write a well-crafted letter to all parents about how the Feds rate our schools as failing because we believe teacher evaluations should be handled at the local level and don’t want to encourage more teaching to the test (and if I understand things correctly we’d still get our $38 million). Somehow I think the bulk of the families in Washington State would understand that, and be fine with that.
As of now, some of the bills are either dead or stalled. At least one bill doesn’t implement the changes until 2017, and then it is only contingent upon the Feds giving WA the waiver, so at least we are lucky in that some of our legislators are trying to find ways to protect public education in WA from the Fed encroachment and Arne’s ideology as much as possible.
Still, I rue the day I voted for Obama thinking that Linda Darling-Hammond was informing his ed policy and that we might have a chance to reverse course on the hideous damage NCLB has wrought on our public education system. What a fool I was.
So now we have an unqualified and incompetent Sec of Ed holding our entire state hostage over a single word in a move that epitomizes his utter lack of understanding of teaching and learning.
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Oh my. Why does the word not get out that this is simply a tactic to force teachers out of job security? I suppose since other jobs have no security, there is a movement to make sure teachers don’t either. It is disheartening that states aren’t able to afford to say no to the federal dollars. If that money wasn’t dangled over their heads, more states would abandon this ridiculous punitive endeavor!
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Disheartening to see our Gov, whom we had high hopes for, sell out the working stiffs. He did the same for Boeing employees, giving the company a huge tax break while pushing the (union) machinists to take a lesser contract, sacrificing pension $$ and other things to ensure that WA State kept Boeing as an employer, even though all future employees would have fewer benefits and make less than previous generations of Boeing employees had (relative). In other words, he’s started down the Scott Walker path of disempowering and dismanteling unions, but with less controversy.
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It’s the new American way. The Corporate States of Amerika.
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Turn the Tides…If they can grade teachers, then teachers can grade them..
Publicize their grades…let’s see how they like it..
Share on every social media site, blogs, news sites, etc etc in the USA.
Go for it.
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Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
More on value added evaluations of teaching
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I think we need to inform our legislators with this kind of information, so they can speak against these policies when they are debated in legislatures. We also have to get more political. We have to run a credible, pro-public education candidate in every district that has a troglodyte, GOTV, and get into the power circle. Always playing defense has grown tiresome.
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We have been informing our legislators. We’ve had teachers go down to Olympia pretty much every day trying to educate them. Some understand, some listen, some don’t really care.
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