The New York Times published a tribute by Kevin Carey of the New America Foundationto William Sanders, “the little-known statistician who taught us to measure teachers.”
One hates to speak ill of the dead, but accuracy requires that we note that Sanders’ statistical model for “measuring” teachers was flawed, inaccurate, and damaged the lives of thousands of teachers based on Sanders’ obscure algorithms. Sanders was an agricultural statistician before he found a goldmine in education. Measuring teacher quality really is not akin to measuring cattle or crops. Every analysis of the influences on students’ test performance gives far more weight to family income and education than to the teachers who see her or him for an hour or five hours a day. Sanders tried to remove human judgment from the equation and ended up creating a profitable business that distorted teaching and learning into a struggle for higher test scores. If the tests themselves are invalid, then any accountability measures based on them will be invalid.
No one knows William Sanders’ works and its flaws better than Audrey Amrein-Beardsley. She has studied Sanders’ value-added measures for years and testified against them in court. She comments on the New York Times’ article here. Amrein-Beardsley points out that Sanders’ methods have been faring poorly in court because it is unfair to judge a teacher based on a mysterious algorithm that no one can understand or explain.
In my book Reign of Error, I wrote about the fallacy behind Sanders’ reasoning by quoting a song from “The Fantasticks.” I paid $1200 for the right to reprint the lyrics. It is the one that goes “Plant a radish, get a radish, not a sauerkraut./That’s why I love vegetables, they know what they’re about.”
No one can say the same about children. Children from the same parents are different, even when their upbringing is as identical as those parents can make it. They look different, they act different, they have different interests, they have different goals.
Sanders never understood that.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I commented on that article arguing that the mathematics that applied to physical objects does not necessarily apply to human beings because physical objects are, well, consistent. Never heard of a teenager who found a new passion (music, boys, girls, a sport, etc.) and their focus changed drastically? No? Then you have never worked with them for any time.
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Wm Sanders and his students specialized in genetic engineering with the aim of increasing the productivity of seeds, sows, and cows. Sanders was intent on applying that knowledge to teachers, providing a measure of their “productivity” based on test scores and “increases” in these year to year, which he conflated with “growth.”
His formulas are proprietary, owned by SAS, which also means no one can see and evaluate them. Some time ago I requested a copy of the SAS contract with the Ohio Department of Education as well as the formula. I received a copy of the contract. It placed full responsibility for data accuracy on the ODE. It came with a lot of marketing materials from SAS and Dr. Sander’s articles defending his formula.
The effect of the widespread use of VAM to rate teachers was no less than a planned version of genetic engineering–getting rid of the teachers who were insufficiently productive of test scores–a triage by numbers that continues today. And that is to say nothing of the uptake and marketing of SLOs (student learning objectives) and variants for the majority of teachers who have teaching assignments for which there were not standardized state tests.
That sham, still in use, was first marketed in 1999 for Denver’s pay-for performance plan funded by the Broad Foundation among others. A recent review of literature about the SLO strategy for managing teachers, from the American Institutes of Research, confirmed that there is no evidence to support its use for evaluating teachers, only for “managing” them–with sticks more than carrots.
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Though Sanders tried to pretend that he had removed human judgement, it was still there in the form of the decision that test scores were to be the key “measure” of learning.
He simply made himself judge of what it means to be a good teacher.
I’d like to see the NY times print Audrey’s rebuttal, but I know it will never happen.
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Print it as an article, that is
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I didn’t see her rebuttal in the comments. Do you have a link SDP? TIA, Duane
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Read the employee comments about New America at Glassdoor, rather damning.
New America self-anointed to write public policy (ignoring democracy), when they recommended oligarch preferences for those things that pave the way for schools-in-a-box, which are coincidentally an investment of Bill Gates, who happens to fund New America. New America and the Center for American Progress have expanded the plot from K-12 to higher ed.
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Kevin Carey worked as Indiana’s Assistant State Budget Director. We all know about Pence and Tony Bennett and Indiana schools.
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The Mathbbe cross-posted this blog today… and it has a great analogy: https://sensemadehere.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/how-value-added-models-are-like-turds/
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OMG! CRAZY.
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Is Carey one of those jerks who got his, at public universities, but feels no moral responsibility to pay it forward for the next generation because he’s a found a way to make a salary, by bashing and transmuting public schools?
My opinion- New America, as a self-important, “elitist” (as described by employees) organization, has a duty to perpetuate colonialist society, hiring only Ivy League-educated shills/scholars and, denying jobs to people, who took advantage of the state university system that the public sacrificed to create, as a quality alternative to legacy admission colleges.
Carey’s handprints are all over the “badges” that Laura Chapman described (comment thread to May 22 post about “personalized learning”). But, the kids of the rich will still be hobnobbing with each other at the prep schools and Ivie’s. The kids of the 90%, who at one time could have gone to quality state and pubic schools, will be looking, in the fences at the rich kids, holding up their “badges” and schools-in-a-box, for which they no doubt paid their scarce dollars, with the futile hope that that education will gain them entrance to the gated communities of America’s oligarchs.
The Sanders/Carey epithet, what a travesty and what a slap in the face of democracy.
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Yes, children raised by the same parents are different. I was the youngest of three. My sister, still living, was 14 years older than me. She finished high school, never went to prison or college, but is an avid reader of fiction like me.
Our brother was 12 years older than me. He spent 15 of his adult years in prison (not a country club, white-collar minimum security prison) and he died illiterate, and like the Kremlin’s Agent Orange who is the malignant narcissist in the White House, he never read a book, but unlike Trump, he never bragged about it. Richard was actually embarrassed that he never learned to read and hid that fact from all seven of his children. Five of the seven grew up to be illiterate just like him.
Our brother died at age 64 in 1999 after a hard life working jobs that paid poverty wages. His lifestyle choices included endless cigarettes, lots of beer, and drugs.
Why didn’t I follow in my brother’s footsteps? Why did I join the Marines out of high school instead of ending up in prison like Richard did? Why did I go to college on the G.I. Bill after Vietnam and the Marines?
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How is Carey measured? (a) How much money the richest 0.1% give him?
(b) How many plutocrat publications publish his stuff? (c) How many politicians, that don’t care what constituents want, pass legislation consistent with New America policy? (d) How many Koch governors lap up New America recommendations? (e) How many nails New America can drive into the coffin of democracy?(f) other?
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“. . . who taught us to measure teachers.”
Liar, liar pants on fire, Mr. Carey!
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“. . . than to the teachers who see her or him for an hour or five hours a day.”
That’s for elementary. Middle and High School teachers are lucky to see a student (along with 25 others) for 50 minutes. Makes VAM that much more ludicrous and risible, and boy am I being polite with that description.
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If Carey read the 155 comments to his NYT post, he would understand the lack of both substantiation and support for the Gates-funded New America agenda.
DeVos’ $1 mil. a month security should give the anti-democracy think tank$, lobbyist$, and P.R. shill$, masquerading as journalists, cause to worry. Oligarch-owned politicians have seen the barely suppressed rage at their town hall meetings. Historically, smug human predators haven’t been as invincible as they thought.
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There is a reason that the public police are outnumbered by corporate, for-profit, private sector police. Those smug human corporate predators know they are in danger and the public schools are not their only target to take over and profit from.
“By the late 1960s, the private security industry was growing at a recession-resistant rate of 10-15% annually. Estimates of the number of private guards, investigators, and so on ranged from 350,000 to 800,000.[16] From 1976 to 1981, there was a 20% increase in calls for police service. Demand existed for nonroutine services, such as police checks of vactioners’ homes, escorts for merchants making bank deposits, extra patrols at business closing times, and so on.
“Around that same time, many police departments were facing budget freezes or cuts, and the number of police employees per 1,000 population dropped 10 percent between 1975 and 1985. Police adopted differential responses to requests for services, deprioritizing investigation of “cold” burglaries and larcenies.
“Private firms were employed to fill the gap.[17] Private police and their clients have compiled extensive records on certain crimes, such as department store pilferage, whose perpetrators have often been arrested and dealt with privately, without involving the governmental criminal justice system do also in part to security having its own private courts that are staffed by federal judges and have to power to send the convicted to private prisons.[disputed – discuss][18] By 1990, private police comprised three-fourths of all police officers in the United States.[19] It has been suggested that the private sector of policing in the future may increasingly assume the role of the public guardian of society, leaving public policing to a more narrow role that focuses on personal violence.[2]”
…
“Ultimately, some people see the potential for a “dual system” of policing—one for the wealthy and one for the poor”
The Growth & Development of the Private Security Industry
The private security industry has been booming since 2010 and is only expected to continue on that path through 2020. Specific occupations within security, like private detectives, investigators and security guards, are all expected to see growth of around 20 percent through the end of the decade, far outpacing the average for all other jobs.
In a study recently released by ASIS and the Institute of Finance Management, the U.S. security industry was found to be a $350 billion market. Some of the key findings of the study, which included over 400 executives from the security industry:
https://www.firstsecurityservices.com/the-growth-development-of-the-private-security-industry/
Private police carry guns and make arrests, and their ranks are swelling
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html?utm_term=.3b07e3087d1c
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Lloyd,
As always, the amount of knowledge you have, puts me in awe.
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Thank you but no stored knowledge. It’s called Google at your fingertips and knowing just enough to ask the right questions.
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