It is called VAM. Value-added-measurement, or value-added-modeling. It means measuring the effectiveness of teachers by the rise or fall of the test scores of their students.
Rachel M. Cohen, writing in The American Prospect, documents the slow but steady retreat from evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. Only a few years ago, VAM was lauded by Secretary of a Education Arne Duncan as the ultimate way to determine which teachers were succeeding and which were failing; Duncan made it a condition of competing for Race to the Top billions, and more than 40 states agreed to adopt it; Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting it; a team of economists led by Raj Chetty of Harvard claimed that the actions of a teacher in elementary school predicted teen pregnancy, adult earnings, and other momentous life consequences, and earned front-page status in the anew York Times; and thousands of teachers and principals were fired because of it.
But time is the test, and time has not been kind to VAM.
Cohen reviews the role of the courts, with some refusing to get involved, and others agreeing that VAM is arbitrary and capricious. She credits Duncan and Gates for their role in creating this monstrous and invalid way of evaluating teachers. The grand idea, having cut down many good teachers, is nearing its end. But not soon enough.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Academic acceptance of any of this is an indictment of academic integrity. It should not have taken time. It should only have taken a modicum of thought. Unless, of course, your goal was to drive good teachers from the profession.
Just yesterday, I was driving out of the blue ridge mountains and ran into a nice Christmas tree farmer. He show our family his seedlings and talked with us. His wife, he said, was recently retired from teaching. She would have taught a bit more, but for the testing and its effect on real education. This is, of course, the real reason for value added testing. Reformers want to get rid of costly, experienced teachers.
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The wife’s thoughts about testing affecting a “real education” may also be a clue here: little by little, testing and its punitively forced pre-scripted curricula is stifling creative thought, creating more low-paid drones for corporate use, presumably.
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It is also interesting to read the part of this article that places the beginning of the end of VAM to be the publishing of teacher data that let some people analyse it and find it wanting reliability. VAM? RIP!
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The “some people” would be Gary Rubinstein and the publishing (of tge NY City VAM data) was quite accidental. Either that or itvwas an act of whistleblowing.
The last thing the VAMmers want is people scrutinizing their data and/or methods.
This is proof positive that what they are doing is not science — and a sign that it is very likely fraud.
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The test-based “Value-Added Method” (VAM) of evaluating teachers has been “slammed” — quoting The Washington Post — by the very people who know the most about data measurement: The American Statistical Association (ASA). The ASA’s authoritative, detailed, VAM-slam analysis, titled “Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment” and has become the basis for teachers across the nation successfully challenging VAM-based evaluations.
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 — and teachers’ unions should fight all evaluations based on student test scores.
Fight back! Never, never, never give up!
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I think it is premature to judge that VAM and SLOs are become relics. Both types of measures claim to be estimates of “student growth.” Both rely on at least two test scores gathered from students during at least two intervals of time (e.g., beginning and end of year; prior year and current year). VAM and SLO’s have been marketed as if “objective” and valid measures. They are not, but states still have these measures on the books and some hardwired by legislators.
Some time ago the Education Commission of the States (ECS) could be relied upon as a source of current information about state policies for matters such as teacher evaluation, with state-by-state detail on legislation.
No longer.
The ECS website directed my question about teacher evaluation policies to the National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a propaganda arm for the most recent report on teacher evaluation, 2015. Funding for this report was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.
In addition to presenting some data of possible interest and use, the NCTQ report, “State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning,” implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, rates the teacher evaluation systems of states.
NCTQ believes too many teachers get positive evaluations and that more teachers need to be subjected to corrective action, or fired, based on criteria that NCTQ proposes, especially measures of “teacher effectiveness.”
According to NCTQ, measures of “effectiveness” should be part of a comprehensive system of evaluation that also determines teacher pay and retention, the character of professional development, and so on.
It should be noted that Title II of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) also calls for “student growth” measures (among other measures) for teachers, principals, and other school leader evaluations. These measures are supposed to offer clear, timely and useful “feedback” for personnel decisions such as salary increases, bonuses, promotions, and warnings leading to dismissal. Test scores are essential for ESSA measures of academic achievement and “growth.”
For what it may be worth, here are some highlights from the 2015 NCTQ report on teacher evaluation policies with a few comparisons to 2009 (p. 6).
■ 45 states require annual evaluations for all new, probationary teachers; and 15 require classroom observation of probationary teachers early in the school year.
■ 27 states require annual evaluations for all teachers, up from 15 states in 2009).
■ 43 states require that student growth and achievement be considered in teacher evaluations.
■ 18 states include growth measures as a “significant” criterion in teacher evaluations but only ten of these states explicitly define what significant means.
■ 22 states require or allow SLOs, only nine of these states also require that the learning objectives are reviewed and approved (p.iii,).
Uses of teacher performance evaluations.
■ 23 states require that evidence of teacher performance be used in tenure decisions, up from zero states in 2009.
■ 19 states require a consideration of teacher performance is“in reduction in force” decisions.
■ 28 states position “ineffectiveness” as grounds for teacher dismissal (p. 6).
■ 7 states (Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada and Utah) tie teacher compensation to teacher evaluation results.
Ohio and Tennessee are two states with an entrenched system of teacher evaluation based on VAM
Many states are relying on a variant of the equally invalid SLO (student learning objectives). An SLO is a writing assignment for teachers that requires them to set “targets’ for student performance in a subject, based on students’ prior performance. The teacher is also obliged to identify and justify the tests that will be used as part of this exercise. SLOs are widely viewed as an alternative to VAM for teachers of “untested subjects”–subjects for which there are not statewide tests, estimated to be about 69% of teachers.
The most fundamental problem with ESSA and state policies is a corruption of the meaning of “growth” to a difference in test scores between two (or more) points in time. Human growth and development is multifaceted and misrepresented by the use of test scores as if those numbers are objective and essential measures of learning and accomplishment. They are not.
More information and how NCTQ views it is here http://www.nctq.org/dmsView/StateofStates2015r
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I concur with your thoughtful analysis. While readers of this column appreciate statistics and science, the state politicians and governors who will now be making decisions thanks to ESSA are likely to endorse VAM because it is relatively inexpensive and provides a sheen of mathematical rigor. The fact that test scores yield seemingly exact data that can be used to rank schools is a wonderful by-product as well.
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Gates and Duncan have no business in education. VAM is BAD, period.
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Gates and Duncan are CLUELESS. But they do “hang” with other CLUELESS people.
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Why do teachers endure such insanities such as VAM, standards and testing regime, large class sizes, etc. . . that they know are wrong?
Because teachers, overall, are not boat rockers, they are conservative by and in their being, but most importantly they are dead afraid of saying anything at all for fear of losing their jobs and therefore acquiesce to everything thrown upon them.
Until teachers, female, male and any and everything in between and beyond, grow some cojones and stand up to the bullying, the bullies-adminimals, state educrats, federal educrats and those bastards funding and encouraging such nonsense will continue the onslaught. Lily-livered is to kind an epithet to describe the vast majority of GAGA Good German teachers that are in our public schools.
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