David Berliner is one of our most distinguished educational researchers. He has received numerous honors for his studies of education. He is currently Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizona State University.
This video is a presentation that he made at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in Australia. He explains why standardized tests are a terrible basis for teacher evaluation because the tests primarily reflect student demographics, not teacher quality.
Please set aside the time to watch and listen to this important presentation by one of our great scholars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, tis a good watch!
Yes – a good watch. And of course, Berliner and Biddles book The Manufactured Crisis has been validated. Too bad that we now all are getting on board the Berliner bandwagon and giving his thoughts on education reform credibility after the victory of the corporate privatizers of public schools and their ESSA. Oh well – why cry over spilt milk.
Thomas,
The party’s not over. They haven’t won until we give up. Everything the privatizers push has failed.
One issue is that while test results do reflect demographics “on average”, there are students from all demographics who will fall on various points in that line. The chance of an at-risk student performing below average is much more likely than the chance of an upper middle class student performing below average, but there will be some students from all cohorts who are above average. And the charter schools with the most “success” teaching at-risk students are the ones who have brilliantly exploited this and run their schools to keep the at-risk students who fall on the higher achieving points on that line and get rid of the ones who fall on the lower end. But by denying this, they can claim miraculous results and credit their inexperienced teachers. And credulous reporters believe it.
The problem with those charter schools that want to expand enormously is that they soon find it harder and harder to make sure their classes consist only of the at-risk students on the higher end of that average. Especially when the public finally starts looking more closely at attrition rates. So they can only expand so much without also having to educate at-risk risk kids whose performance on those tests will be more typical of their demographic. They can’t do that!! Their test scores will drop.
But they still want to expand without having to educate those more “average” at-risk kids (and certainly without having to educate any who are below average for their demographic!) The answer is: middle class students. It doesn’t take a genius to see that
if a charter school is desperate to teach ONLY the students who will do well on standardized tests, they can’t expand too much in the poorest areas where their wait lists are longest. They have to go where they can attract middle class parents and create a demand, even if there isn’t one.
But — uh oh — although their secret sauce has never consisted of much more than victimizing low-performing kids until their parents pull them from the school, that kind of thing doesn’t fly with the middle class parents they want. No problem! Just dump everything that you pretended was necessary. No more long school days — after all, if you absolutely need middle class kids to keep your test scores up but the middle class kids’ parents expect their kids to participate in after school activities, you need to make sure your school is catering to them. So long days no longer matter! And again, credulous reporters never question why the charter school suddenly dumped the methods it insisted were an intrinsic part of their “secret sauce”. And will still believe that the high test scores the charter schools achieved after weeding out half (or more) of their at-risk kids are a reflection of something special. If it was something special, they would not have to change their schools so that middle class parents were served!
If you have thousands of at-risk kids on the wait list and you claim that your methods work miracles with them, why would you change your school day and drop everything you believe so that middle class students had time to participate in the after school activities their parents can afford? The families of those at-risk kids aren’t clamoring for that.
I just wish those schools would be a little more honest about who they are trying to serve, because it is certainly not the average at-risk student anymore. At least make it clear to all the low-income parents on the wait list that their kids — unless they perform far above average for their demographic — are not wanted. Why? Because as this presentation shows, they bring down test scores and achieving high test scores trumps educating at-risk kids.
Good to hear from someone who understands statistics and is not afraid to mince words, calling the current movement to evaluate teachers with VAMs “ludicrous”.
The people developing and cheerleading for VAMs really should be embarrassed by the sort of pseudo-science garbage they are pushing – and ashamed of the fact that it is being used to evaluate and fire teachers.
But one can only be embarrassed — and feel ashamed — if one understands.
Sadly, many of them do not seem to even possess the bare minimum of knowledge of science needed to understand how “ludicrous” what they are doing is.
Or, if they do possess that knowledge, they are simply being dishonest — with others and even with themselves.
should have said “minces no words”
SomeDAM Poet: you are too kind.
I have come to the conclusion, after following the ed debates for some years now, that the vast majority of enforcers and enablers and purveyors of self-proclaimed “education reform” don’t have a clue what VAM and the like mean. They’re just regurgitating the sales points and pitches of the “experts” that push Rheephorm Preferred Eduproducts.
Two very obvious but glaring examples by supernovas [even if faded now] of rheephorm. *But they will shine brightly again at the upcoming TFA Love Fest!*
Michelle Rhee touted “her” success at bringing “her” students from the 13th to the 90th percentile. There is no doubt, based on her self-promotion and that of her supporters, that this former head of DCPs genuinely and sincerely believed that [in educational terms] she walked on water and then turned that water into wine.
John Deasy, who went from darling of the LATIMES to being thrown under the bus, raised the LAUSD graduation rate to 12%—right, 12%, after subtracting all those inconvenient “non-strivers” [of Michael J Petrill of the Fordham Institute] that made the actual graduation rate 2%.
How do these and the other edufrauds explain their withering incompetence in handling ‘hard data points’ ? They almost always claim that someone else, anybody else, everybody else, led them astray. Unfortunately, the Teflon Defense has a way of backfiring on folks that, literally, can’t think straight: what kind of leaders are they that they can be so easily manipulated into making ridiculous claims that can’t stand even casual scrutiny?
Alert! This is the point at which they call in Peter Cunningham aka “Mr. Civil Conversation” and complain they’re being “swarmed” by “shrill” and “strident” lazy LIFO union thugs and need a rapid response team to deal with the mess they’ve created.
But all becomes clear when you refer back to rheephorm’s foundational Marxist principles regarding numbers and informational text:
“My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.”
Groucho, you must admit, taught them well.
Rheeally!
😎
waiting for virginiasgp’s response…?
I was going to ask the exact same thing. Money is speech and data is human value and all. https://dmaxmj.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/part-i-good-lord-when-did-these-fools-become-the-supposed-experts/
Much thanks for your posting and for the kind words.
David David C. Berliner Regents’ Professor Emeritus 120 E. Rio Salado Parkway, Unit 205 Tempe, AZ 85281-9116 Ph: 480-861-0484
I am not convinced that Arne Duncan and the political clients of the reformers have acted out of ignorance. In fact, I was thinking that If Arne and Bill and all their friends were seated in that audience in Australia, they would not admit that their ideas are wrong. They would find some buzz-worded blather to deny reality. Reason does not defeat idealogy.
To me the most inspiring part of the video is where Berlinger talks about the fact that the low life expectancy of Americans is caused by the low achieving US doctors,
Berliner is probably too much of an elitist, moralizing professor to think over the practical, paradigm changing implications of this fact.
I, on the other hand, consider it my duty to explore what needs to be urgently done to make sure our great country wins the Race To Top Life Expectancy.
As Berliner suggests, we first need to fire all doctors and replace them by talented Mathematics and English majors who are trained to be a doctor, using 21st-century-based methods, by Cure For America during an intense weekend soon after their graduation from college.
Now, where did all these doctors get their medical degrees from? From our outdated medical schools which are completely corrupted by their unions. To bring these low performing institutions up to the level of our top-performing economy, congress will create the Achievement Medical School District which will take over all public medical schools in the country. AMSD will fire all professors from the institutions they conquered and will replace them by scholars rigorously trained at Relay Graduate School of Medicine.
The next logical step in our historical program is clear: Our doctors had gone to college before medical school. Hence all public college professors will be fired and replaced by Windows 10 computers running Pearson’s MyPersonalProfessor software. It really is a blessing that Pearson has been working on controlling the infrastructure in colleges for over a decade, hence taking over colleges by Pearson Global Access can be executed by just a small coup that can easily be paid for by a barely noticeable increase in our nuclear budget.
You guessed the last stage of our life-span transforming program correctly: Since our doctors began their underachieving and undisciplined education in pre and K-12 schools, all these schools will be taken over by NRA’s Safe Schools District, and the teachers will be replaced by armed guards who, according to the second amendment, need no training in operating their AK-47’s.
I think y’all agree that the above simple but logic- and rigor-based program will enable the American people to live the longest life in the world to realize their American Dream in hard work.