Audrey Amrein-Beardsley here summarizes and comments on a very enlightening interview with Jesse Rothstein in the Washington Post. Rothstein, an economist, conducts research on teacher evaluation and accountability.
Rothstein, on teacher evaluation:
“In terms of evaluating teachers, “[t]here’s no perfect method. I think there are lots of methods that give you some information, and there are lots of problems with any method. I think there’s been a tendency in thinking about methods to prioritize cheap methods over methods that might be more expensive. In particular, there’s been a tendency to prioritize statistical computations based on student test scores, because all you need is one statistician and the test score data….
“Why the interest in value-added? “I think that’s a complicated question. It seems scientific, in a way that other methods don’t. Partly it has to do with the fact that it’s cheap, and it seems like an easy answer.”
“What about the fantabulous study Raj Chetty and his Harvard colleagues (Friedman and Rockoff) conducted about teachers’ value-added (which has been the source of many prior posts herein)? “I don’t think anybody disputes that good teachers are important, that teachers matter. I have some methodological concerns about that study, but in any case, even if you take it at face value, what it tells you is that higher value-added teachers’ students earn more on average.”
“What are the alternatives? “We could double teachers’ salaries. I’m not joking about that. The standard way that you make a profession a prestigious, desirable profession, is you pay people enough to make it attractive. The fact that that doesn’t even enter the conversation tells you something about what’s wrong with the conversation around these topics. I could see an argument that says it’s just not worth it, that it would cost too much. The fact that nobody even asks the question tells me that people are only willing to consider cheap solutions.”
“Rothstein, on teacher tenure:
“Even if you give the principal the freedom to fire lots of teachers, they won’t do it very often, because they know the alternative is worse.” The alternative being replacing an ineffective teacher by an even less effective teacher. Contrary to what is oft-assumed, high qualified teachers are not knocking down the doors to teach in such schools.
“Teacher tenure is “really a red herring” in the sense that debating tenure ultimately misleads and distracts others from the more relevant and important issues at hand (e.g., recruiting strong teachers into such schools). Tenure “just doesn’t matter that much. If you got rid of tenure, you would find that the principals don’t really fire very many people anyway” (see also point above).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Dirty DAMs, done dirt cheap” (from the AC/DC song)
If you got a teacher and you want her gone
But you ain’t got the guts
She keeps kids laughin’ evry night ‘n’ day
Enough to drive you nuts
If yer in a jam, pick up a VAM
It’s time you made a stand
For a fee, I’m happy to be
Your junk-stats man, hey
Dirty DAMs done dirt cheap
Dirty DAMs done dirt cheap
Dirty DAMs done dirt cheap
Dirty DAMs and they’re done dirt cheap, yeah
Dirty DAMs and they’re done dirt cheap
Dirty DAMs and they’re done dirt cheap
Dirty DAMs and they’re done dirt cheap
Concrete apples
Lie-n-hide
T.F.A.
Done dirt cheap
Oooh, Gates-ties
Contracts
High doltage
Done dirt cheap, eah
“If you got rid of tenure, you would find that the principals don’t really fire very many people anyway.”
What Rothstein says may be true today, but it won’t be true as the democratic public schools are replaced by corporate, mayor or governor controlled management—who are handpicked and supported by HUGE campaign contributions through the oligarchs—and the elected school boards of each democratic public school district loses power or goes the way of the Dodo.
It’s already obvious that with the corporate-driven, fake-eduction reform movement, the goal is to maximize profits in the Walmart-Bill Gates modeled corporate Charters and this can’t happen if teachers earn too much and have the power to speak out when they think something is wrong.
The Walmart model—without teacher unions—will eventually turn teachers to low-paid clerks who earn poverty wages without benefits, while the Gates aspect of this model will turn teaching over to education software through iPads and other tablets where teachers will be lowly paid monitors with a job description to make sure that the roboticized and obedient—or else—children are staring at a screen focused on the programed lesson or bubble test of the day,
the corporate driven, fake-reform movement is all about money and who has the power over what children learn and nothing else, because we are already seeing what happens to kids that refuse to do what it takes to learn—the at risk kids—they get the boot, and the next step in that chain will be a prison camp of some kind. They had or still have juvenile prison-camp schools in California. The only way to go home was for the at-risk kid to show dramatic improvement in his learning. I know, because I once lived next door to the assistant principal of one of these juvenile prison camp schools. They already have a model for the next step in how to deal with at-risk kids:
“The boot camp model became a correctional panacea for juvenile offenders during the early 1990s, promising the best of both worlds—less recidivism and lower operating costs.”
What happens to at-risk kids when that label becomes a juvenile offense?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_C._Nelles_Youth_Correctional_Facility
Teacher salaries in Charter schools runs between $34K to $48k.
For Public school teachers, the median is $52.5K with a range from $39.7K to more than $70K for veteran teachers. Average teacher salaries are $46.2K for high school teachers and $42K for elementary teachers.
If we look at the average salary of teachers per state, it is almost always higher than the highest possible salary in the average Charter school.
http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/
Statisticians and others with expertise in VAM calculations and the inferential leaps based in VAM should stop giving those calculations any credibility for evaluating individual teachers. A screeching halt is needed.
Among other reasons, these calculations are not even relevant to the estimated 70% of teacher whose job assignments do not implicate the state-wide tests that provide the data for VAM.
Not being measured is the quality of the work environment that makes coherent and inspired teaching possible or turns a school into a minefield where the teacher must be make a difference in spite of the broken lights, windows, leaks in the classroom ceiling, the constant churn of the teaching schedule, the interruptions from the intercom and the pullout programs, the failure of the latest must-have gizmo, or the presence of a clueless external expert who demands rigorous compliance with some well-marketed product or service, or else.
Teachers are really feeling bombarded with nonsense from people who are engaging in a studied disregard for the work life of teachers.
I appreciate Rothstein’s effort to debunk the high-profile nonsense of Chetty et.al., and more generally the distractions that make news, but he seems also to be thinking that “strong teachers” are always strong irrespective of the work environments and resources provided to them.
The great teacher and top talent mythology is perpetuated in the Danielson/Marzano observation schedules, in student surveys undifferentiated by subject matter, by the continued use of VAM and the proxies for VAM marketed as if the best solution to evaluations of teachers until more tests are available, on the near horizon in Florida, tests for every grade–a mad policy that will preempt time for instruction and learning on an unparalleled scale,
Tests for every subject and grade level are being created in Florida as we speak. All teachers in Florida are supposed to have a VAM score based on either the new Common Core aligned FSA exam or district created EOCs. The only exception will be AP teachers which will be evaluated on proficiency rates. This is horribly unfair because some teachers have control over who takes their class while other AP teachers in Florida have their classes treated like a dumping ground if the regular and honors level core classes which are covered by the class size amendment are full.
When I questioned both the state and the district level officials about how they will create VAM rankings for tests that are entirely new that students have never taken before, their answer was that they are pretty much going to just throw in any old test score for the baseline variable since the number one predictor of student standardized test performance is past performance. The statisticians have basically confirmed what most teachers believed already. That standardized test scores primarily measure how well students do on standardized tests, not their academic abilities. You can read their confession here http://kafkateach.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/vam-by-any-means-necessary/.
This part of the nonsense reply from a Florida State Department Official to your reasonable question.
“The VAM model calculates an expected score for an individual student based what similar students scored on the test during the same year. It does this using a series of covariates that have been shown to be related to student learning growth. Prior test score is the most significant of these predictors. The expected score is based on the actual performance of students on the assessment during the year, and these expectations are set individually using information from the covariates contained in the model. It is not dependent on alignment of scales between the prior assessment used as a covariate (FCAT) and the current test score expectation being calculated (FSA). The fact that the FSA is new does not impact the way the model functions or its ability to perform the expected score calculation. To take a simple example, height and age can be used to predict weight using a simple linear regression. An expected score for weight is computed and compared to actual weight to determine the fixed effects beta coefficients based on how it is measured. If the observed weight data is measured in pounds, the predicted values calculated using these fixed effects will also be in pounds. If they are measured in kilograms, the predicted values will be in kilograms. In the case of VAM, student scores on the FSA will be predicted based, in part, on prior performance on the related FCAT 2.0 assessment and how students who performed similarly in the prior year on the FCAT 2.0 scored in 14-15 on the FS …… and so on.
Kafkaesque NONSENSE. Preserve the model. Forget the rest.
Laura, I like your reference to Danielson / Marzano observation schedules. My district uses Marzano and what it does is homogenize instruction.
I understand that there are best practices but these schedules are very prescriptive and narrow. And then there are sections that simply can’t be quantified in any way.
Marzano Design Question 8: Establishing and maintaining effective relationships with students. Element 37: Students respond to teacher’s verbal and nonverbal interactions and can describe the teacher as someone who cares for them.
Yeah, a lot of space for relationship building in the classroom of the future. Students are treated like low-level employees (perform or else!).
What happens in my school is that an administrator see a lesson he / she likes and then wants everyone to replicate it. (I swear if a teacher does mini-whiteboards in collaborative group it is a guarantee for the highest lesson rating.) So guess what happens over time?
Plus teachers put on a show for observations. How valuable is that? There’s no way a teacher gets good, legitimate feedback that way. It’s because a culture of anxiety has been created as layoffs perpetuate and seniority is no longer a protection. So teachers can never really get the information they need to improve. Survival is the mode.
In this system, I’ve seen shameless sycophant behavior, credit-stealing on lesson plans, “stored lessons” brought out for unscheduled observations and other unproductive behaviors. Taking a chance on a new lesson is lower than ever. (Last year we had Take A Risk Day which tells you how fearful people are to deviate from the script of Marzano practices.)
Before all of this, there was very little anxiety. An administrator walked in, a teacher executed their lesson, a conversation was had afterward in which teachers were asked to self-reflect and submit a written self-critique and we learned from it. Now it’s “Make sure you include three elements from Design Question 3 this year.”
This is what Gates and others want. It isn’t just about standardized tests. It’s about standardized teaching.
““What are the alternatives? “We could double teachers’ salaries. I’m not joking about that. The standard way that you make a profession a prestigious, desirable profession, is you pay people enough to make it attractive.”
That might be a hard sell, if by chance, a double salary required double funding(Taxation).
Another “Standard” way, is to grant monopoly “Rights” by LAW (Doctors, Lawyers, Big
Pharma…)
If “Public Education” had the same monopoly “Rights” granted by law, Chaters(charters)
Fly-By/Wood-Bee(would be) TFA and such, would be closed out of the market.
Unca Sam grants monopoly rights if properly lobbied. I don’t know if Doctors, Lawyers,
or Big Pharma used “For the Children”. Ask them how they did it. For sure, some
finessing of the “All Men are Equal” has produced monopoly “Rights”.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat…
There is ample evidence that compensation matters to teachers, but that it is not the primary reason teachers enter and stay in the profession.
In a 2013 USDE-funded experiment, 1, 514 teachers identified as highly effective (VAM estimates for reading and mathematics) were offered a $20,000 bonus—paid in installments for two years—if they transferred to a low performing school. Only 81 teachers applied. Of these, 75 stayed for two years. About 35 stayed beyond two years. The retention rates for teachers and improved student scores attributed to these teachers varied by district. Other experiments with teacher pay-for-performance show that few plans survive beyond six years due to funding and allocation issues in addition to a failure to make any consistent difference in achievement. In very few professional fields are workers
Glazerman, S., Protik, A., Teh, B., Bruch, J., & Max, J. (2013). Transfer incentives for high-performing teachers: Final results from a multisite experiment. (NCEE 2014-4003). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee.
Here is a direct link to the paper: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20144003/pdf/20144003.pdf
It looks interesting.
sentence needs completing—
In very few professional fields are workers presumed to be incompetent and in need of micromanagement and evaluation by observations, surveys, and measures known to be unreliable and invalid for making judgments about “performance.” USDE policy begins with the assumption that all teachers are so incompetent that all of them must be stack rated and with no regard for the conditions under which they work. I am waiting to see how many of the 35 teachers who stayed beyond 2 years will continue with teaching at the normal salary for each of the districts where they moved. USDE like to think of teachers as movable furniture, pieces on a chess or checker board, workers who sign up for a piece-work job were you earn a bonus for the increments in tests scores you can produce, and it the quota is missed you are “qualified” to be fired.