Leonie Haimson weighs in on the mess created by Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top demand for a state teacher evaluation system based to a significant degree on test scores.
Leonie says that if the Legislature is unwilling to repeal the law (as I urge), it should hold public hearings.
No way to put lipstick on this pig.
Evaluating teachers by test scores is unsound. There is no evidence for it. It has failed and failed and failed.
It should be repealed. The legislature doesn’t know how to evaluate teachers. Let each district devise its own plans.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why are state and national unions so unhelpful with this?
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Now that’s the question of the decade: so much money taken in by unions, so many teachers continually blamed, forced into repeated out-of-classroom trainings, ultimately dismissed. Somehow the math continues to be all wrong.
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Devise a system for administering interim and summative 8th grade tests to every one in the state legislature who is responsible for this absurdity. Adding them value-added scores and publish the scores. Make sure the tests are administered with a schedule that requires them to drop everything else and under conditions that are proctored for test security. Publish the scores and do some sack ratings on who is great and who is not. What’s good for teachers must be good for the legislators.
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Like!
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Also, let 30% of the legislators be evaluated on other’s scores.
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No, 70%
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I agree, but I think sixth grade tests would probably be more apt for NY legislators, Andrew Cuomo and Mary Ellen Elia.
I think the eighth grade tests would be so far above their capabilities that every single one would fail and then who would be left to run the state into the ground?
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SDP:
I believe that all governors, legislators, and state chiefs should take the 8th grade math test and publish their scores. I feel confident that 96% will fail.
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I’d like to see them take the 6th grade ELA and Math exams.
Or frankly, the third grade ELA exams.
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Laura, exactly right!
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I am amazes at the unintended errors in my post–from the autocorrect and my failure to read before posting. So, if I took the ELA test, it had better be on a computer without autocorrect.
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Autocorrect is not our friend
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If the deformers had autocorrect for their policies, they would not be such a mess.
For example, Cuomo and Elia would specify 50% for the amount VAM counts toward teacher evaluation and the autocorrect would automatically change it to 0%.
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I am amazes…
Did it again. This is exactly what artificial intelligence looks like.
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Imagine the kind of conversations AI robots will have in the future.
First bot to second: I am amazes at how bad your grammar be
Second bot to first: I know you are amazes, but what are me?
Of course, they won’t actually need to speak. They will be able to simply plug in to each other and download data.
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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 though it’s anti-public school and anti-union, the Washington Post said the following 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 or principals — and teachers’ and principals’ unions should fight all evaluations based on student test scores with the ASA statement as a good foundation for their fight.
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As I responded to your post on another thread:
“VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.”
Value Added Methodology (VAM) cannot “measure” anything. That methodology attempts to ASSESS, CALCULATE, JUDGE, APPRAISE and/or any other in a long line of thoughts that are not/do not “measure” anything. Even the ASA misuses the term and meaning of “measure” in this statement.
How is a correlation measured? The correlation is an expression of the mathematical relationship between two variables. How does one “measure” that mathematical relationship? Once again, one can assess, calculate, judge, appraise, etc. . . said relationship but it is not a measurement per se. For what is the agreed upon standard unit of measure that delineates what is being measured in that “typically measure correlation”? Hint, there is none.
I’m not a statistician nor am I a psychometrician but for me, so many people misuse the term measure, and when they use it they certainly intend measure in a metrological sense and not just to take stock of, analyze, assess, etc. . . . It is that misusage of the meaning that serves to confuse and conflate the importance of and make “measure” to appear to be rationo-logically sound when it isn’t.
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“Evaluating teachers by test scores is unsound.”
Hmm, not only unsound, but completely invalid, and TOTALLY UNETHICAL.
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Under the four year Common Core moratorium, the majority of teachers in NYS (outside of NYC) have been partially evaluated (50%) using shared or distributed test scores. In my district, 92% of teachers have their teacher effectiveness quantified using the combined test scores of the five required HS Regents exams. many other upstate districts are doing the same. Absurdity aside, this has re-established a sense of normalcy in the classroom as this is a rigged game intended to protect administrators from having to jump through the hoops of the state Teacher Improvement Plans required for “developing” or “ineffective” ratings. Imagine being a newly hired first grade teacher and being told that 50% of your evaluation will be based on the scores of high school students you never met and subjects which you never taught. The credibility for the teacher evaluation system in NYS is less than zero, but the pressure of the Cuomo witch hunt has been almost completely relieved.
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