Audrey Amrein-Beardsley reports that highly rated teachers are leaving the Houston public schools because of the erratic EVAAS measure. Seven teachers are suing the district based on its erratic measure.
In this post, she tells the story of a teacher with 15 years experience who prefers teaching in high-needs schools.
“The one teacher highlighted in this piece, “holds a mathematics degree from the University of Houston, has taught all levels of high school mathematics for 15 years…and has repeatedly pursued assignments in high-needs schools with large Latino populations. While administrators, parents and peers have consistently rated him as a highly effective teacher, his EVAAS scores have varied wildly. While at [one district high school], he earned one of the highest EVAAS scores and year-end bonuses possible. Two years ago, teaching the same subject at [another high school] he received a below-average EVAAS score.” This teacher decided to leave the high-needs school in which his students’ performance apparently “biased” his results. He explained, “I can’t afford to be heroic. I want to be in the toughest schools, but the EVAAS model interprets my students’ challenges as my personal [and professional] failure.”
Teachers in training, she reports, are shunning Houston because of the flawed EVAAS.
Don’t forget: the purpose of EVAAS was to ensure that HISD had only “great teachers.” When will district leaders recognize it is driving away its best teachers?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Actions have consequences. Houston will find that out the hard way. When they see they are unable to staff their high risk schools, maybe then they will get the hint and throw their flawed VAM out the window. This nonsense is the result of schools being overrun with politicians that want to use public schools for their own agenda. Whatever happened to research and pilot testing to validate a test or policy change? It’s impossible for teachers to focus on teaching, learning and, most of all students, when they are constantly subjected to the whims of politicians and billionaires.
Where are all these teachers fleeing to? Finland? Is there any place left in this country where it’s safe to teach?
No. All states have been perverted with the “reformist” garbage, including states like Oregon that have been traditionally very tough to get jobs of any kind in public ed.
Missouri is pretty good overall but the forces of evil and darkness (see Sinquefield, SF and ALEC) are trying there best to bring us down into the morass of educational deformity.
I don’t think this post or its title are accurate. Beardsley doesn’t write that “effective teachers are leaving the Houston public schools.” She only mentions one teacher. And she writes that he left high school that he used to teach at, not that he left Houston public schools. He’s still teaching in HISD, at an all-boys school.
http://blogs.houstonisd.org/news/2014/02/19/advanced-math-course-has-benefits-in-high-school-and-beyond/
Do you mean “or its title are accurate” or do you mean “or its title IS accurate” or do you mean “AND its title are accurate”? I ask this question because they each mean something different about your subject and might involve a hint of irony.
I do agree that only one teacher is mentioned. That is certainly a tsk on the Shaking-Your-Finger Tsk Meter.
However, with your last point, a simple modifier like “high-needs” before Houston public schools might be implied. I read it that way probably because of my educational experience and the fact that leaving the district might follow a pay cut.
I meant that neither are accurate, to the extent they are saying that “teachers are fleeing” or “teachers are shunning” Houston public schools, which is what I read them to be saying. I agree that your proposed language in your third paragraph would be accurate, with the caveat that Beardsley’s post is just a discussion of one teacher’s experience.
If you’d bother to read anything about Houston, you’d know it wasn’t just “one teacher.”
Typical garbage that is typical of a troll like you.
Predictable. As in, already predicted.
W. Edwards Deming, THE ESSENTIAL DEMING (Joyce Orsini, ed., 2013, p. 27):
[start quote]
The merit rating nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, [and] nourishes rivalry and politics. It leaves people bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of rating, unable to comprehend whey they are inferior. It is unfair, as it ascribes fro the people in a group differences that may be caused totally by the system that they work in.
The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good.
The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise. Everyone propels himself forward, or tries to, for his own good, on his own life preserver. The organization is the loser.
[end quote]
For more context and explanation, I refer interested readers of this blog to Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s RETHINKING VALUE-ADDED MODELS IN EDUCATION (2014).
And remember that the de facto Secretary of Education of these United States, Bill Gates, tried out a merit rating scheme [aka forced ranking/stack ranking/rank-and-yank/burn-and-churn] at Microsoft. The results? If you’ve read the above, predictable.
[start quote]
Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
[end quote]
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” [Albert Einstein]
‘Nuff said.
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Here’s a question that I hope some one can answer for me: Because it is well-established that factors such as parental discord, hidden health issues, household financial problems, and myriad behavioral factors can heavily influence a student’s achievement in school and performance on standardized tests, then in accord with the Due Process rights that teachers have, can a teacher whose job is on the line because of students’ poor test scores request detailed information about students’ home life, parental relations, family finances, and other pertinent information? If so, that would raise such a political backlash against using test scores to evaluate teachers that use of test scores to evaluate teachers would be swiftly dumped.
Please note that seven teachers are suing the Houston district based on its erratic EVASS measure.
EVASS is also used in Ohio, at least for most teachers, and that EVASS score counts for 50% of the teacher’s evaluation. It will be difficult to prove EVASS is invalid because the formula is proprietary.
Several years ago, I asked to see the Ohio State Department of Education contract for EVASS. I was acquainted with Gerald Bracey’s vivid and clear criticism of the crazy assumptions in VAM and his efforts to engage Dr. Sanders (developer/promoter of EVASS) about this farce. Ohio’s contract was surrounded by a thick wall of spin from SAS, the marketer of EVASS.
The state contract only talked about the SAS “deliverables,” not the algorithms. The kicker was that SAS assumed no responsibility for the accuracy of the data that OhIo provided to them for munching and crunching and producing the stack ratings of teachers. Red-flagging or cleaning up “dIrty data” (as it is called) was not within the purview or the budget of SAS.
I have not seen any recent discussion of “Garbage in, Garbage out” in connection with VAM. Bad data entry probably goes in the big bucket that statisticians call “random error” or “noise.” So, even if teachers in Ohio teachers wanted to sue, following the lead of Houston, there are probably formidable legal needles to thread.
Unfortunately, The American Statistical Association statement that VAM should not be used to evaluate individual teachers was more than a little late out of the gate.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a STUDIED silence among the policy makers, legislators, and federal officials and all of the economists and statisticians who have promoted VAM as if this methodology is a gold standard for teacher evaluation. It is widely considered so so valid that some very low correlations of VAM scores are being used to make claims about the the validity of observation scales (e.g., Charlotte Danielson upgraded in 2013 to include the CCSS) and the proctored K-12 student surveys from economist Ron Ferguson (7 Cs structure). Of course these claims rest on the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching project, MET, that ended with more spin than substance.
The plot thickens if your start asking about the evaluation system for teachers whose job assignments are outside of the “gotcha range” of VAM. In most states, this group is about 70% of all teachers. Most of these teachers are forced to engage in a convoluted process called “student learning objectives” or SLOs ( about which I have posted on this blog more than once.). The scams associated with SLOs–the “alternative” process of getting stack ratings for most teachers–deserves as much attention as the fraud of VAM.
In a Catch 22 loop, proponents of SLOs claim that the results from that process are “valid” because they have occasionally had a low correlation with some VAM. In other words, both of these unreliable measures are being used claim validity for the other. Circular reasoning, insular, shortsighted, and persisting in policies foisted on teachers by Obama, Duncan, Gates, and his buddies— with the net result that students are at risk of being treated as if they only mattered as instruments (data points) for evaluating teachers.
Much thanks to Audrey Amrein-Beardsley for this post and all of her other well informed comments on VAMBoozled.
Laura H. Chapman:
“O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” [Walter Scott]
There are so many facets to charterite/privatizer math.
One of the most salient is the “hide the data” game where we have to accept their word of honor that edubean counters in the service of $tudent $ucce$$ played fair and square with the numbers. For example, in the “large data sets” from LAUSD that Chetty et al. utilized in their VAManiacal formulae and conclusions. No Chetty picking here: he’s the ‘Michael Jordan’ of VAM! Rheeally! In a Johnsonally sort of way…
Then there’s the one you mentioned, GIGO. But then they assert, so what? In their eyes the purity and perfection of numbers is such a wondrous thing, especially when they lead straightaway to the predetermined conclusions of the people that hired them! Gotta think about that next accountabully gig! There’s gold in them thar little tykes, er, data points.
And there’s that old Inquisition/witchhunt accountability system: massage and torture numbers and stats so that 30/40/50% charter attrition equals 100% charter graduation rates, or one teacher of two working together in a classroom takes all the credit for allegedly raising “her” students from the 13 to the 90th percentile, or 98% of teachers supposedly get nothing but a meaningless and perfunctory “satisfactory” on their evals.
Bona fide miracles. Of credulity. No doubt about it.
But even miracles have precedents. And charterite/privatizer math has deep historical roots.
“In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.” [Stephen Leacock]
Perspective. Ya gotta love it…
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“Bona fide miracles.”
I think we need the Catholic Church to formally vet those miracles, eh!? Perhaps about 300 years from now the Pope will let us know if they were miracles or not.
Unravelling the assumptions and methods of misrepresentation are beyond my meager and long-ago graduate courses in statistics. I learned enough to know why that little volume called “How to lie with statistics” is a classic, and to appreciate the amazing clarity of Gerald Bracey’s much missed dismantaling of the piles of GIGO. You have a gift for romping in the absurdites as well.
They recruited from NC and from Spain (for bilingual teachers) this year because they did expect vacancies. I think it’s important to mention that all are not based on EVAAS because not everyone has those standardized scores. They are also based on Stanford testing in 1st and 2nd grade and for classes like PE, a district made assessment. I teach Kinder and am still waiting to find out what growth they calculated for my scores last year (and yes, they were bubble-in multiple choice tests). No one could explain to me how it was going to work, what percentage growth was required to be considered effective and how that was going to be calculated– so I’m very anxious about it. I was rated highly effective in the professional and instructional areas but who knows. We are supposed to use 2 different assessments for more validity but that doesn’t happen-they end up using the reading and math versions of the same test given the same week. I did wonder how many vacancies they had to start the new school year yesterday?
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
Value added measures drive away good teachers.