This post, with an anonymous author, reviews the research on value-added measurement, with frequent references to those who claim that the rise or fall of test scores is the best way to judge teacher quality.
The basic question he or she addresses is whether the actions of your kindergarten teacher or your third-grade teacher can affect your lifetime earnings, as Raj Chetty and his team asserted in a study a few years back.
The author goes into a lengthy back-and-forth about whether such claims make sense.
But the one essential fact that his post is missing is that 70% of teachers do not teach tested subjects. A district or school can evaluate teachers with VAM only when there are enough years of test scores to document the effects of the teacher over several years. Teachers of subjects other than reading and mathematics in grades 3-8 will never get VAM ratings.
But many states have solved this problem by assigning VAM ratings to the 70%. Their ratings are based on the scores of students they never met in subjects they never taught. This is called an “attributed rating.”
That makes sense, said no one ever.
That may be why Hawaii and Oklahoma have dropped VAM. It is expensive and gives false positives and false negatives. Expect more states to join these two states.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hi Diane,
This post is by Scott Alexander, who is actually a rather prominent blogger. I guess Scott Alexander is “almost but not quite my real name” but using a pen name and being anonymous are not really the same thing. He is a fourth year psychiatry resident and writes a lot of critical reviews of various sorts of psychiatric and related research.
Sounds like yet another expert who isn’t a classroom teacher.
Thanks, Tom, I enjoyed his writing.
I, for one, would like some of these “experts” to talk to and listen to actual teachers rather than analyze them like something in a Petri dish. As soon as I hear economist or psychiatrist, I move on.
The idea that one person can affect one’s income over 30-40 years of his or her life is absurd and common sense and wisdom would dictate discarding it immediately. But, since there is very little wisdom out there, it’s still going strong. 😦
Like!
And still you have not answered the question: What do YOU suggest as valid ways to measure teacher effectiveness???
I got lots of ideas!
Teacher effectiveness sniffing dogs.
Teacher phrenology.
Burning teachers at the stake. (If you survive, you’re fired!)
Psychics, tarot cards, and teacher palm readings.
“Teaching” classes of avatars.
Any one of those ideas is just as valid as using student test scores, surveys, or rates of attendance or graduation. Use them! Or, you edu-tourists could just stop meddling, let me do my job, and let my supervising principal do hers.
To Rudy J Schellekens who says: “And still you have not answered the question: What do YOU suggest as valid ways to measure teacher effectiveness???”
If I might interject: We do what we do for professional scientists, but with a few added exceptions related to the specifics of the teaching profession: we give them all the training we can, allowing them the time and resources to keep up with the leading edge ideas in their theoretical fields; you provide them with good working conditions, including salary, and the supports to capitalize on them; you let them do their job with
(1) reasonable numbers of children in a classroom,
(2) reasonable supervision by a person or persons who know the field and the job, and whose income isn’t directly influenced by lessening teacher salaries;
(3) reasonable support of all kinds considering the specifics of their job, namely for teaching CHILDREN and mediating with their parents/caregivers both of whom are not non-conscious “data” but other persons (big difference from the natural, physical, or statistical sciences, or business and marketing);
(4) reasonable intellectual “space” to collaborate and learn from others both in-field and in-school on multiple levels, and to learn about their individual students, all with creating a whole-school community ethos of learning in mind;
(5) reasonable general (not lockstep or overly-detailed) mission statements, goals, etc., that are visited regularly, in dialogue with teachers, to be sure they are being implemented creatively;
(6) systematic avenues of communications, adult education, and problem-solving between parents, community members, state and local officials.
I don’t know where you want to put MEASURING in–probably somewhere. But be sure you have someone who, themselves, are reasonably educated to make up the questions, and someone who is not working for an oligarch or a venture-capitalist corporation (interested in killing public education) who see students and teachers as figures on a balance sheet. Otherwise, you have someone who has confused capitalism with political acumen and who is, for instance, trying to measure how a kindergarten teacher can affect a 6-year-old’s income when they turn 40. The assumption is that “good teachers” really do spend their value-added time thinking about such things–and should. Or maybe not.
I appreciate your response. Seems like we’re getting somewhere.
What you described is like giving someone a hammer, saw, level, and a tape measure. You have described the tools.
And a good set too, high quality.
It reminds me of growing up, learning to cook. I have the best pots and pans money can buy. I have the best and most expensive ingredients for a meal.
How do you know if I did a good job with using what was available?
Obviously, in this scenario by what you taste. You have a list to go by.
Temperatures
Flavoring
Done or not?
So now with the list of tools you have described as being given to a teacher.
What does the result of my using these great tolls look like?
To Rudy, who when speaking of teacher accountability in education, uses the analogy of baking a cake, with all of the right equipment and ingredients, and then tasting it. “How do you know if I did a good job with using what was available? Obviously, in this scenario by what you taste. You have a list to go by.
Temperatures . . . .”
The short answer is that teaching student development and knowledge acquisition, especially in a group, is not very much like baking a cake, if at all. But to use a better but still inadequate analogy, a teacher’s job is more like a general trying to manage a war campaign, where neither the weather, the locals, nor the enemy, and sometimes not even your ranking officers are predictable and, at times, not even aligned well with your intentions or your choices of method to carry them out.
Aristotle had it right a few years back (ha!) when he said that we must first agree that discussion of such matters cannot be more than an outline and is bound to lack precision for “one can demand of a discussion only what the subject matter permits, and there are NO FIXED DATA (like in baking cakes) in matters concerning actions and questions of what is beneficial . . .” and if so “of our general discussion, our treatment of particular problems will be even less precise . . . since these do not come under the head of any art which can be transmitted by precept, but the agent (teacher) must consider on each different occasion what the situation demands . . . ” (my emphases and parentheses) (Aristotle’s Ethics, book two/1104a).
I love statistics, rightly developed and applied. But the they seem to avoid a fundamental tenant of science: Pay attention to the data, which as Aristotle knew, is human, and not “fixed.”
That being said, and I mean no offense here, both (a) the cake analogy and (b) the report’s basic set of foundational assumptions (e.g., the underlying cognitional theory suggested in the report), the methods, and the expectations-to-outcome are severely misguided, even naive. Getting to the intelligible relationship of (a) a single teacher’s responsibility in K-12 to (b) adult income in students’ later life is like building a house of cards with different sized cards and decks and with many missing cards that we cannot eve get to the first level as reasonably related without collapse. Let’s just eat the cake before reading the recipe, shopping for materials, taking a bath, or checking to see if anyone wants or is allergic to ice cream.
We won’t fix the problem here. But the fields of and surrounding education have a plethora of smart and questioning people who have a history of thought about what works and doesn’t work. And because we are historical beings who, unlike cakes, communicate with one another, we can fix that part of the plane, even as committed teachers and theoreticians who have the right tools are flying it–as it turns out, damn well in many, many cases. But the first question in a democracy, in my view, is: What are the political foundations of the researchers?
The question has been asked and answered many times in this forum.
YEP!
There has been NO OBSERVABILITY study done. DUH! Politicians have no clue about the necessity of “Observability Studies.” How can anyone make the claim that student test scores are effective at determining teacher competence and knowledge.
Click to access chap5traCO.pdf
“How can anyone make the claim. . . ”
Perhaps not a “how” answer but a why one. Because one sees a pot of gold at the end of the testing rainbow.
Sadly it doesn’t seem to matter in today’s world if something is fair or if it makes sense. It seems to matter only if it makes dollars and cents for people with vested interests.
YUP!
Using test scores to judge teachers uses the same flawed, autocratic, fascist reasoning that was behind the Nazis forcing Jews to sew the Star of David on their shirts/jackets so they could be easily identified and persecuted.
The Economic Policy Institute listed the reasons why back in August 2010.
“A number of factors have been found to have strong influences on student learning gains, aside from the teachers to whom their scores would be attached. These include the influences of students’ other teachers—both previous teachers and, in secondary schools, current teachers of other subjects—as well as tutors or instructional specialists, who have been found often to have very large influences on achievement gains. These factors also include school conditions—such as the quality of curriculum materials, specialist or tutoring supports, class size, and other factors that affect learning. Schools that have adopted pull-out, team teaching, or block scheduling practices will only inaccurately be able to isolate individual teacher “effects” for evaluation, pay, or disciplinary purposes.
“Student test score gains are also strongly influenced by school attendance and a variety of out-of-school learning experiences at home, with peers, at museums and libraries, in summer programs, on-line, and in the community. Well-educated and supportive parents can help their children with homework and secure a wide variety of other advantages for them. Other children have parents who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to support their learning academically. Student test score gains are also influenced by family resources, student health, family mobility, and the influence of neighborhood peers and of classmates who may be relatively more advantaged or disadvantaged.”
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/
Diane writes: “The basic question he or she addresses is whether the actions of your kindergarten teacher or your third-grade teacher can affect your lifetime earnings, as Raj Chetty and his team asserted in a study a few years back.”
If that’s the basic question, then perhaps its about planned attrition again: looking for a way to shed doubt on teachers and keep them in a defensive mode?
But why the focus on earnings? I thought teaching was about educating children? Does “educating” mean providing the best shot at increasing one’s personal bottom line? (The Trump school of economics and politics?) Did they ask if these children grew up to become thoughtful persons? Do they participate in the political life and well-being of their communities (are they citizens in the best sense of that word?), or pay attention to someone else besides themselves, or to state, national, and world concerns? Did they know history and love to read? Did they have a vibrant circle of friends and family?
Or did they think of “welfare” as a giveaway program to jealous slobs who expect “a handout” and just don’t want to work? instead of providing a commonwealth-baseline for everyone who lives here to “fare well” under their particular circumstances? Even “welfare” is miscast as merely “bottom line.” (What a vacuous internal life such thinking suggests.) As Bloomberg said in his speech at the DN Convention, do they know how to recognize a fraud when they see one?
“But why the focus on earnings? I thought teaching was about educating children?”
Because earnings = education, DUH!!!
(sarcasm)
” I thought teaching was about educating children?”
To what end do we “educate children”? And that concept leaves a bit to be desired in my thinking. Should the teaching and learning process be one of doing something to a child or should it be a process of allowing, helping a child to develop in his/her own way through time and space? The first tends to deny “agency” on the part of the child and his/her parents while the second, while seemingly chaotic and anarchic, allows for that agency. Robotic behavior vs open unconditional thought/being?
I contend that we must keep in mind the purpose of public education as delineated in the states’ constitutions and have proposed the following language in a compilation and summary of the wording of those states that have a stated reason:
“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
I read through their “evidence,” and found most of their data was based on assumptions about the human condition. As someone that has watched students develop over decades, I can say that trying to quantify the human condition or the impact of a given teacher is fruitless, and artificial at best. There are too many variables in our lives to accurately calculate the impact of one teacher. I have observed many students that were slow to start ultimately do well in school and life, and I have observed students with great promise that got mixed up with drugs resulting in a life of crime. As for grit, this is another artificial construct. The most significant take away from the article is from Diane:
VAM is Junk Science. Looking at children as machine-made widgets and looking at learning solely as standardized test scores may thrill some econometricians, but it has nothing to do with the real world of children, learning, and teaching. It is a grand theory that might net its authors a Nobel Prize for its grandiosity, but it is both meaningless in relation to any genuine concept of education and harmful in its mechanistic and reductive view of humanity.
By the way, I doubt anyone will get awards for VAM. It is a mess of assumptions and bias, not scientific in any way.
What do we do about excellent teachers whose students get a minimum wage job 40 years later? Or homeless? A criminal?
Daniel Spaniel,
Those students that end up in minimum wage jobs 40 years later were free to learn but probably decided not to cooperate with the excellent teachers they had and become part of the learning process.
For children to learn, those children must pay attention to what the excellent teachers are teaching, ask questions when needed, follow classroom rules, do the class work, read assignments and even read for fun, do homework, get adequate sleep every night (the average child in America does not get enough sleep – do we blame teachers for that too?), keep sugar consumption at a minimum (Do you know what sugar does to a child’s brain, you should?), eat a healthy died and never come to school hungry.
Too much sugar impairs memory and learning skills. Do you know how much sugar the average U.S. child eats? The average child consumes 32 teaspoons of sugar daily. But only 5 to 8 teaspoons is the recommended daily limit for children.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/06/sugar-brain-mental-health_n_6904778.html
For instance, my older brother, who is dead now (he died at 64), made that decision and cut school as often as possible so he could run with gangs, seduce as many teenage girls as possible, swill beer, smoke cigarettes and do drugs. Since he was my brother, I was a witness to his high school years. I was there, a pre-school child, when he was 16, cut school, and arrived with his girl friend (our parents were both working) so she could use our home phone to call the school and lie, pretending to be our mother, about why he wasn’t there.
Are you kidding me? I am supposed to blame my personal struggles forty years later on the quality of my teachers. Dang! I had no idea it was so easy to dismiss uncontrollable life events and/or personal responsibility. Ma! I had no idea teachers were so powerful!
to 2old2teach: If teachers are deemed responsible for your later “situation,” then they can be held to a VERY high but statistically mysterious (translated: not achievable) standard and so: They’re Fired.
Nothing!
minor correction. A VAM score assigned to a teacher who whose job assignment does not “produce” scores on statewide tests is called a “collective VAM,” or a “distributed” score. It could be called “attributed” too, because the process is rationalized by claiming that all teachers contribute to and are responsible for school wide results on VAM. The “collective VAM” label comes from writers who also helped to market that idea as well as SLOs for the USDE’s Reform Support Network.
I read through the report–noticed that the writer(s) return to the relationship of income, income, income to early teacher performance. My question: Is THAT what education is about for these folks? My analysis: What a shallow internal life does THAT suggest. What about what happens to these students’ community life when they grow up? Do they love to read? Are they thoughtful human beings who think about others or something other than their own “bottom line”? Do they know history or the state of their own and others’ political, moral, social, spiritual, cultural ground?
This group of studies seems to me to be just another way to raise doubts about teachers who then must stay on the defensive while they try to do their lifework. We all have to have a financial base; but certainly, that work is not about THEIR (teachers’) bottom line. Such statistical analyses are just another Procrustean bed–doesn’t fit, never will. . . or as another said above, not until researchers understand something more and better about the human condition. Statistics are only a small part of the “picture,” and sometimes they are so “siloed” as to be humorous, and would be–if they weren’t taken so seriously by those who make policy.
Well, considering that students standardized test scores are COMPLETELY INVALID to begin with, any conclusions based on said scores are COMPLETELY INVALID at face value. To understand the invalidities involve read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
VAM has been “slammed” — quoting The Washington Post — by the very people who know the most about data measurement: The American Statistical Association (ASA). The findings of the ASA provide a firm basis by which every teacher who is unfavorably evaluated on students’ standardized test scores to vigorously oppose the evaluation, citing the ASA’s authoritative, detailed, seven-page VAM-slam “Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment”.
Even the anti-public school, anti-union Washington Post newspaper said this about the ASA Statement: “You can be certain that members of the American Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, know a thing or two about data and measurement. The ASA just slammed the high-stakes ‘value-added method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers that has been increasingly embraced in states as part of school-reform efforts. VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the ‘value’ a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been. THESE FORMULAS CAN’T ACTUALLY DO THIS (emphasis added) with sufficient reliability and validity, but school reformers have pushed this approach and now most states use VAM as part of teacher evaluations.”
The ASA Statement points out the following and many other failings of testing-based VAM:
“System-level conditions” include everything from overcrowded and underfunded classrooms to district-and site-level management of the schools and to student poverty.
A copy of the VAM-slamming ASA Statement should be posted on the union bulletin board at every school site throughout our nation and should be explained to every teacher by their union at individual site faculty meetings so that teachers are aware of what it says about how invalid it is to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers.
Fight back! Never, never, never give up!
I just talked to,a teacher today whose experience with the VAM farce included a demonstrable dip in her own score when a very proficient student had to miss taking a test due to the death of her grandfather. Had she been a level 5 teacher, as we say here in Tennessee, she might have been able to prevent the man from dying so that her VAM could have been better. Anything else is just an excuse.
If a teacher can be blamed for their student’s failures in life then can the teacher blame his or her teacher?
I can still remember telling my mother that I had finally reached the age of reason: I no longer claimed the privilege of blaming her for all my faults.
Mickey,
Anyone who is religious and believes their deity to be omnipotent/omnipresent can simply blame their deity. Obviously it’s His/Her/Its fault.
Also we should blame the “reformers'” parents parents parents parents parents parents … (etc.) for being so greedy and stupid.
“. . . believes their deity to be omnipotent/omnipresent. . . ”
Should then understand that I, you, and everyone is/are god!
Commenters, did we read the same article? If you have the patience to read the whole thing, he blasted holes a mile wide in all the VAM studies. He was skeptical throughout, & showed how factors ‘proven’ one study undermine other studies. I particularly liked the way he made fun of the ‘grit’ concept throughout, without directly addressing it.
To Rudy J Schellekens who says: “And still you have not answered the question: What do YOU suggest as valid ways to measure teacher effectiveness???”
You do what what we do for scientists, but with a few added exceptions related to the specifics of the profession: we give them all the training we can, allowing them the time and resources to keep up with the action research and leading edge ideas in their theoretical fields; you provide them with good working conditions, including salary, and the supports to capitalize on them; you let them do their job with
(1) a reasonable number of children in their classrooms
(2) reasonable supervision by a person or persons who know the field and the job, and whose income isn’t directly influenced by lessening teacher salaries;
(3) reasonable support of all kinds considering the specifics of their job, namely for teaching CHILDREN and mediating with their parents/caregivers both of whom are not non-conscious “data” but other persons (big difference from the natural, physical, or statistical sciences);
(4) reasonable intellectual “space” to collaborate and learn from others both in-field and in-school on multiple levels, and to learn about their individual students, all with creating a whole-school community ethos of learning in mind;
(5) reasonable general (not lockstep or overly-detailed) mission statements, goals, etc., that are visited regularly by all, including teachers, to be sure they are being implemented creatively;
(6) systematic avenues of communications, adult education, and problem-solving between parents, community members, state and local officials.
I don’t know where you want to put MEASURING in–probably somewhere. But be sure you have someone who, themselves, are reasonably educated to make up the questions, and someone who is not working for an oligarch or a venture-capitalist corporation who see students and teachers as pawns or figures on a balance sheet. Otherwise, you have someone who has confused capitalism with political acumen and who is, for instance, trying to measure how a kindergarten teacher can affect a 6-year-old’s income when they turn 40. The assumption is that “good teachers” really do spend their value-added time thinking about such things–and should.
Expect more districts in New York State to go to shared attribution scores as 3012-D, voted in by the ‘heavy hearts club’ legislators as part of the Education Transformation Act of 2015, makes it nearly impossible to do anything other than that. ‘Non-tested’ classes were previously ‘allowed’ under 3012-C to use end of course evaluations (read that as ‘assessments other than state tests’, i.e. in-house assessments) in SLOs for predictive VAM purposes. That is no longer allowed under 3012-D, unless the assessment is approved in the review room (which of course it won’t be) after filing a 30 page application for each assessment for the 70% of teachers who don’t have a state test for their SLO. In my district this would be literally hundreds of applications. Even if districts wanted to attempt this, the cost in terms of manpower and money has the potential to be crippling. NY continues to corner districts and teachers into inappropriate, junk science assessment of teachers, with test scores now 50% of teacher evaluations.
The human cost for teachers has been and continues to be terrible. I spent this month helping teachers write appeals of ineffective and developing ratings. Many of the ratings were a result of obvious mistakes such as missing scores, and will be nullified. However, teachers still have to go through the appeals process and in many cases go through the creation of a teacher improvement plan (required for ineffective and developing ratings) before the appeals process is complete. This is terrible and demeaning for teachers no matter how much they know the evaluation to be bogus. The number of man hours required on the part of the district, administration, the teachers is huge. All for a system we know to be inappropriate and incorrect.
Under the Common Core moratorium here in NYS, close to 90% of teachers now fall into the “non-tested” category which results in the use of “distributed” (shared) test scores and a common SLO. Only high school Regents teachers and grade 8 science teachers have the dubious honor of teaching “tested” subjects.
The 90% of “non-tested” subject area teachers will now be evaluated using the scores of pooled high school Regents tests. The common SLO will account for 50% of their evaluation.
By example, a first grade music teacher in her seventh year of teaching will now be evaluated using the biology (9), algebra (9), global history (10), US history (11), and ELA (11) scores of high school students she has never even seen, much less taught.
The farce is complete.
On a side note Jillian you can relax because this also brings an end to the “human cost” as most districts have realized that it is easier to game the system via “creative” SLOs – rather than have 90% of their teachers being “TIPed”.
Thanks for the backstory. This is a case of cognitive dissonance gone wild. Try to describe this new APPR to a non-educator and their brain refuses to believe such nonsense is for real.
“to shared attribution scores” Hmmm the acronym is SAS.
SAS = $tupid A$$ S#!T.
Teachers should not be evaluated on test scores alone. As an educator for over fourteen years and a parent for over seventeen years, I feel to evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness based on test scores for their students on one given test is absurd. I know my own personal children have good days where they feel they are at their best and some days where they don’t. Just like all people. I would not want my children’s teachers to be judged on that one off day. What about all the other wonderful things they have taught my children? Those would be lost. Students come to the classroom from different backgrounds. Some students have received ample nutrition, nurturing, medical care and pre-school services before they step foot in an elementary classroom. Unfortunately, this is not always the case for all children. As teachers we know this and accept each student as an individual with individual needs. A standardized assessment does not take this into account. Students and teachers are being evaluated on this one assessment. This is like saying that if we are running late to our jobs one day because of traffic we should have to pay a price for being late even though the circumstances are out of our control. Most rational people would agree that this is nonsense. As an educator, I do feel there needs to be some accountability. The question is how. Just as we expect for teachers and schools to look at the whole child we need to look at the whole teacher. Most states have evaluation practices in place. Teacher observations and requiring teachers to continue in meaningful professional development should be placed high on the scale. Providing support to teachers and properly funding education would be a good starting place.