We now know that William Sanders, the creator of Value-Added Measurement, which measures teacher quality with the methods of an agricultural statistician, is revered in the think tank world of D.C.
But Peter Greene, who teaches in a Pennsylvania high school, doesn’t think much of VAM.
He recounts how Sanders was inspired to think about measuring teachers based on his studies of radioactivity in cows that were downwind from a nuclear explosion (really!).
To which Sanders writes:
Oh, let’s tell the truth. VAM systems have also been limited by the fact that they’re junk, taking bad data from test scores, massaging them through an opaque and improbable mathematical model to arrive at conclusions that are volatile and inconsistent and which a myriad educators have looked at and responded, “Well, this can’t possible be right.”
You’ll never find me arguing against any accountability; taxpayers (and I am one) have the right to know how their money is spent. But Sander’s work ultimately wasted a lot of time and money and produced a system about as effective as checking toad warts under a full moon– worse, because it looked all number and sciencey and so lots of suckers believed in it. Carey can be the apologist crafting it all into a charming and earnest tale, but the bottom line is that VAM has done plenty of damage, and we’d all be better off if Sanders had stuck to his radioactive cows.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane Like matches to all socks ever made, somewhere in the universe there is a relationship to be found between (1) radioactive cows; (2) fake mommy monkeys and (3) VAM. I’ll let you know when the statisticians and economists find that relationship.
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Diane,
this is all just fodder when you look at the real reason for VAM, Charter Schools, Privatization and school choice. It is done to make sure that those in low SES, and of color stay oppressed. They need to make sure that they can make and gain money off the efforts of those who cannot see where the true oppression stems. In order for the Mega-Rich to stay the Mega-rich, they must make sure that those at the low middle and bottom stay where they are because they need the cheap labor. It is all about the almighty dollar. It is about Power. It is about keeping the white heterosexual male in the dominant position.
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Like!
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Sanders’ logic makes some sense if you’re measuring knowledge transmission (e.g. did Teacher X’s kids learn the state capitals?). It makes a lot less sense if you’re trying to measure vague qualities like critical thinking skills or reading comprehension ability. Teachers can’t really teach these things the way they can teach capitals. (Some will say you can teach “using context clues” and other reading strategies, but the core of reading comprehension is the sum total of a student’s world and word knowledge). Unfortunately SBAC and PARC attempt to measure the vague stuff. And lay people –i.e. most of the general public –don’t know just how ambiguous these qualities are.
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But his model supposed linear development in child development. And he discounted the effect of different teachers with differing approaches providing. A good mix over time. If sanders were evaluating a football team, he would have everybody throw the ball, even though only one out of eleven ever does that.
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The whole design of VAM is so flawed and filled with erroneous assumptions. Sanders made a fortune off a bogus formula that caused the destruction of teachers’ careers. He should have stuck with cows.
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But how many cows’ lives do you suppose he destroyed?
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Or would have destroyed if he hadn’t been preoccupied with destroying teacher’s careers.
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Come on Roy, wide receivers, half backs, even place holders and kickers sometimes throw the ball.
See Garo Yepremian’s “toss”:
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“Sanders’ logic makes some sense if you’re measuring knowledge transmission. . . ”
Sorry, ponderosa, Sanders logic makes no sense and “measuring knowledge transmission” also makes no sense.
Again there is no measuring in the teaching and learning process. There may be assessing, counting correct answers, evaluating and/or judging, but no measuring. Why not? To understand read and comprehend the following:
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
Because there is no rebuttal/refutation!
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Two teachers teach about the Protestant Reformation. One is murky; the other lucid. Students from both classes take essay tests afterwards. One set is murky; the other lucid. Don’t the tests reflect the teachers’ ability?
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It’s not that simple, ponderosa, just not that simple.
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How teachers teach is subjective.
How students learn is based on many factors and teachers are an insignificant factor in that long list of factors that start at home.
Some students will think a teacher is boring and refuse to work while other students enjoy the same lesson, do the work in all their classes, and eventually graduate from high school with a high GPA; then go to college.
When our daughter was in 3rd grade and lied about homework she didn’t do. Her excuse, an often used lame excuse supported by lame parents, was the teacher was boring. I told her I didn’t care if the teacher was boring or not; that learning was her responsibility and there were no excuses not to learn based on allegations a teacher was incompetent and/or boring.
From that date forward, Lauryann earned straight A’s in every class and nine years later she graduated from high school with a 4.65 GPA, was accepted to Stanford where she graduated in June 2014.
During her second year at Stanford, I asked her how many incompetent teachers she’d had K through 12. She thought about it for a day or two and then got back to me. She wrote in her e-mail, “TWO.”
And she still learned something in those classes from those teachers because the learning was her responsibility. Teachers can’t learn for their students.
Then when we boil down the teaching and divide it up between all the teachers a student has from K -12, that number could be as high as 50 teachers. Just in high school, the average number of teachers a student has is about twenty-four at six or more teachers a year for four years, and a student spends about one hour or less with each of those teachers a day. A day runs 24 hours and students are in school about 7 hours out of that 24. Most of their time each day is out of school and the average child in America watches several hours of TV a day in addition to listening to music, texting friends, playing video games, trolling the internet, etc.
There are a lot of factors that take place in a child’s life every day that interferes with what teachers teach. And then there are the distractions that disrupt the learning environment in classrooms caused by difficult to teach students who often are not interested in learning and hate where they are thanks to the influence of their friends who also hate school and parents/guardians that support that thinking.
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William Sanders is The VAMbie who just won’t die.
It’s like an endlessly repeating loop of Night of the Living Dead.
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What is wrong with VAMers? Are they just DAFT? Or are they getting payback?
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We’d have been better of if Sanders had been one of the cows that got a massive dose of radiation.
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If not Sanders, then who? History is as organic as the dirt. The person who gave the reform world the false hope of measuring teaching did it at a time when it would be accepted. Even Lamar Alexander did not bite a decade or so earlier. What poison is in the works now that will lead education people to accept a new direction of the wind? Trump was produced by sociological forces. As was Lincoln. As was Nixon.
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If Gates didn’t pay think tanks like New America and the Center for American Progress, and, all of the “education reporting” that fronts for P.R., America would have a better chance of protecting its most important common good.
Any politician who plans to hide behind the guise of, reform as a civil rights issue, will have to confront the damning comments about New America at the Glassdoor site.
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“Outside-of-school factors like talent, wealth and home life were thus baked into each student’s expected growth.”
I wonder if Sanders used a regular oven or a microwave.
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“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
???????
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Man, dead tired after getting up at 3:00 am to drive to KC to attend a edudeformer and privateer conference on “failure” of reforms-some biggies there, Hess, Greene, and assorted others (actually quite friendly folk, very misguided, but friendly even after I identified myself as the enemy). I think some are starting to realize that what they pushed has been a complete flop-hmmm like no one ever told them it would be. Then turn around and drive another three + hours back.
And moderation is the thanks I get around here??
(Diane, please take with all the humor intended)
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Duane, you are not in moderation.
I hope you will write up what you saw and learned and let me post it.
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Duane,
Sometimes WordPress puts comments in moderation for no reason. It has happened to Laura Chapman and others. This morning it was you, Laura, and democracy. No reason. Don’t take umbrage. Some have put into spam, then permanently blocked. I didn’t realize this until about two weeks ago. Now I check the spam folder several times a day. Ellen Lubic was blocked and I contacted WP to restore her.
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No umbrage taken. I knew it had something to do with the algorithms they use. Hmmm, where else have we seen algorithms go bad?? I had it happen to me a little bit ago on another wordpress site.
Unfortunately it makes more work for you to have to deal with it.
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Duane,
I get hundreds of spam comments every day, and it takes time to make sure that a real person did not swept into it.
Amazing the garbage in the spam box: shoes, clock parts, erotica are most numerous. Sister-wives are big right now.
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It’d be nice if wordpress would allow you to give it the names of posters so that they wouldn’t end up in your spam folder. And yes, it’s interesting just all the sheer crap that is sent out. I’ve had emails to me not even get to the spam folder. All of this technology is not as fool/safe proof as many would have us believe.
On a different note, I’m working on a “report” on the conference yesterday. Should I send it to your .com site?
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Duane
It is a Reformer/WordPress conspiracy. And from what I can tell, the Russians are also somehow involved.
Very insidious.
I figure the person who started WordPress also owns charters — and, apparently, so does Vladimir Putin, although he may have registered them in Trump’s or DeVos’ name.
Once, when I posted a poem mocking charters, a picture of Putin’s head with cross bones popped up.
Very unnerving, as you can imagine.
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Whatever oven Sanders used, he didn’t leave it on long enough, cuz all his ideas are half-baked, at best.
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Now that’s a really good one!
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So, one of the Common Core pushing New America Foundation’s million dollar sources of funding is the U.S. State Department. Does the funding slasher with the necktie to his knees know that?
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I presume DeVos knows New America is run by a former executive in Hillary Clinton’s State Dept.
There’s only one party in D.C., the party of money. David Koch and Madelyn Albright are on the Aspen Institute Board and Gates funds its education programs like the Senior Congressional Education Staff Network, which cocoons in its “safe space” to create policy against the 90%.
D.C. is flooded with people willing to serve the oligarchs who prey on other people’s kids and who destroy democracy and the nation’s future. Orange hair fits in perfectly.
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