Reader Alice responds to the court victory of VirginiaSGP, who succeeded by lawsuit in getting the ratings of Virginia teachers released and plans to post them on his Facebook page. VirginiaSGP is Brian Davison, apparently an engineer, who believes that these test-based ratings are true measures of teachers’ worth.
Alice comments:
“While I obviously cannot psychoanalyze Brian, I recognizer a lot of a STEM ego in Brian’s diatribes. As a recovering STEM- a-phile, I recognize the inability to recognize that not everything that matters can be numerically measured.
“Dealing with humans rather than machines, or in my case, neutrons, is very different and more complicated. Neutrons follow the laws of quantum physics. Neutrons make no decisions. They are consistent. Humans follow no laws of the physical world. Humans make decisions every moment of every day and those decisions are based on a myriad of factors that are not limited to whether they have eaten that day or gotten enough sleep. None of those factors can be measured and put into a VAM or SGP model.
“Coupled with the STEM ego is a denigration and misunderstanding of social science research. I have done both types of research. STEM research is cleaner. It is elegant and mathematically beautiful. This is the Gates MET study that Brian consistently quotes. Social science research is messy and depends highly on the assumptions made and the model used because all of these focus on a different aspect of humanity. It cannot be anything else and be of any use to educators. But it looks less “rigorous” than STEM research. But those of us in the field know the rigor.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Alice, well said!
I worked as a geologist for twenty years before moving into teaching. In the environmental field geologists often work with engineers. My fellow geologists and I were always amused and occasionally frustrated with the mind set of some of the engineers we worked with. Not all, mind you, but some.
Geology is in part, a descriptive science and has much more ambiguity than does engineering. As a geologist, I was comfortable in that ambiguity, the unknown and relatively unquantifiable nature of what is beneath our feet.
But it drove some of my engineer friends bonkers. They were often frustrated by the reality of geology. We don’t have Superman’s X-Ray vision, so there is no way to definitively describe what’s down below, unless you dig it up! They took great comfort in formulas that gave the correct answers, so long as you had the data to plug into them. The binary, black and white, right-wrong nature of engineering is as different from geology as it is from human interactions – which at its heart is what teaching is.
We need both engineers and geologists, and teachers for our world. It is fortunate that I found a science that I felt comfortable in, because engineering wouldn’t have been it. The mistake is when our world views are so narrow that we come to believe that view is the only correct one. I’m not surprised Brian is an engineer.
No way he could have been a geologist*🌎
* or a teacher!
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rockhound2: thank you for excellent comments on an excellent posting.
😎
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Quote about economists- “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
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That STEM ego has kept wages down for STEM workers for ages.
One might have to consult that social scientist CW Mills “White Collar” for the explanation.
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rockhound2: I have posted this before, but in response to your fine observations I do so again. From Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 edition of the 1964 republication of the 1962 original, pp. 143-4):
[start]
A person who uses statistics does not thereby automatically become a scientist, any more than a person who uses a stethoscope automatically becomes a doctor. Nor is an activity necessarily scientific just because statistics are used in it.
The most important thing to understand about reliance on statistics in a field such as testing is that such reliance warps perspective. The person who holds that subjective judgment and opinion are suspect and decides that only statistics can provide the objectivity and relative certainty that he seeks, begins by unconsciously ignoring, and ends by consciously deriding, whatever can not be given a numerical measure or label. His sense of values becomes distorted. He comes to believe that whatever is non-numerical is inconsequential. He can not serve two masters. If he worships statistics he will simplify, fractionalize, distort and cheapen in order to force things into a numerical mold.
The multiple-choice tester who meets criticisms by merely citing test statistics shows either his contempt for the intelligence of his readers or else his personal lack of concern for the non-numerical aspects of testing, importantly among them the deleterious effects his test procedures have on education.
[end]
A prescient description, no?
😎
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I totally agree, and have a similar feeling about engineers.
But ‘STEM’ supposedly includes ‘science’. However, as you say, science (any area) is far different from ‘technology, engineering and math’. The latter three involve deduction (the initial premises are given as ‘truth’). Science, though, is inductive and, therefore, not dependent upon top-down truth. The dream of any scientist is to stand ‘truth’ on it’s head, to be an Einstein and create a whole new way of understanding our experience.
Whenever I see ‘STEM’ it makes me angry. ‘TE and M’ are simply using the ‘S’ to give them more credibility.
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“Science, though, is inductive and, therefore, not dependent upon top-down truth. ”
Hm. Newton’s big contribution was that he introduced three simple rules from which he could deduce all of classical physics. Maxwell’s and Einstein’s contributions were similar.
It’s another matter that scientific discovery is usually inductive: lots of experimental data eventually yields a theory that would then explain the source of the data—and hopefully other future data.
Math is the ultimate top down activity: you ultimately deduce everything from a few truths. The natural sciences necessarily deductive since they are ultimately expressed in mathematical formulas.
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I have college degrees in both history and engineering. I worked in engineering and was a teacher for a couple of years (a story for another time). The engineers often said what an easy life teachers had; many were married to teachers. I would tell the engineers that my job as a teacher was harder than engineering on a day-to-day basis, but they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) believe it. I can see them applauding the idea of using student test scores to measure teacher effectiveness because most of them would assume that all students would need is high standards and tough discipline. There would be no possibility of any problems brought to school unless the kids were one that should be expelled.
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Engineers are smart but they aren’t well educated.
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I disagree completely. I know many engineers, across the engineering disciplines, and I have found them as well educated as anyone else. I sing with some, I’ve enjoyed discussions of literature with some.
And some are not as well educated as others are. Just like us.
So before we cast them all as human adding machines or biological computers we need to stop and evaluate them individually. We as teachers demand the same.
Why not them?
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Just remember, Davison does not represent engineers, parents or any group. His is his own mess.
He has won a technical victory as the entire nation gradually shifts its weight away from these deforms that are a true intellectual embarrassment.
The backlash will likely be severe.
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It just dawned on me…he is so cunning and intelligent and bent on extracting a pound of flesh for whatever wrongs he perceives, so much so that he is considered a nuisance and threat at the school where his children are educated – why doesn’t he homeschool his children? They must be embarrassed each day by their dad.
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Excellent point.
The schools seem to be working out for the most part and he works. Everyone is in a unique situation. The current deforms have certainly pushed many, ready or not, with appropriate time and resources or not, into homeschooling. He damn well should understand that.
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Any claim that the Gates funded “Measures of Effective Teaching” studies are definitive are as uninformed as equating teacher quality with test scores converted into SPGs or VAM. See some of the deep flaws in the MET studies, conducted by economists, at Mathis, 2013). Rothstein, J. & Mathis, W. J. (2013). Review of “Have We Identified Effective Teachers?” and “A Composite Estimator of Effective Teaching”: Culminating findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved June, 2013 from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013.
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Thank you, Laura.
So sad we’re at this state of debunking what we should all already know and accept as true.
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Sorry,
Sad we’re in this state of debunking what we as a society should already know to be false.
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I agree. That part of my post came out wrong. What I meant is that is “appears” to be mathematically sound so the uninformed believe it.
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As Gary Rubinstein pointed out in <a href="“>”The 50 Million dollar Lie” the people who did the MET study hid the uncertainty with statistricks.
What they were doing was not science (of any kind.) by any stretch of the imagination.
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Maybe Virginia can take his lawsuit further. Maybe he can force teachers to wear their ratings on an armband at all times. And maybe he could arrange for color coded triangles to go with certain scores. And maybe we should start rounding up the lower rated teachers and putting them in ghettos or camps where they can’t harm the innocent population.
What a sick individual. I hope he gets fierce backlash, but I’m not holding my breath, the way public shaming seems to be a bloodsport these days.
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Yes, I had distracted myself by considering posting along those lines; like should we have to annually, seriously defend against eugenics, mandatory IQ testing, Scientology, Area 51 theorists, conspiracy theorists who claim Bigfoot killed Kennedy, etc.? And now pasta?
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He claims to be helping parents and students through his actions. He accepts $35,000 in attorney fees paid for by taxpayers. Something does not add up. If taxpayers are not concerned about this issue and did not sue why are they responsible for covering the attorney fees of this individual who has his own agenda. Anyone who is disruptive to the educational process i.e.(school day) is not permitted on school grounds. There is precedent to support this.
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Well stated, Dienne!
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SGP’s were not designed/intended to be used for evaluating teachers.
Their misapplication for that purpose is neither good science nor good engineering.
It’s just dumb.
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Soon it may be actionable, besides being wrong.
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And dumb.
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Brian/Virginia is a strange case. He is a good example of those people who are both smart and dumb. Reminds me of the typical politician: clever but blind. Accidentally, or willfully.
See, intelligence isn’t just one thing, and science is easily corrupted when it is not accompanied by the humanities.
It’s strange how economists, for example, view the entire world through their little prism of bullcrap.
I think the problem is not just a narrow curriculum, such as in STEM, but disciplinary study itself — which from K-12 is more dangerous than we thought. It sets the conditions for people to see the world in false divisions.
But here I am again with my radical ideas to fundamentally change schooling to better fit reality and human needs.
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And BTW – where is ol’ Davison? Now that the defecation has hit the rotary oscillator, he evaporates like the gaseous excretions he spews into the atmosphere.
What a tool. As an undergrad, I doubled in Maths and Engineering, minors in other technical fields, but quickly found the working environment with many engineers to be interminable – these guys (it was all males then) were so certain of themselves and their “intellectual superiority” – it just made me physically ill and I dreaded going in to work each day. When I quit, I left them with the famous Bertrand Russell quote – which went right over their heads – and they claimed to be brilliant (You guys know the quote, I am certain – ” The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure, and the brilliant are filled with doubts”). I reminded them that Russell was a brilliant Mathematician, but he realized the limitations of that type of intellectual endeavour.
People like Davison are actually to be pitied, I have learned – they are so filled with anger, for whatever reason, and are so un-self-aware that they truly do not understand their own actions. that is not an excuse for this type of stupidity, but perhaps it will help shed some light on the mindset behind such ridiculous fool’s errands.
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There are only three questions remaining when one reads the title “Measuring Effective Teachers”:
What’s the definition of an effective teacher?
and once we answered this question to everybody’s satisfaction
Can we measure teacher efficiency?
and then, finally,
When we measure teacher efficiency, do we get data that really describes teacher efficiency?
MET proposes to introduce a new science, the science of measuring teacher efficiency. When they do that, they have to give precise definitions. Otherwise, nobody can tell what the authors are doing—including the authors.
There is no “common sense” answer to either questions—people just think there is one, because they heard effectiveness in so many context that they think, it makes sense in every context.
The measurability or non-measurability of something is not a matter of belief. No, it needs to be examined, before we measure it.
I have some questions on measurability of other things which may make sense at first hearing, but puzzling at closer inspection.
Can we measure the effectiveness of musicians?
Can we measure the effectiveness of music?
What is the connection between effective musicians and effective music?
What time span should effectiveness of music and musicians take into consideration? (or should we just measure immediate effect of music or musicians)?
Is Bach effective? Is Bach more effective than Justin Bieber?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a physicist?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a physical theory?
What is the connection between effective physicists and effective physical theory?
What time span should effectiveness of physics and physicists take into consideration?
Was Einstein’s general relativity effective? (It had no proof for decades, and has applications only nowadays in GPS)
Are Newton’s physical theories ineffective since they are not valid?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a doctor?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a nurse?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a mother?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a preacher?
Can we measure the effectiveness of a publisher?
Can we measure the effectiveness of an actor?
And of course there are basic questions on general measurability
Are there more things that are measurable than non-measurable?
What is the difference between measurable and non-measurable things?
Can we measure the difference between measurable and non-measurable things?
When we declare that we measure something, do we really measure that very thing? How can we tell?
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“…three questions remaining…”
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