John Thompson, teacher and historian, here reviews the testimony in the Vergara trial of economists Raj Chetty and Tom Kane. They are believers in economic models for judging teacher quality. Thompson concludes they are seriously out of touch with the real world of teachers.
Thompson reviews their testimony and writes:
“Chetty, Kane, and other expert witnesses are assisting in an all-out assault on teachers’ most basic rights. I disagree with them, but I can see why they would believe that their research is relevant to 3rd through 8th graders in math and, to a lesser degree, elementary reading classes. But, even though they have not studied high schools, they are participating in an effort to also destroy the rights of high school teachers.
“And, nothing in their research could possibly support the opinion that once current laws are stricken that data-driven evaluations in non-tested subjects would likely benefit students in those classes. Up to 80% of students are in classes that remain virtually unstudied by value-added researchers. Yet, they are so confident in their opinions – based on their goal of addressing the bottom 5% of teachers – that they are helping a legal campaign (based almost completely on the opinions of some like-minded persons) to strike down duly enacted laws.
“Of course, I would also like to understand why a few corporate reformers are so convinced in the righteous of their opinions that they have initiated this assault on teachers. But, I’ve already gone too far down the path of trying to speculate on why they engage in such overreach. I just hope the Vergara judge has the inclination to look deeply into both the testimony of expert witnesses and how it is very different than the evidence and logic they have presented in written documents.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Trying to understand why these fools think the way they do will not stop them from thinking this way. They are invested in their wrong-headed beliefs, and the only way to stop them is to prove them wrong in a court of law. If we can’t do that, we are doomed. Well, that’s not the only way. The other choice is one I don’t think most of us want to even think about yet, but if they win, that day will come and they will regret it as much as we will.
Consider this, even after China suffered horribly under Mao’s leadership that led to the decade long Cultural Revolution that caused millions of deaths, and China moved drastically way from Maoism back in the late 1970s after Mao died, there are still millions of Maoists in China who want that insane world back because they still firmly believe that’s the best path for China to follow.
And lets not forget what happened in Germany after the nutcases we called Nazis gained control. Look at the cost in life and suffering to the world to end that insanity.
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You might want to try reading the research that Chetty has done. The basic takeaway is that teachers matter. I would think that is something you would agree with, given your tales of the importance of getting the right faculty into a school you taught in.
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You missed the whole point.
Of course teachers matter, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what influences a child to want to learn, and study after study has supported the fact that two thirds or more of what influences a child comes from outside of the school environment.
Without teachers, the kids who are there to learn and cooperate would not have someone there to teach them and control those who are not there to learn. A tablet computer can’t do that. Guards with stun guns can. Teachers don’t use stun guns. They use the skills they have learned and along the way they do all they can to influence the child who isn’t interested in learning to become interested.
More than a century of research on children points out that by the age of six, more than 90% of a child’s perception of the world and their attitude toward education has already been formed before they walk into a kindergarten class for the first time.
By the time they reach 12th grade, if they reach it, the child has had 40 to 50 different teachers while having the same parent/guardian most if not all of that time.
Are you incapable of understanding how much influence one of those 40 to 50 teachers has compared to the parent/guardian? Influence is not the same as teaching ability.
Again, let’s look at the education formula:
Teachers teach + students cooperate and do the work/study needed to learn + parents support the teachers and provide a home environment where the child may learn = education
Let’s say each element is worth one third of the formula. Remove the parent and that usually removes the child and that’s two thirds of the formula.
Unless you teach for at least five to ten years, I don’t think you will ever get it that many kids do not arrive at school living books or wanting to do the work that leads to learning. Even the greatest teachers can’t reach every kid who was lost long before they reached age 5 or 6.
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Perhaps what I did not understand was who you thought “these fools” to be. Who did you have in mind as the fools?
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Without reading the content and context of my comment, I think “fools” are people who make judgements and pick sides in this education war who have never lived for an extended period of time and/or never taught in the same school environment I taught in or any school environment for that matter.
For instance, you live in a rural area in an eastern state while I taught in an urban school in California not far from Los Angeles (a city with the largest gang population in the country. There are 100,000 gangbangers in LA but less than 10,000 police to keep them in check).
To have a look through the window of film at this world, I suggest you see “End of Watch”.
For a film that takes viewers into a classroom in one of those schools and communities, I suggest “Detachment”.
The high school I taught at had only 8% white students (now it’s closer to 1%) and more than 70% of the students were on free or reduced breakfast/lunch.
How many drive by shootings happen in the streets around the schools your kids attend or attended? I witnessed two from my classroom doorway as school let out. Hardly a week went by without hearing of another shooting and/or death in that community.
What about your community? Are the streets where you live dominated by violent street gangs?
If you don’t live in a similar environment with similar experiences over a long period of time (not just a fleeting moment), who are you to judge if those schools are doing the best they can with the support they are given to teach those kids who come from that world—the world they grew up in and lived in for six years before starting school, the world they have to return to every day after school ends?
How dare anyone, for instance, Bill Gates, condemn schools so far away and so alien from his environment that he claims the right to condemn and close those distant schools and fire those teachers in addition to offer his mandated solutions to teaching those kids.
Firing the teachers and closing those schools will not get rid of the poverty, the violence and the street gangs.
There are about 317 million people in the US. More than 40 million live in poverty. How far is your house from a poverty riddled community? I was born in one and spent my first few years living in a house without windows or doors.
The FBI reports that there are 38,000+ street gangs in US cities and the members number more than one million. Many are teenagers who attend their community schools. Almost half of the reported violent crimes in the US takes place in these communities to other people who live in poverty.
More than 16 million children live in poverty in the US—one if five American children. Most of those children live in the same communities and attend the same schools. You will seldom find them attending schools in an upper middle class neighborhood where the people who live there are insulated from the world that surrounded the schools where I taught for thirty years.
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Sorry, I posted the same link to the first film. Here’s the one to Detachment.
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TE, of course, teachers matter. But test scores are not the only product of education, his research was conducted on data that preceded the current era of high stakes testing, and any district that fired teachers based on his study would fire those who teach children with disabilities, English learners, and teachers of the gifted–none of whom get big value added gains.
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You might take a look at my comment below about sigmas and noise.
One comment about gifted students and yearly progress on exams. We might well conclude that gifted students who are at the top of the scale on these exams should be moving on out of the K-12 environment to the next stage of their lives. As has been pointed out many times here, students progress at different rates and some may well be done benefiting from instruction at the K-12 level long before their scheduled high school graduation.
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TE,
Since you seem to have a pulse on those who think teachers DO and DO NOT matter, could you specifically list a group or an individual who thinks that teachers do not matter?
I am of the opinion that most people on all sides of the educational argument believe that teachers matter. So it would be interesting to me to find a group or an individual in the educational spectrum who/that believes otherwise.
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Perhaps you should retread my post. I only pointed out that the conclusion of the much criticized Chetty paper is that teachers matter and it is possible to detect the benefits and costs of unusually talented and unusually poor teachers for years after the student has left that classroom. Why this conclusion should generate such hostility on this blog is a mystery to me.
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Of course teachers matter, but does VAM capture why they matter? Or depending on how much weight is given to a VAM score, how much a teacher matters? Are student test scores a valid way of describing a teacher’s worth?
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I don’t believe that using changes in test scores from year to year as a way to compensate teachers was the topic of the original work. The Chetty study looks at all the noise in student standardized test scores and tries to see if it can detect the faint signal of good teaching hidden in that noise. Finding this signal required a large number of observations because the signal is faint compared to the noise. The mistake that proponents of using annual changes in standardized test scores to compensate individual teachers make is that they can find the signal of good and poor teaching with relatively few observations. With few observation the signal is too weak compared to the noise.
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TE,
It is quite clear what your point is: Most voices in the educational debate argue that teachers matter. Pointing out that Rhee or Duncan or Chetty or some other person believes that, too, is rather a “no duh moment” here. There’s really no takeaway. So does Ravitch and myself and all the other people on this blog and even many of the people I disagree with. And it is quite obvious that the pro-VAM crowd believes that “teachers matter.” Is there a reason or a takeaway that wouldn’t demonstrate this if someone was a supporter of VAM? I don’t think so. It is rather obvious because their argument hinges on this very point.
The criticism you receive has more to do with poking around on the edges of rudeness than it does in delivering a haiku moment of reflection.
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So what is the objection to the research in the Chetty NBER article? In this post, as in others on this blog it seems to excite a great deal of criticism for a paper that provides evidence that teachers matter.
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If you are looking for an in-depth look at the limitations of Chetty’s research, then see what Baker, Beardsley, and Ballou have done. Baker addresses the noise issue you have already brought up. But he also addresses the media problem and the policy/spin problem (Chetty, in his testimony in LA, also addresses the policy limitations, yet policy makers and the media ignore this as well). Ballou addresses the fact that alternatives to the VA are not addressed in the study. Beardsley addresses the peer review issues and the related methodological issues.
2Old2Teach in this thread addresses some of the common VAM criticisms. However, you failed to acknowledge this and instead continue to assume that everyone else believes that teachers do not matter. Awkward. Why? It is not an avenue I would proceed down since most people think teacher effects do matter (I haven’t found anyone to say otherwise). So your rationale and motive are questionable.
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I have constructed a new quality indicator called CAM (corporate added model) which measures the quality of CEO leadership. The statistical constructs are too complicated for the average laymen to understand (at times, I am not sure what they mean either), but be that as it may, following my latest administration of the CAM model the following CEO’s have fallen below my CAM cut scores: Jamie Dimon (CAM score of 28); Bill Gates (CAM = 32); Mary Barra ( CAM = 13); L. Blankfein (CAM=49, missed cut score by 1 point). This is the short list, when all scores are computed I will provide a complete list that will be published in various media outlets –for some reason the Wall Street Journal has turned me down. A footnote, my CAM list will not include those CEO’s currently under indictment or serving time.
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ROFLMAO!
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Alan, I eagerly anticipate your CAM indicators. It would be interesting to add the inverted “merit pay” that CEO’s seem to earn as bonuses and golden parachutes; the lower the CAM score, the higher the rewards!
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I think that that inverted pay metric is already in place. Correct me if I am wrong there.
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Economists seem to think they have superior wisdom about education because they crunch numbers. They are promoting uninformed policies or seem to be ignorant about, or cynically dismissive of, educational history.
In the mid-1960s, federal officials commissioned a report (Coleman et al., 1966) on the relationships among school resources, educational outcomes, and broader social inequities. Known as the Coleman report, this study displayed the power of statistical analyses in understanding public education from a socioeconomic perspective.
There were several major conclusions: (a) the socioeconomic status (SES) of students and their families were more important determinants of educational outcomes than differences in school resources; and (b) irrespective of SES, teachers have a significant influence on students’ learning.
The Coleman report had several lasting effects on K-12 education and research. It supported rationales for the initial desegregation of schools. In made “the achievement gap” an enduring part of discussions about education.
It spawned further studies that confirmed the dominant role of out-of-school factors, especially SES status, in explaining the achievement gap. Concurrently, it enticed economists into educational research and theorizing about the influence of schools and especially teachers on achievement. Today’s reformers do not want to address the role of out-of-school factors, especially SES, on achievement. So they exaggerate the influence of teachers on achievement—one of the findings from the Coleman report—dismissing the rest.
Econometric studies of education have proliferated—number crunching is what economists like to do. In 1971, for example, economist Eric Hanushek introduced the concept of a value-added metric to rate a teacher’s production of gains in students’ test scores. He has since churned out about 500 articles, many of these cited to justify VAM-based evaluations of teachers. Other economists (e.g., Murnane & Cohen, 1986) have used such measures to call for more rigorous qualifications and evaluations of teachers, along with pay-for-performance.
Economist Thomas Kane is one of several hired by the Gates’ foundation to confirm the validity and reliability of several methods of teacher evaluation in a $64 million plus study—Measures of Effective Teaching (MET Project). The study focused on VAM scores, observations (Danielson protocol), and a student survey designed by another economist. That student survey has since been sliced and diced to correlate with student test scores.
Reports from the MET Project, reviewed by experts, are marked by sloppy empirical scholarship in addition to the usual circular reasoning that teachers are”effective” if they produce higher than average test scores and such scores mean the teacher is “effective.”
Informed criticism of the MET project did not prevent Kane from testifying at this trial or in other venues, including Congress. He continues to lead major “reform” projects.
Find Kane’s bio and a sample of projects at: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/directory/faculty/faculty-detail/?fc=71512&flt=k&sub=all
Sources: Coleman, J. S., Kelly, D. L., Hobson, C. J., McPartland, J., Mood, A.M., Weinfeld, F.D., & York, R. L. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/06389
Hanushek, E. (1971). Teacher characteristics and gains in student achievement: Estimation using micro data. The American Economic Review, 61(2), 280-288. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Erik+Hanushek&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C36&as_sdtp=
Murnane, R. J. & Cohen, D. K. (1986). Merit pay and the evaluation problem: Why most merit pay plans fail and a few survive. Harvard Educational Review, 56(1), 1-18.
For the rigging of student surveys that originated with the MET Project see: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/09/23/what-education-reformers-did-with-student-surveys/
Kane, T. J. & Staiger, D.O. (2013, January). Gathering feedback for teaching: Combining high-quality observations with student surveys and achievement gains. Seattle: WA: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.metproject.org/
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. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013.
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The oligarchs will not be satisfied until they have absolute, unilateral authority to make whatever decisions they wish to make, however capricious and damaging those might be, concerning the lives of others.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Doing away with due process confers absolute power. That’s what the oligarchs want. That’s what they believe is theirs by divine right. That’s what this trial is really about.
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