David Gamberg is the superintendent of two neighboring districts on the North Fork of Long Island, Southold and Greenport. He shows here how bizarre it is to evaluate educators based on the test scores of students they never taught. This is sometimes called “shared attribution.”
He makes the point by using an analogy.
Suppose all doctors in the community were judged by the weight loss of every community member?
We will assess eye doctors, podiatrists, and pediatricians based on the results of data gleaned from a community’s ability to lose a specific amount of weight by a specific date on the calendar. You happen to be a pediatrician who has just begun your practice, and as such you work in a relatively poor community. Within the first few years of practice your license is revoked due to “poor performance.” You never get to a point in your career where you might consider opening a practice in a more affluent community. This, despite the fact that you are well respected, and have made significant inroads into improving the health and well being of community members in that less than wealthy neighborhood.
To further skew the validity of the measurement the fact remains that the weight loss data was conducted in a poor neighborhood, among community members who may not have attended college, and had less access resources that might bolster their chances of success. Sure, some community members rose above their circumstances and met their weight loss goal, but they were the exception to the rule. Thus, the eye doctors, podiatrists who also practiced in this community as well as the pediatricians who were held to this one size fits all standard suffered the personal and professional consequences of the poor performance of the patients within this area.
cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Testing-Testing-Testing-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Career_Consequences_Diane-Ravitch_Loss-150304-506.html#comment535838
It seems his analogy equates using a community weight loss average to evaluate individual physicians. That’s a terrible idea.
But what’s going on in many places is specific teachers who don’t teach tested grades or subjects are being “assigned” the scores of specific groups of students they don’t teach, and those scores are part of their evaluation. That’s even worse.
Yes, it’s absurd, but not that much more absurd than evaluating teachers based on students they do teach. To go back to the doctor/obesity example, for months your doctor has been telling you that you are dangerously overweight. She has prescribed diet and exercise, referred you to a dietician, talked to you about medication, bariatric surgery, etc. You go home and have a bag of Doritos and a box of ice cream while sitting on the couch watching TV and die of a massive heart attack. Should her license be revoked? After all, she did treat you, unsuccessfully.
Part of it is there’s a broader category in health care and it’s “public health”. They don’t blame individual physicians for larger problems like obesity or smoking or vaccination rates because there’s a recognition that those rates go down (or up) only with a coordinated approach that includes a whole range of efforts outside a medical practice or hospital.
I just think delivering every problem in the world involving kids on public schools or “teacher quality” and saying “fix this” isn’t going to work, let alone be rational or fair. I get that it’s convenient because we have this universal public school system (unlike with health care) but to me it’s become a kind of dumping ground for all our ills.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Imagine if we had a true educator such as David Gamberg in the position of Secretary of Education…tens of millions of our students, our children….would be protected and treated with the respect and dignity in an educational environment that respects our youth, and protects them from the vultures such as Duncan and Cuomo, men who have sold their own souls for the financial crumbs of the billionaires…Ms Weingarten, where are you…when our superintendents stand up to protect our children and our educators…perhaps she is sitting alongside Duncan and Cuomo, in a dark corner, counting the blood money….the bribes, mixed with stolen public funds….which were originally intended to educate our children and defend our educators…
Thank you, Mr Gamberg…for being a true hero of our educational system and our democratic way of life…
And to the Duncans, Cuomos, and Weingartens…justice inevitably prevails in democratic societies…you should be imprisoned and the keys thrown away…There is no place in a society such as ours for the disgraces of your kind…shameful “asterisks” to be teach our children what not to be…
“Thank you, Mr Gamberg…for being a true hero of our educational system. . . ”
Horse manure.
Has he instructed the districts that he oversees to return the testing materials and instructed his staff to not do any test prep nor give the tests?
Where have these supposed “hero” supes been all these years?
I know, making sure that the “contumacious” teachers who have been questioning the educational malpractices that he has been supporting are eliminated.from the staff.
This is the type of idiotic thinking we get when we follow a statistical model rather than common sense based on reality.
Yes! Thank you!
retired teacher: please pardon the nit picky editing but…
I would replace “idiotic thinking” with “idiocy” because “thinking” is going to get a bad rap any time you associate it with self-styled “education reform.”
It is also a question of fundamental fairness. My sense is that the vast majority of people don’t even know that many teachers are now being evaluated—with potentially dire consequences—for the performance [aka scores from high-stakes standardized tests] of students they haven’t taught.
Thank you for your comment.
😎
This is one of two related issues.
Some teachers are being rated on the scores of students that they DO NOT teach.
This is like a dentist in Albany being blamed (and punished) for the excessive number of cavities in the patients of a dentist in Buffalo. Blaming the dentist in Buffalo for the cavities would be crazy to start with. Blaming the dentist in Albany is beyond absurd – it should be unlawful.
Some teachers are being rated using the scores of students they DO teach, but using tests that cover course content that the teacher was not responsible for teaching. This occurs in multi-year courses or programs using a single, cumulative test. Examples include NY’s two year, global Regents exam or the 3 to 4 year middle level science test administered at the end of 8th grade. Math teachers face the same problem, albeit in a more subtle way, when students enter their program below grade level. This is like the dentist in Albany (or Buffalo) being blamed (and punished) for having too many patients with heart disease and too may cavities. Not only absurd, but probably unlawful as well.
In NY, the litigation against these two issues could be based on “threat to harm” thanks to Governor Cuomo’s absurd education agenda modeled after the Spanish Inquisition. Send lawyers, guns, and money – the tests have hit the fan.
Nice Warren Zevon reference.
I miss his music.
The shared attribution concept is marketed to districts by USDE publications from the “Reform Support Network.” The concept is also known as a “collective measure.”
The idea that all teachers are responsible for the performance of students on the Common Core in English Language Arts and Literacy provides a reason for all teachers to have a shared attribution score for their school, or grade level, on that measure regardless of their job-assignment.
Principals are routinely judged by the test scores of students they have not taught. Those scores, calculated as so-called growth measures, count for 50% of their evaluation in Louisiana, Tennessee, Florida, and that high percentage weighting of test scores in evaluations of principals as well as teachers is often present in districts with Teacher Incentive Fund Grants (e.g. Chicago, Dallas, Denver).
A study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis this year ( March, 2015) examined six models for estimating the “value- added” by principals to the test scores of students. The value added metrics (VAM) will not die. These are legislated measures or they required to receive federal funds…and they are a scam.
This study looked at math and reading scores only–as usual, truncating the curriculum that “counts” and radically simplifying the task of number-crunchers, but not also misrepresenting the work of principals or the varied job-assignments of teachers in particular schools. These issues were not discussed by the researchers.
The data for this study was provided by the fourth largest district in the US (Miami-Dade County Florida)– also the district where I did student teaching and had my first job.
Among other conclusions, there were not that many principals who were assigned to a single school every year, for consecutive years, the kind of job assignment preferred for VAM.
The researchers found that principal turnover and their assignment to more than one school in a year was commonplace. Some principals were assigned to three schools.
The researchers offered no great insights other than noting “how difficult” it is to use test scores to rate principals. Why? Among many reasons, “improvements” put into place by a principal might not show up for several years. Assigning “credit” for any gains was risky business. The principal might not be the most important agent in relation to testing– could be an assistant principal, lead teachers. Add to that stew all of the same out of school factors that play a huge role in rating individual teachers by the scores of their students.
The researchers hint at flawed policies–chasing test scores and incentives based on these–but they are not well-poised to bite the hands that feed them money to their pursue number crunching–USDE’s Institute of Education Sciences.
“The shared attribution concept. . . ”
I read that the first time around as “The shared retribution concept. . . .”
which may not be that far off either.
Politicians understand this concept VERY well. Ever write to a politician and get a reply stating they get so much mail that they only respond to people in their jurisdictions? Even if they don’t say it –which my Representative in Congress actually does say– many politicians do not feel responsible for or accountable to anyone who the think they don’t represent, even though they are on committees in DC which affect all Americans. .
Then there are the politicians who don’t feel responsible for or accountable to people from other parties who did not cast a vote for them, even when those people reside in their own jurisdictions.
So, lets start grading politicians based on the ratings of people outside their jurisdictions, as well as the ratings of their own constituents from other parties. We’d need to attach high stakes for that to matter to them though. Any ideas?
How can you judge a teacher using a standardized test when our children are not standardized? Children have different interests, talents, levels of intellect ; different family dynamics, different family support, different levels of wealth and health. All these affect how a child learns, so no matter how good a teacher is, no class/school can begin to be honestly judged by a “standardized” test. This is all, to a greater or lesser degree, true of administration, also!
Well, in practice it will be a Full-Employment Act for Lawyers, so at least someone will benefit.
After all, this has absolutely nothing to do with improving the lives of children or their education…
Mr. Gamburg is the super of my alma mater AND also a neighboring district. That in itself is a testimony to the kind of educator he is. I have only met him once ( I no longer live in the area) and he was a warm and welcoming, down-to-earth guy. My best friend growing up is BOE president in the district where there is MUCh support and community togetherness in terms of education. I believe Southold and Greenport schools are very fortunate to have David leading the way.
It’s in the Ohio governor’s biennial budget to do this very thing as part of a way to reduce testing by eliminating non-core subject areas’ SLOs. Excuse: literacy standards in Ohio’s new state standards, aka CCS.
So interesting this topic came up today as it was exactly the issue embedded in the last vignette in the book I’m writing, Naked Teaching, which shows what teaching is today in rural Arizona. In this vignette, the teacher is being evaluated the next day to meet the letter of the contract requirements for two formal evaluations per year. This fictionalized teacher says, “Fact is half of my evaluation is already calculated using data obtained before I was hired. In its desperation to qualify for federal funding, Arizona passed a law that requires up to 50% of a new teacher’s evaluation to be calculated using existing standardized testing scores. Willow Crossings’ status is Needs Improvement. It’s like starting a test with half the answers already done incorrectly by someone else and you can’t change them. No matter how good you are, the best you can do is flunk. How does that improve anything for Jeremiah. Or Rosa or Takala or any of the 50,000,000 other school-age children in America?”
Grim.