Our Blog Poet, known as SomeDAM Poet has written poems for economists Raj Chetty, who launched the failed craze for VAM (value-added measurement) or test-based accountability for teachers, determining their quality by the rise or fall of the test s ores of their students, and the late William Sanders, an agricultural economist who transferred his methods for measuring the growth of cattle to the measurement of teachers, relying on student test scores.
SDP writes:
“Do I have a Chetty poem?
“Is Bill Gates rich? Is the sky blue? Did Arne Duncan get his gig at DOE cuz he shoots hoops?
“Chetty Pie”
To bake a Chetty pie
You pick the ripest cherries
Enticing folks to buy
“The Chetty Data Queries”
“Standard Deviations”
The Chetty-picker’s standard
Is lower than Death Valley
And even for a VAM nerd
That’s quite a lowly tally
“For Whom No bell Tolls”
A Nobel Prize in Hubris
Is what I do deserve
And though it may sound hum’rous
I’ve really got some nerve
I won’t let major sticking
Points get in my way
My trademarked Chetty-picking
Will surely win the day
And the following one was sort of made with Chetty in mind, cuz Obama loved his DAM work (although it also refers to William Sanders and his cattle model. But all these economists are basically the same)
“A way for a Manager”
A way for a manager, a plan for his
sham,
The little Economist laid down His sweet
VAM.
The stars in the White House look down
where He lies,
The little Economist, with powerful ties.
The cattle are lowing, Economist
awakes,
And little Economist, a model He makes;
I love Thee, Economist, look down from
the sky
And stay by thy cattle till morning is nigh
Kill the cow, or kill the farmer.
LIKE! Thanks, SomeDAM Poet. Made me chuckle, and boy do I need some positives.
Always clever and entertaining, the anti-reform muse!
I work with one administrator, an assistant principal, who is a good person, truly. He honestly just wants to be helpful, to help me be the best teacher I can be, but he has a flaw that prevents him from doing that. It’s a ubiquitous, yet often overlooked problem, overshadowed by overpowering stench of VAM. The problem is the grading rubric. He believes in the computer-based Professional Growth System rubrics to guide him and me.
My union was able to keep VAM out of my evaluation, but the entire evaluation is still based on rubrics, attempting to boil down complex classroom interactions into numerical categories. Even though my rubric scores are near perfect, I constantly challenge the idea of using them because instead of having meaningful conversations about generally effective practices and individual student needs, we wind up discussing the semantic differences between rating levels. My assistant principal tells me I should accept rubric scores because that’s the way it is in the business world. I disagree.
Value is not a number.
What you are describing is just typical adminimal behavior. You should record it for posterity.
Almost all adminimals have their charming sides. One doesn’t get to be an adminimal without a perfectly good plastic smile and demeanor. Hell, it might even be a real smile and demeanor. But if they don’t play the adminimal games they won’t be invited to the adminimal parties anymore and well, ya know, those teacher salaries just don’t compare, eh.
You’re right about him having to play the adminimal game. He just wound up in his situation because he’s one of many who became a techie coder because he believed the hype that using Google products would make everything in life better, then couldn’t find a job as a programmer that paid as much as administrator. (Fewer than half of computer science grads can.) He’s a good guy, though, because his wife is a teacher who, as he says, keeps him “from going over completely to the admin Dark Side.”
I think there’s a piece of important information in there. Thinking of my assistant principal, Matt Damon, Jon Stewart, and others, it’s good to love someone, a mom, a dad, a wife, a husband, who taught or teaches. It helps one care, even when there is tremendous pressure to not care.
That said, his reliance on tech and rubrics is maddening.
Duane,
I take that back. My assistant principal is an adminimal like the rest. He just cheated me out of a perfect score because of a tiny, meaningless technicality. Just to keep me down. He doesn’t care about people. He cares about machines.
I’ve had adminimals admit that in using a rubric with a scale of 1-5 no one would ever get a 5 because no one was perfect. Makes perfect adminimal sense! Yep, your adminimal has a full blown case of adminimalitis!
You said it, brother!
“Rubrics Cubed”
“Rubrics Cubed”
And “VAM spree squared”
Chettys wooed
And rest impaired
” V = VAMspree Squared”
VAM the teachers!
VAM the fools!
VAM the education schools!
“VALUE equals VAM-spree-squared”
Einstein for the math-impaired
Once they make numeric something like writing or speaking, they lose the meaning and complexity of language. Devaluation Added. That’s the rubric-algorithmic Method. D.A.M.
Math without meaning = mathturbation
Mathturbators use math to impress and intimidate rather than illuminate. More often than not, they don’t even understand the math they are using. In that case of VAM, if they really understood it, they would be embarrassed by how ridiculous it is.
“Value unaccounted”
If value were a number
Uncountable ‘twould be
Quite hopeless to encumber
Much like infinity
Is there not some Yddish habit of language that would render the phrase rubric schmubric?
If I hear the word again from someone in administration, I think I will commit Harry Cary (this consists of singing “take me out to the ballgame ”
When I hear of rubrics, I always think to Robin William’s character in Dead Poet’s Society. At the front of the anthology was a list of the attributes of a good poem, a sort of rubric by which students could decide whether a poem was a good one. He called it excrement and had the kids tear it out of the book.
A real administrator would make something up rather than follow a rubric. I worked for such a guy years ago. The result was a good school.
Productivity of seeds, sows, and cows same as teacher productivity of test scores. Genetic engineering for agriculture is not different from engineering better instruction by eliminating bad teachers and bad schools…clean up the gene pool.
I have never understood the hostility to Chetty’s research. Basically what it shows is that good teaching matters far beyond the classroom. I am curious if any poster here has any evidence, other than Chetty’s work, that this is true.
Stay by thy cattle, till morning is nigh.
Making an argument that having good teachers matter to students requires 1) being able to contrast the work of good teachers and poor teachers and 2) finding some way to define “matters”. What Chetty et al does is show that we can find the echos of having a good teacher in the lives of students many years after leaving that teacher’s classroom. I find it strange that teachers dispute this.
Other than this kind of work, what evidence is there that good teaching matters? Most of the posters on this blog seem to think it does, but perhaps it is just a matter of faith.
Chetty uses test scores as his measure of “good teachers.”
Good teachers do not agree.
So you think his measure of teacher quality is flawed. Can you point to any study using a different methodology that shows having a good teacher matters? If so, how did the study determine who the good teachers were and who the poor teachers?
We don’t need Chetty to know that a good teacher matters.
Did you read this critique, which demolishes Chetty?
http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/moshe-adler-chetty
I have not forgotten the timeless quote given to The NY Times by one of Chetty’s co-authors.
The lesson of the study, he said, was to fire teachers faster.
He didn’t explain how to fix a teacher shortage.
What I find strange is that you can’t see the logical fallacy in your “argument”.
Now that you know it exists, maybe you can find it. 😉
What research convinced you that good teaching matters and influences students over the course of their lives (and, of course, the other side of the statement, that bad teaching matters and influences students over the course of their lives)? Is it simply a matter of faith?
TE,
Chetty’s Research went way beyond the simple assertion that Good teachers matter. His study claimed that teachers who raise test scores are directly responsible for lower teen pregnancy rates, higher lifetime earnings, and everything else that is good in life. Many people believe that his study was debunked by Columbia University Professor Moshe Adler. http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/moshe-adler-chetty
Many superb teachers work in classrooms with cognitively challenged students and would be considered “bad” teachers if judged by student test scores. As the American Statistical Association said in 2014, individual teachers should not be judged by value-added scores because they are determined by who is in the classroom, not teacher quality. Are you familiar with the ASA?
Here is Moshe Adler on Chetty:
Economist is as economissed does.
“VAMs are Craps”
To judge a teacher, roll the dice
The VAMs are craps, and job the price
To keep a teacher, roll a seven
When coming out, or roll eleven
A 2 or 12 will crap them out
And also 3, the lousy lout
When point’s established, a 7 roll
Sends the teacher down the hole
But point repeated ‘fore a 7
Keeps them in the Seventh Heaven
The VAMs are mathy as can be
And oh so fair, as you can see
SDP:
Nice job.
Consider VAM as the protagonist: O that this too too solid data would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a decision about which teachers I should fire because I am told to.
VAM as a physicist: a VAM score at rest tends to stay at rest. A VAM score in motion tends to make an administrator stay in motion
VAM as a composer? Total silence.
VAM from a farmer: This is a bunch of bullshit!
“Genesis” (from the Raj Chetty
version of the Bible)
In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.
And the earth was without VAM, and
void; and darkness was upon the face of
the deep. And the Spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be economists”:
and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good:
and God divided the good teachers from
the bad ones
And God called the light VAM, and the
darkness he called “School Principal
Evaluations of teachers”
“Warrantless Seizure”
It isn’t backed by science
And isn’t backed by court
So test and VAM reliance
Are warrantless, in short