Chalkbeat reports on what happened eight years after the Los Angeles Times paid to create a value-added, test-based rating system to evaluate teachers and then published their ratings online.
The bottom line: The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. And some teachers left teaching.
New research suggests that’s what happened next — but only for certain families.
Publishing the scores meant already high-achieving students were assigned to the classrooms of higher-rated teachers the next year, the study found. That could be because affluent or well-connected parents were able to pull strings to get their kids assigned to those top teachers, or because those teachers pushed to teach the highest-scoring students.
In other words, the academically rich got even richer — an unintended consequence of what could be considered a journalistic experiment in school reform.
“You shine a light on people who are underperforming and the hope is they improve,” said Jonah Rockoff, a professor at Columbia University who has studied these “value-added” measures. “But when you increase transparency, you may actually exacerbate inequality.”
That analysis is one of a number of studies to examine the lasting effects of the L.A. Times’ decision to publish those ratings eight years ago. Together, the results offer a new way of understanding a significant moment in the national debate over how to improve education, when bad teachers were seen as a central problem and more rigorous evaluations as a key solution.
The latest study, by Peter Bergman and Matthew Hill and published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Economics of Education Review, found that the publication of the ratings caused a one-year spike in teacher turnover. That’s not entirely surprising, considering many teachers felt attacked by the public airing of their ratings.
“Guilty as charged,” wrote one teacher with a low rating. “I am proud to be ‘less effective’ than some of my peers because I chose to teach to the emotional and academic needs of my students. In the future it seems I am being asked to put my public image first.”
But a separate study, by Nolan Pope at the University of Maryland, finds the publication of the ratings may have had some positive effects on students, perhaps by encouraging schools to better support struggling teachers.
Pope’s research showed that Los Angeles teachers’ performance, as measured by their value-added scores, improved after their scores were published. The effects were biggest for the teachers whose initial scores were lowest, and there was no evidence that the improvement was due to “teaching to the test.”
“These results suggest the public release of teacher ratings could raise the performance of low-rated teachers,” Pope concluded.
The Los Angeles Times sued to get additional data so it could rank and rate even more teachers based on test scores, but a three-judge appellate court turned the newspaper down. The public did not have a right to know the ratings of individual teachers, the court said.
The distinguished mathematician John Ewing wrote an important paper in the journal of the American Mathematical Society called “Mathematical Intimidation,” in which he thoroughly debunked the Los Angeles Times ratings. He later debunked the “crisis in education” in a speech at Brown University.
The New York Post followed the lead of the Los Angeles Times and published the ratings for thousands of New York City teachers. The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid identified what it called “the worst teacher” in the city and hounded her, publishing her photo and banging on her apartment door in search of an interview with this terrible teacher.
But another look and it turned out that this teacher taught new immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class all year long. The ratings were meaningless.
Gary Rubinstein reviewed the city’s ratings and found them to be incomprehensible. A teacher might be highly effective in math and ineffective in reading, or vice versa, leaving the choice of which half of him/her should be fired.*
The review of the Los Angeles ratings omitted one consequence that mattered, at least to his family and friends: Roberto Riguelas, a teacher of fifth grade in a rough neighborhood, got a mediocre rating and jumped off a bridge, committing suicide.
Arne Duncan still praises the “courage” of the Los Angeles Times for publicizing the ratings of teachers, no matter how many of those ratings were erroneous and hurtful.
*Here are Gary Rubinstein’s posts about the absurdity of New York City’s value-added ratings. Blog #2 is the most important:
Part I
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/
Part II
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/
Part III
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-iii/
Part IV
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-4/
Part V
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-5/
Part VI
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-6/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There appears to be no limit to the shenanigans the right wing will commit to destroy public education. Unfortunately, many Americans buy into their foolishness.
This same dynamic already happens to some degree in public schools without the published results in the newspaper. My children attended the public schools of “highly rated” New Jersey district. My son was tracked for advanced math, and my daughter was in the regular math classes. My son always seemed to get the better math teacher than my daughter, and I could often tell the difference from the “back to school” night presentation at the beginning of the year by the quality of organization, clarity and degree of specificity of the teacher of the advanced students. All of the qualities of the advanced math teacher would have been a bigger benefit to my daughter more than my son who would have done well regardless. I do not know if my first impressions were fair, but they seemed to be confirmed during the events of the school year.
The whole idea of my effectiveness as a teacher being related to the scores my students get on a standardized test is nonsensical. It just makes no sense. Publishing the scores did not raise or lower scores. I don’t even buy the idea that publishing scores increased segregation. Charters and tracking do that. One has to be very simple minded to think that what I do as a teacher is to input data into human learning machines. Dumb!
The Times and the Post publicly harassed thousands of innocent people. It was a crime. No good came of it because it. didn’t. make. sense. Eight years later, and no apologies given, not even an admission that the court was correct in stopping it. Eight years later, and I am still enraged on behalf of my victimized colleagues. The LA Times used to be a partner education. We used to read the Times in my classes. No more. That dirty rag is not welcome in my school ever again.
I feel like the teacher ranking mania was really the lowest point of ed reform. It culminated with the Atlanta cheating scandal – they ignored or silenced all critics until it IMPLODED in Atlanta. Crashed and burned.
Read the report of that cheating scandal. It’s a primer on how not to treat people and it all stemmed from the obsession with test scores and rankings.
Atlanta was the natural and inevitable endpoint of lemming-like adherence to this theory they foisted on the whole country as fact.
I heard Duncan describing “value added” on the radio at the height of ed reform- 2010 or thereabouts. He presented it as fact, like gravity or a measure of length. 2 + 2 = 4.
They do this a lot. They do it now with the “jobs of the 21st century”. They all glom onto some slogan or theory they like and present it to the public as fact. None of it is fact. It’s all their pet theories and their pet theories always (magically!) align perfectly with their market-worshipping ideology.
It also put the teachers that served the poor, troubled, at-risk, handicapped, or language minorities on the chopping block as the algorithm would decide these teachers often provided a lower “value add.” The whole quasi-mathematical determination was worse than fake news because it undermined teachers and sometimes ended the careers of those that work with the most vulnerable students.
Ed reformers consistently over-sell things. There’s this false certainty they project that is really misleading.
I don’t know why they can’t just sell these things honestly. They had no earthly idea if these ranking systems had any value at all, and they should have admitted at the outset that it was a huge and wildly expensive experiment.
Duncan said in interviews about his book that ed reform could have been marketed better. He’s wrong. The problem is all they do is market. It’s all puffery and exaggerations and clever PR campaigns.
What they did to those teachers in Atlanta should have been a wake-up call, but it wasn’t. Instead all they did was focus on the misdeeds of the teachers. None of the policy was questioned, none of the management ideas were questioned- the entire blame was laid on the front-line workers. Atlanta was a systemic failure. Their “accountability” system failed. It crashed and burned. It didn’t matter. They just blew it off and walked on, learning nothing.
As my mother used to say, “There’s none so blind as those that will not see.” That is the way of the “head in sand” so-called reformers.
Here! Here! Terrified me as a Title I teachers and remedial reading teacher.
Research, studies, data data data, statistics statistics statistics. Who, what do we listen to and “believe”? You put all this out there, Diane – weathering the storm of the War on Education. THAT’S EDUCATION – for those of us that still can afford the connection and have a shelter to put it in. Think of those that do not. There are many. They do not get educated. They do not get the information.
Tim Slekar, dean of the college of education at Edgewood College in Wisconsin, writes here about the state’s determination to destroy the teaching profession by deregulating it. This is an ALEC goal. You gave us this link :http://bustedpencils.com/2018/03/wisconsin-department-of-public-instruction-makes-teacher-licensing-process-more-understandable/
As a former teacher who refused to have uncertified teachers, administrators rate me, no self respecting professional wants to be part of the swamp education process that is being administered. If you can home teach or send your child to an Catholic school do so because your child will not learn any other way.
Racism /wall street is at the heart of these charters and till minorities wake up we are dooming another generation to ignorance.
Beata – racism and wall street are at the heart of everything in this nation. I home taught (under the umbrella of Clonlara School in Ann Arbor, when it was illegal) one of my children. The other child loved school and is now Google ARVR employed in San Francisco. Catholic??? I was Catholic educated – elementary plus College. Tell me, how is a Catholic education better than a public?
“I was Catholic educated. . .”
My condolences!
Oh, and by the way I resemble that remark! 🙂
“The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid identified what it called ‘the worst teacher’ in the city and hounded her, publishing her photo and banging on her apartment door in search of an interview with this terrible teacher.”
This is a repeat of the McCarthy Red Scare years.
“McCarthy became a very powerful man. However, pressed for the evidence of a real communist, he made a big mistake. McCarthy accused officials in the government and army of communism. McCarthy never proved any of these charges, and his ideas were discredited. People no longer believed him (The Red Scare: Mccarthyism). He was stripped of his leadership roles. Soon the Red Scare ended. This event is a blemish in America’s history. People’s lives were ruined. Some left the country, and other committed suicide. A general distrust in the government by the American people came about because of this incident (Schwartz, Richard).”
https://americanscares.weebly.com/mccarthyismred-scare.html
“McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.[1] The term refers to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s[2] and characterized by heightened political repression as well as an alleged campaign spreading fear of Communist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
How much time will it take to discredit Bill Gates and the other leaders of the Racist Destroy Public Education movement and make money while you are doing it?
Would you call Mueller a McCarthyite then for his baseless prosecution of Trump?
In answer to your question, NO!
There is no comparison to McCarthy’s witch hunt and Muller’s alleged witch hunt, an allegation coined by Trump and repeated by Trump’s brain-dead, easy to manipulate and fool, racist, ignorant, deplorable supporters, and defenders.
“As re-election began to loom closer, McCarthy, whose first term was unimpressive, searched for ways to ensure his political success, resorting even to corruption. Edmund Walsh, a close fellow Roman Catholic and anti-communist suggested a crusade against so-called communist subversives. McCarthy enthusiastically agreed and took advantage of the nation’s wave of fanatic terror against communism, and emerged on February 9, 1950, claiming he had a list of 205 people in the State Department who were known members of the American Communist Party.
“The American public went crazy with the thought of seditious communists living within the United States, and roared for the investigation of the underground agitators. These people on the list were in fact not all communists; some had proven merely to be alcoholics or sexual deviants. Regardless, McCarthy relentlessly pushed through and became the chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, widening his scope to “investigate” dissenters. He continued to investigate for over two years, relentlessly questioning numerous government departments and the panic arising from the witch-hunts and fear of communism became know as McCarthyism.”
http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/senatorjosephmccarthy.asp
Senator McCarthy was an elected official with no mandate from the Congress to investigate anything.
Muller, on the other hand, did not start out and is not conducting a witch hunt like McCarthy did. Muller has a letter that outlines his investigation powers.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3726408-Rosenstein-letter-appointing-Mueller-special.html
Muller is working within the confines of that letter investigating “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump …”
The results — so far:
“Pivotal moments in Mueller’s Trump investigation: 5 guilty pleas, 17 indictments and more”
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-mueller-investigation-one-year/
Fake President Donald Trump has not been indicted — yet, but he has been actively acting like he is the focus of this investigation he alleges is a witch hunt.
Baseless?? BASELESS????? Over 20 indictments, five guilty pleas and one conviction (so far) is not baseless.
This is the one-page version of why VAMS should never be used for teacher evaluation. I do not know what to do to kill this beast, the fraud, the damage still being done by this totally wrong use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
Down load your copy and circulate this link.
VAMS ARE NEVER“ACCURATE, RELIABLE, AND VALID”
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X16651081
Thank you!
“I do not know what to do to kill this beast, the fraud, the damage still being done by this totally wrong use of test scores to evaluate teachers.”
And if I may add a companion update to your thought:
“I do not know what to do to kill this beast, the fraud, the damage still being done TO STUDENTS by this totally wrong use of test scores to evaluate THEM.”
Laura H. Chapman – so this is an example of what I mentioned. Maybe I just don’t know how to get around it. I’ll call the HELP desk! But you provided a link to an article that I cannot download “my” copy and circulate it unless I PAY $36 for a 1 day pass to do so. I’ll call the HELP desk. But thanks for the opportunity.
If a VAM system is used, a substantial percent of the teachers will automatically be the worst, since VAMs compare scores to the supposed trajectory of the students concerned. So all the students could be performing at a very high level, and a teacher might look bad for not putting more pounds on the stuffed pig (a reference to the agrarian roots of VAM for those who have no experience in this debate).
Swacker has often pointed out that students become what the numbers say that they are on this web site, referencing Foucault and pointing out the internalized norms of society as contained in the scores of tests. VAMs do the same thing to teachers, attaching an identity of failure or success based on false assumptions of legitimacy of the testing procedure. New teachers are forced out of the field this way. Good, experienced professionals often cannot shake the feeling of failure when they work as hard as they can and still look like the north end of a southbound mule on their scores.
Teacher are not immune to internalizing identities forced on them by superiors. LA? Boooooo!
Thank you.
Reading this blog and all the supportive comments helps keep me from internalizing the scores. I feel for those who don’t read this.
In my opinion as a working newsroom journalist and media union official, it was beyond the scope of news media to create a rubric and then evaluate members of a profession based on that rubric, and publish the results of the methodologically unsound evaluation. Out of bounds and unethical. But speaking of what happened afterward, what about the reporters who ran this sh*tshow, Jason Felch and Jason Song? Well, Jason Felch was fired for the (undeniable) ethical violation of having sex with a source; and Jason Song went to work for, surprise, a billionaire-funded pro-privatization operation in the so-called education “reform” sector.
They all get a pay-off.
Yolie Flores, the LAUSD Board member, was given a mid-six-figure jog in an corporate ed. reform non-profit created seemingly for the purpose of … well … providing a mid-six-figure job for Yolie Flores. Bill Gates created this non-profit after Yolie, while on the LAUSD board, was instrumental in opening charter schools affiliated with … Bill Gates.
WAITING FOR SUPERMAN director Davis Guggenheim was paid a multi-million-dollar salary for directing that trash.
The list goes on.
Would you join with Trump, then, in criticizing the ethics of the media? Are VAMs a sort of “fake news”?
I don’t think Mr. Trump criticizes the ETHICS of the media, he criticizes the CONTENT of the media… and VAMs are a sort of “fake news”… they provide reformers with “scientific evidence” that teachers are failing the same way that creationists and climate change deniers can find “scientists” to support their cause…
If you’re talking to me, I’m a working daily-newspaper journalist. I have a pretty highly developed awareness of journalistic ethics, and regardless of what Trump does, I will call out breaches of ethics and professional standards. The L.A. Times project was an egregious breach of both. So was its having its education reporting, for a while, funded by a subject of its education reporting (Eli Broad). We work hard to maintain high standards and ethics in our field, and to do that, we can’t be chickens*t about criticizing breaches of standards and ethics.
Adding: The teacher attacks by the L.A. Times, and the nation’s editorial boards’ ongoing teacher-bashing and eager gushing,fawning promotion of any so-called education “reform” scam that comes along, are undoubtedly pleasing to the far right and the Betsy DeVos world. So I’m pretty sure that Trump would be enthusiastically on board with those aspect of the MSM, including the Times’ discredited teacher-bashing VAM project, if he had enough focus or knowledge to be aware of it. Of course he makes it clear that he has no grasp whatsoever of the major issues of the day (nobody knew health care could be so complicated! Gosh, who knew!), so he certainly isn’t paying attention to this.
I did an analysis of the VAM model that Superintendent Cortines (who was in the process of retiring at the time and was being pressured by Deasy, who then became Superintendent) was attempting to implement back in 2010, with a follow-up analysis of the LA Times polemic that your entry discusses. I never published my analysis or had reason to use it as LAUSD’s “leaders” dropped the idea of VAM-related stulling when the union didn’t cave in [for a little perspective, teachers and nurses unions had just fought a prolonged fight against Schwartzeneggar’s attacks on unions ($300M spent by the unions over a period of a couple years) in an attempt to keep the State from going right-to-work. Nurses, teachers, fire fighters (who have become more liberal-leaning over the last 20 years) and service unions eventually got California out of the Doldrums that Ah-nold and the GOP put the State in, but it used up a decade-worth of political capital to do so.]
Cue Jerry Brown’s return…he helped fix the state financially, but has stabbed his base in the back with his stance on charter schools.
Anyway, here’s some of what I put together, from 2010. We don’t use the California Standards Test (CST) anymore, but normative test are normative tests…
“To provide more perspective on the whole “teacher value-added” issue, I present some results of a series of statistical calculations that I performed on the average student ELA scores of LAUSD’s third grade teachers for the year 2004.
In its new database, the LA Times rates the best and worst elementary school teachers’ effectiveness in teaching English according to the following schedule: a “most effective” English teacher is one whose students repeatedly increase their average raw ELA scores by 7% or more relative to the students’ LAUSD peers; a “least effective” teacher of English is one whose students’ average raw ELA scores repeatedly decrease by 7% or more compared to the students’ LAUSD peers. We must note that these definitions reflect changes in students’ scores relative to the students’ peers, and not as simple gains and loses from one year to another. This is key, as the use of relative percentile gains and loses make it appear to the general public that gross differences in teacher effects are occurring, when the reality is that only small differences are happening. I would not say that this is a statistical “trick”, rather it is often a means to dupe people who really do not care about the admittedly boring topic of statistics. And, since large differences in teacher effects are not occurring, this classification scheme can rightfully be deemed as ridiculous. Observe how the Times’ method produces the following absurd labels:
In 2004, the average LAUSD third grader’s raw ELA score was approximately 37.8, with a standard deviation of about 6.5. This means that the typical student correctly answered 37.8 out of 65 questions, and that more than two thirds of the district’s third graders received raw scores between 31.3 and 44.3. Teachers at an underperforming school, with students who averaged 35.1 out of 65 on their third grade ELA exam, would be classified as “most effective” if their students’ average scores went up to 36.3 (that is, if the teachers’ students managed to correctly answer 1.2 more questions than the average school peer). An unfortunate colleague next door would be labeled as “least effective” if her students answered 33.8 out of 65 questions correctly (1.3 questions fewer than the school’s average third grader).
In a high performing elementary school, where third grade students averaged 43.3 out of 65 on their ELA exams, a teacher would be labeled as “most effective” if her students scored 45.1 (answering nearly two questions more than their average peer). On the other hand, a teacher down the hall would be deemed “least effective” if his students answered an average of 41.8 questions correctly (1.5 questions fewer than his school’s average third grader).
Why are these “most effective” and “least effective” labels absurd? They are absurd because teachers place varying degrees of importance on the annual California Standards Test. Some educators compensate for their mediocre or poor instruction throughout the year by dedicating the entire month of April to CST review and drill. On the other hand, many teachers feel comfortable with what they have imparted to their students throughout the year and would rather present new lessons than spend precious hours reviewing for what they consider a meaningless test.
The result is that some average or exceptional teachers in the LAUSD will have students who correctly answer one or two questions fewer than their school peers, and some of the worst teachers will produce above average, or even stellar CST scores. I have observed both types in my sixteen-year career as a teacher. Indeed, I can say that some of the worst teachers I have known have been those that teach only those concepts covered by the CST, producing students who have a hard time doing anything other than respond to a number of similarly phrased, trivial questions.”
Wow, looking at it eight years later, I can say that my last paragraph sounds a lot like how Success Academy operates. Or most charters, for that matter.
This is a fascinating and devastating analysis. Tell me if this math is correct. A teacher who teaches 150 students may be ruined by a small group who perform very low on the test. For example, if 130 students get 45 correct, and 20 get only 10 correct, that teacher would have a class average correct of 40.3 questions correct per student. So a huge majority of the students performed at a level that would have been considered very positive, but a few made it appear much worse.
That is absolutely true, Roy, and it does happen.
I did not post a bunch of analysis on the actual VAM measurements that they used back in 2009-2010 (and were about to incorporate into our stull process). Suffice it to say that their VAM methodology was absolutely absurd.
Over and over and over…schools, teachers, and whole neighborhoods can be labeled as “failing” with no recognition that actually a majority of students are NOT failing
The difference between most and least effective is two of sixty-five questions?! Not to be believed.
I mean, the ratings are not to be believed. The analysis is spot on.
“I would not say that this is a statistical “trick”, rather it is often a means to dupe people who really do not care about the admittedly boring topic of statistics.”
As with any subject area, the more one knows about it the less boring it becomes and actually starts becoming more interesting. For many the problem with overcoming that initial boringness has to do with how statistics is taught as a course. (Not that I know how to teach it, hell I was a Spanish teacher.) I have had two statistical classes, one undergrad and the other graduate although they were both fundamental type courses. Neither was taught in much more than here is the information, learn it and practice it a little. Although as I took the second one I was better able to understand due to age and having worked a bit with stats and numbers in business.
Statistics is interesting when one better understands what is going on in the mind of statisticians (no that’s not a joke.)
And looking at the Chalkbeat article, I see that it is once again Matt Barnum! The VAM-lover himself! Skimming one of the articles Barnum cites, I see that the results are essentially saying this:
-moving students’ average raw scores from 25-out-of-65 (in one of the distrct’s lowest-performing schools) up to 25.6-out-of-65 is cause to say that a teacher really took the LA Times’ articles to heart and that students’ improved markedly; great job!
-moving students’ average raw scores from 47-out-of-65 (in one of the district’s higher-performing schools) up to 47.6-out-of-65 is cause to say that the teacher didn’t really take the LA Times’ articles to heart and that the students’ didn’t really improve; hiss! boo!
That’s it. There’s a lot of hand-wavium and impressive statistical analysis on exactly what(?)…that students gained or lost, on average, 0.6 problems on a 65-problem exam.
Flipping ludicrous.
Not nearly as ludicrous as the suggestion that a 65 question test is anywhere close to an accurate evaluation of anything. It is like taking one of those on line IQ tests and taking it seriously.
What happened after the LA Times published test based ratings of teachers?
Rigoberto Ruelas committed suicide, that’s what.
The people who published the scores are scum.
And the so called “researchers” who try to read anything into VAM are clueless twits, too stupid to understand how baseless and dumb their claims actually are.
The LA Times is a yellow rag run by billionaire trash.
Well, the L.A. Times has a new owner, is newly unionized and the reporters who did that are gone, so take note of that. I don’t know if any of the editors who oversaw and approved it are still there.
A newspaper has to EARN credibility and respect.
It can’t be based on speculation about possible change with new ownership, especially when the new owner is also a billionaire.
I’ll believe it has changed when I see it
Until then, it will remain what it has been for a long time: a yellow rag.
“I’ll believe it has changed when I see it”
Me too. How long do we wait? A few years for sure to see if the LA Times changes its obvious bias under the previous profit-driven owners.
Yes, I understand that it has to show that it has changed. But isn’t it on this thread that someone already commented on a transformation in the L.A. Times’ editorial viewpoint on education? So that could constitute some indication.
My own view is that it’s suicidal for print media to adopt a position of teacher-bashing, aside from the sheer wrongness of doing it — trashing an entire quite large profession and offending all teachers and everyone related to or connected with teachers is not smart behavior for embattled journalists.
Scum.
Six of one a half dozen of the other.
Actually, calling them scum insults scum. There has to be something worse than that we can call them.
So I Googled it, and found this:
“These Are The Meanest, Most Cruel Insults A Human Being Can Say And Shockingly NONE Of Them Contain Profanity”
I’m not sure I can print the one I liked best on Diane’s site — a phrase that ends in this word, “legs”
https://brobible.com/life/article/meanest-insults-a-person-can-say-no-profanity/
And who was this LA County Coroner that “ruled” Rigoberto Ruelas’ death a suicide? http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/local/la-me-south-gate-teacher-20100928 Shall we believe that person’s opinion?
Maybe you posted the wrong link or maybe you were joking. No one in the linked article suggested that Ruelas did not commit suicide or that the coroner was just one guy with an opinion. Ruelas jumped off a high bridge. That usually indicates suicide. I happened to be in L.A. that day. The only debate of which I am aware was why he jumped to his death, not whether.
And still “reform” outlets seem ignorant on why teachers appreciate the tests, but resist test-based reform. I think they know, but if they need it explained you have to help. Helping is what teachers do. https://realedreform.com/2018/08/10/dear-lane/
“Teachers appreciate the tests?” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I know only a handful of teachers like this. Most of us know the sham that these tests are.
…but not how they are used.
How they are used: For toilet paper, if the test is on paper, that is.
Oh come on, Shirley you appreciate having all these tests. Shirley.
Admit it.
You would get very bored otherwise.
The tests are something to look forward to every year. Backward too!
LONG POST from original L.A. Times VAM article accompanying the VAM database (wherein the Gates-funded, Broad-funded folks embedded in LAUSD confidently predicted VAM would be adopted by 2013. Wrong. Every single cliche is in here, including teachers “have a job for life.”)
articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/14/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815
Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane (link just above):
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. Times in 2010:
“Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
“Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.
“The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
“Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.
“In coming months, The Times will publish a series of articles and a database analyzing individual teachers’ effectiveness in the nation’s second-largest school district — the first time, experts say, such information has been made public anywhere in the country.
“This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
(When it comes to teacher quality, years of experience, grad degrees, or on-going professional development… none of that matters as to whether a teacher is of high quality or not.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. Times in 2010:
“Many of the factors commonly assumed to be important to teachers’ effectiveness were not. Although teachers are paid more for experience, education and training, none of this had much bearing on whether they improved their students’ performance.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
(Oh, and when it comes to students, poverty doesn’t matter either, nor does being a second-language learner.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. Times in 2010:
“Other studies of the district have found that students’ race, wealth, English proficiency or previous achievement level played little role in whether their teacher was effective.”
(And here’s more … in the current system, teachers have a job for life, where actual performance on the job means nothing, with teacher evaluation involves nothing more than brief, pre-announced visits —- total lies, by the way, as any LAUSD teacher will tell you —- and is therefore worthless.”
… and in support of all this, they quote TNTP, or course.
To remedy all of this, of course, VAM is the solution.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. Times in 2010:
“Nationally, the vast majority who seek tenure get it after a few years on the job, practically ensuring a position for life. After that, pay and job protections depend mostly on seniority, not performance.
“Teachers have long been evaluated based on brief, pre-announced visits by principals who offer a confidential and subjective assessment of their skills. How much students are learning is rarely taken into account, and more than 90% of educators receive a passing grade, according to a survey of 12 districts in four states by the New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit.
“Almost all sides in the debate over public education agree that the evaluation system is broken. The dispute centers on how to fix it.
“Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the “value” that the teacher added or subtracted.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
(And the Times hopes and predicts that VAM will be adopted system-wide
in LAUSD by 2013, and the insistence that it should have
been adopted years earlier.
UTLA, at the time led by Warren Fletcher (2011-2014), stopped all that… thank Jesus.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. Times in 2010:
“Prompted by federal education grants, California and several other states are now proposing to make value-added a significant component of teacher evaluations. If the money comes through, Los Angeles schools will have to rely on the data for at least 30% of a teacher’s evaluation by 2013.
“The Times found that the district could have acted far earlier. In the last decade, district researchers have sporadically used value-added analysis to evaluate charter schools and study after-school programs. Administrators balked at using the data to study individual teachers, however, despite encouragement from the district’s own experts.
“In a 2006 report, for instance, L.A. Unified researchers concluded that the approach was ‘feasible and valid’ and held ‘great promise” for improving instruction. But district officials did not take action, fearful of picking a fight with the teachers union in the midst of contract negotiations, according to former district officials.
“In an interview last week, A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, was adamant that value-added should not be used to evaluate teachers, citing concerns about its reliance on test scores and its tendency to encourage ‘teaching to the test.’ But Duffy said the data could provide useful feedback.
” ‘I’m not opposed to standardized tests as one means to helping teachers look at what’s happening in their classrooms,’ he said.”
(And let’s not forget the great work of the LAUSD teacher effectiveness “task force” made up of corporate reformers that Gates and Broad paid to embed in the upper echelons of LAUSD management. Vergara attorney and proponent Ted Mitchell even makes an appearance.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
“A task force created by the Los Angeles school board to promote teacher effectiveness raised the issue in April, urging the use of value-added scores as one measure of performance.
“The task force chairman, Ted Mitchell, said the changes were long overdue.
” ‘I think it’s simply a failure of will,’ said Mitchell, who also heads the State Board of Education.”
” … ”
“As the district was appointing the task force and seeking federal dollars, some enterprising principals in L.A. schools began making back-of-the-envelope assessments of teachers using raw test scores.
“One clear lesson so far: Finding the least effective teachers is only the first step in a long process.”
(And VAM will help parents who are now “in the dark” about teacher quality, too. VAM will “empower them to demand a good teacher” for their child.
VAM will also “keep teachers on their toes.”
Not mentioned here is how VAM helped keep LAUSD teacher Rigoberto Ruelas “on his toes” . Shortly after this was published, several thusly “empowerd” parents of Rigoberto Rueles’ students read his VAM score on the LATimes “Grading the Teachers” database and then demanded their children be removed from his class.
He grew so despondent that he jumped off a bridge.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. TIMES IN 2010:
“For now, parents remain mostly in the dark.
“Even the most involved mothers and fathers have little means of judging instructors other than through classroom visits and parking lot chatter. Others don’t even have time for that.”
“Without reliable information, it comes down to trust. Which instructor a child gets is usually decided behind closed doors by principals and teachers, whose criteria vary widely.
” ‘Mi niño, all his teachers are good,’ said Maura Merino, whose son Valentin Cruz was in the fifth-grade class of John Smith, the low-performing Broadous teacher, last school year. ‘He never had a problem. Everything is OK.’
“Merino said it’s hard for her to tell the difference between teachers because she doesn’t speak English. If she knew her son was assigned to a struggling teacher,
” ‘I wouldn’t know what to do,’ she said, speaking in Spanish. ‘But I would try to get him to the best.’
“In a conversation after school one day, several Broadous teachers, including Aguilar and Smith, said parents should have the chance to see how teachers measure up.
“They ‘might be more empowered to demand a good teacher,’ said teacher Eidy Hemmati. And it might keep teachers ‘on their toes a little bit more,’ Smith said.
“But many others say it would be impossible to accommodate every parent’s desire for the best teacher, and publicizing disparities would only turn one educator against the other.
“Broadous Principal Stannis Steinbeck refused even to discuss the differences among her instructors, hinting at the tensions that might arise on staff.”
” ‘Our teachers think they’re all effective,’ she said.”
What a difference six years makes.
In 2016, the same L.A. Times Editorial Board that was screaming for LAUSD to immediately adopt VAM put out this editorial opposing it, making the belated conclusion that corporate ed. reform “philanthropists not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn’t be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation’s public schools.”
Really? Ya think? ’cause you sure were saying the exact opposite back in 2010.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-gates-education-20160601-snap-story.html
Again, this is from the same newspaper that, in Fall 2010, went all in on the Gates program of test-score-based evaluation of teachers, and published VAM scores on thousands of teachers.
That’s no more.
Better late than never.
\x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. Times Editorial Board (the same one that lathered on
so much unconditional love for Deasy during his tenure at LAUSD
backing him time and time again when he was in jeopardy of losing
his job):
“But the Gates Foundation has spent so much money — more than $3 billion since 1999 — that it took on an unhealthy amount of power in the setting of education policy. Former foundation staff members ended up in high positions in the U.S. Department of Education — and, in the case of John Deasy, at the head of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“The foundation’s teacher-evaluation push led to an overemphasis on counting student test scores as a major portion of teachers’ performance ratings — even though Gates himself eventually warned against moving too hastily or carelessly in that direction. Now several of the states that quickly embraced that method of evaluating teachers are backing away from it.
“Philanthropists are not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn’t be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation’s public schools. The Gates experience teaches once again that educational silver bullets are in short supply and that some educational trends live only a little longer than mayflies.
” … ”
” (Gates org’s latest statement) ‘This has been a challenging lesson for us to absorb, but we take it to heart. The mission of improving education in America is both vast and complicated, and the Gates Foundation doesn’t have all the answers.’
“It was a remarkable admission for a foundation that had often acted as though it did have all the answers. Today, the Gates Foundation is clearly rethinking its bust-the-walls-down strategy on education — as it should.
“And so should the politicians and policymakers, from the federal level to the local, who have given the educational wishes of Bill and Melinda Gates and other well-meaning philanthropists and foundations too much sway in recent years over how schools are run.”
I don’t know what the staff turnover has been on the editorial board. There isn’t really a protocol in the newspaper world for completely reversing an editorial position.
I can say that the LA Times was reliably liberal up until the early 2000s, when the internet started to eat away at its circulation numbers.
Print media becoming increasingly conservative is a phenomenon that has occured across the country over the last two decades, as younger, internet-savvy comsumers began to see that the same stories that were appearing in their newspapers came out a day earlier on the net. Once they figured that out, it was a no-brainer. Since older Americans tended not to use the internet as much, newspapers took a sharp conservative turn.
To be fair, the LA Times resisted that trend for about ten years, but collapsed into a conservative morass in the early 2000s, as I said. There was a dead-cat bounce for a couple years, where a liberal editor-in-chief took the reins, but that was shortlived.
The LA Times was once one of the most liberal papers in the country, but few outside of LA remember such.
There’s an analogy to be had there with Jerry Brown…
Steve M. — the L.A. Times has an aggressively far-right history and has shifted over the years — my husband, an L.A.-born and -bred journalist, says it shifted starting in the early ’70s. Also, many newspapers with otherwise liberal editorial positions support far-right positions on education.
The New York Times is an example of a liberal newspaper whose editorials constantly and faithfully echo DFER on high-stakes Testing (necessary and good) and charter schools (always praised, never questioned). Same for liberal Washington Post, where reporters were critical of Rhee and the damage she wrought, but the editorial board adored her.
A little bit of inside baseball regarding the VAM fiasco a few years ago.
The astroturf teachers group Educators for Excellence (E4E) did a study and poll that showed that LAUSD teachers overwhelmingly wanted VAM implemented. (A complete and total fabrication … laughably so.)
One of E4E’s then-front people teachers was Kyle Hunsberger, (currently a principal at a traditional public school). Well, Hunsberger at first backed VAM, then when VAM judged him unfairly, he had an awakening or reappraisal of sorts, one that was covered. in this L.A. Times article:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
L.A. TIMES:
“(Husberger’s) principal, Scott Schmerelson, praises him as a leader who heads the math department and started a campus program to give struggling students extra help.
” Some of his students say (Hunsberger)’s the best math teacher they’ve ever had — a caring, funny mentor who explains well, pushes on homework and most of all believes in them.
” ‘He always tells us nothing will stop us from learning and nothing will stop him from teaching us,’ said Edwin Perez, a gregarious 12-year-old, as three of his classmates nodded.
“Yet, according to a key measure of teacher effectiveness used by the Los Angeles Unified School District, Hunsberger is average.
“Two years ago, he said, he was rated above average. Then last year his ratings fell. He doesn’t know what changed and there’s nothing in his scores that will tell him.
“The rating ‘didn’t tell me anything about how I can get better at teaching [weaker] students,’ Hunsberger said. ‘The truth is, I don’t know and I would love to know.’
“Hunsberger isn’t the only instructor questioning the results of the Los Angeles school system’s new approach to measuring teacher effectiveness. Academic Growth Over Time, as the district calls it, is based on students’ progress on standardized test scores. The method estimates how much teachers added to — or subtracted from — their students’ academic performance.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Well that ended Ky’le’s career as an E4E spokesperson. The Gates-funded E4E then purged Kyle from its ranks forthwith. As in any cult, you can’t dare even question the core doctrines and remain in good standing.
Here’s another blast from the past regarding VAM (also known as AGT — “Average Growth over Time” or “VAM/AGT”
Back in November 2011 (about a year after the L.A. Times’ “Grading the Teachers” article and database fiasco), the then-recently-elected UTLA President Warren Fletcher resisted powerful pressure to back VAM and instead wrote an op-ed for UTLA’s paper UNITED TEACHER blasting VAM, mentioning that the L.A. Times was in court for an ultimately failed effort to obtain data for a Round Two of “Grading the Teachers”, this time focusing on middle and high schools.
Not mincing words, Fletcher said, among other things:
— VAM/AGT scores are “virtually meaningless as an indicator of effectiveness or competence”
— “VAM/AGT scores are as reliable as reliable an indicator of (a teacher’s) teaching quality as (that teacher’s) driver’s license number.”
— “Individual teacher VAM/AGT scores are virtually meaningless.”
— “A narrow and punitive system of numerical evaluation like VAM/AGT can seriously degrade instruction and, as a consequence, hurt students.”
— A VAM score is “is little more than a random and meaningless number determined through a formula that has been widely discredited.”
— “It doesn’t matter whether the proponents of VAM are wealthy or powerful; they are still wrong, and they are pushing a teacher evaluation system that is at best meaningless and at worst dangerous to instruction.”
— “I know that if my pay, or even my continuance in the profession, were to be tied directly to my students’ annual CST scores, I would be under intense pressure to spend less time teaching writing and teaching literature; to spend less time teaching my students how to clearly express themselves and to understand complex written material; to spend less time teaching the actual skills that my students need and that their parents want them to develop for college or careers.”
— “But Duncan’s own department has released studies showing that VAM evaluations of individual teachers consistently have an error rate of more than 25%. In other words, one-fourth of all individual teacher VAM scores WILL BE FLAT-OUT WRONG. That’s why the U.S. Department of Education recommends against using VAM scores for teacher evaluation decisions. Respected researchers from all over the country have rejected their use and have warned of their unreliability.”
Here’s the entirety of that article:
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UTLA President Warren Fletcher offers another perspective on things. In his editorial in the November 18, 2011 edition of *UNITED TEACHER (that’s the UTLA’s monthly newspaper), Fletcher sets the record straight.*
(NOTE: he is addressing the 40,000 unionized teachers in LAUSD… hence the “you” and “we”.)
Enjoy.
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*”VAM: A Meaningless, Dangerous Number *
“By Warren Fletcher, UTLA President
“I have been an English teacher in LAUSD for many years. I have always understood that my primary duty and loyalty must be to my students, first and last. Teaching is a profession; it’s not merely a job. At a very deep level, we all understand this. And the public understands this too. Parents and the community don’t expect that we will robotically ‘deliver’ instruction to students. They expect that we will passionately advocate for their children and that we will speak up when the District tried to implement policies that will degrade the quality of instruction.
“Like what is happening right now.
“Superintendent John Deasy has decided to implement a new system of teacher evaluation in a pilot program throughout LAUSD and to do so without negotiating it with UTLA. This is illegal, and UTLA has filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against the District to stop it.
“Last month, the Public Employment Relations Board issued a complaint on the matter, the first step toward making the District obey the law.
“Deasy’s system—Academic Growth Over Time (AGT)—bears a striking resemblance to the Value-Added Measurements (VAM) being pushed across the country. In both cases, teacher evaluations are tied directly to annual student standardized test scores. The long term goal of VAM/AGT is to eventually tie teacher pay and teacher retention directly to those scores.
“Individual VAM/AGT evaluation degrades instruction.
“As educators, we all understand how a narrow and punitive system of numerical evaluation like VAM/AGT can seriously degrade instruction and, as a consequence, hurt students.
“I mentioned earlier that I’m an English teacher. I know that if my pay, or even my continuance in the profession, were to be tied directly to my students’ annual CST scores, I would be under intense pressure to spend less time teaching writing and teaching literature; to spend less time teaching my students how to clearly express themselves and to understand complex written material; to spend less time teaching the actual skills that my students need and that their parents want them to develop for college or careers.
“In a VAM/AGT environment, there is constant pressure to teach less and to reduce instruction to test prep. And that kind of pressure would apply to every teacher, regardless of grade level or subject field.
“Many of the people (including elected leaders) who push the hardest to link teacher evaluation directly to raw test score numbers are well intended. They believe that directly linking test scores to teacher employment decisions will transform all schools for the better.
“This belief is based on TWO OBVIOUS FALLACIES:
“FIRST, that test scores are a direct and accurate (rather than approximate) measure of ‘student achievement’; and
“SECOND, that attaching test score incentives and threats to teachers’ jobs will somehow ‘revolutionize’ how teachers approach their teaching. People who believe these things are not evil—they’re just wrong.
“And it’s our job as professional educators to set the record straight.
“Individual teacher VAM/AGT scores are virtually meaningless.
“The U.S. Department of Education is headed by Arne Duncan. Duncan is a strong proponent of VAM/AGT-type teacher evaluations. But Duncan’s own department has released studies showing that VAM evaluations of individual teachers consistently have an error rate of more than 25%.
“In other words, one-fourth of all individual teacher VAM scores WILL BE FLAT-OUT WRONG. That’s why the U.S. Department of Education recommends against using VAM scores for teacher evaluation decisions. Respected researchers from all over the country have rejected their use and have warned of their unreliability. An individual teacher’s VAM/AGT score, whether it was calculated by the District or by the L.A. Times, is virtually meaningless as an indicator of effectiveness or competence.
“And speaking of the L.A. Times, it appears that they may be planning another round of articles on VAM, once again accompanied by a searchable database of individual teacher VAM scores, based on data from the District. While UTLA will vigorously pursue all legal channels to keep the District from releasing teacher-level raw data, it is important to remember that any individual teacher score that the Times may calculate and post is, by definition, a VAM score, and thus, is little more than a random and meaningless number determined through a formula that has been widely discredited.
“While the obvious purpose of the last L.A. Times VAM series was the public belittling of public school teachers, it is important to remember that your or my individual ‘VAM number’ is about as reliable an indicator of teaching quality as your or my driver’s license number. When we forget that, we empower the people who want to disparage our profession.
“It doesn’t matter whether the proponents of VAM are wealthy or powerful; they are still wrong, and they are pushing a teacher evaluation system that is at best meaningless and at worst dangerous to instruction. We have a duty to our profession and to our students to resist its implementation. When any teacher starts to feel inadequate (or for that matter superior) because of something as meaningless as an individual VAM score, the enemies of our profession score a small victory.
“The advocates of individual VAM score evaluation all have one thing in common: They don’t know the first thing about quality teaching. You do.
“Never forget that.”
More crazy VAM stories from LAUSD, circa 2011.
During the 2011 negotiations for a new evaluation agreement, LAUSD Supe John Deasy was always trying to sneak VAM (also known as AGT) into the new contract covering how teachers are evaluated. — in particular having a fixed percentage of a teacher’s evaluation … 30% to be exact.
Every time Deasy’s negotiators would try and sneak this in, UTLA’s folks would say, “Take it out!” and LAUSD management would do so, right up until the final draft, when the Deasy team — Gates’-funded folks embedded in the district — tried to sneak it in one more time, this time the the fine print.
Nope! UTLA said when they caught it. Take it out!
Anyway, a couple months after the agreement was signed, Deasy unilaterally said that he was going ahead anyway and violating the agreement, and imposing the 30% fixed percentage of VAM on teachers— a system that, for a year, had been in place with a small AGT (or VAM) Pilot Program that a small number of teachers had earlier been bribed into participating in by Deasy a year earlier. By fiant, Deasy was simply imposing the Pilot Program for every teacher in LAUSD, against the contract he had just signed.
Sure, Deasy knew the courst would eventually rule against this (which it did, but it took three years), but in the meantime, Deasy would then try to use the turmoil and use then press to shame UTLA into cooperating — with the eventual goal to make it a “fait accompli’ that VAM was now a permanent part of LAUSD.
“Look, we have this great VAM evaluation system ready to go, and that’s been so successful in the Pilot Program, but those evil defenders of a failed status quo at UTLA are blocking us, and putting adult interests ahead of children’s interests.” This would be a blatant attempt to turn the public against UTLA, and pressure UTLA into going along with VAM / AGT.
UTLA President Warren Fletcher (SEE the above letter) responded two ways:
1) Filed a PERB violation LAWSUIT with the State PERB labor board — easily winnable, as it was open and shut (though it would take about 3 years, which Deasy was counting on and using)
;
2) Told all teachers not to cooperate with the process, or register a protest if they were ever coerced into doing so.
Deasy responded to Fletcher’s directing the teachers not to cooperate by blowing a gasket in an email to Fletcher, and to the press. He told Fletcher that he was cutting all ties with him, cancelling their once-a-month sit-down, and, until Fletcher left office, Deasy then refused to take his calls or answer any of his emails, and never contacted Fletcher again.
Crazy stuff.
But here’s where it gets crazier.
So how was Deasy’s year-old “AGT Pilot Program” actually faring?
Well, word started getting out, and the word wasn’t good.
Teachers who had taken a nice stipend to participate in Deasy’s AGT (or VAM) Pilot Program started sharing what exactly was going on with the Gates’ people in charge of the VAM pilot — the ones that Deasy allowed to be embedded into LAUSD administration, and how the Gates;’ people were running this Pilot Program. (If memory serves, I think Broad and/or Gates actually paid their salaries, but don’t quote me on that.)
Some of this boggles the mind.
Here’s one example:
“Heads we win.Tails you lose” as one teacher participant in the Pilot Program put it.
BACKGROUND:
Apparently VAM was originally based on the measure of cows’ production of milk (I kid you not), where the agricultural evaluators judged the quality of the various feed or food that cows were getting by the quantity and quality of the milk the various cows produced. The best feed added the most value, or value added, the same way that the best teachers or best teaching added value.
Weird, wild stuff.
You see:
teachers’ teaching = food cows eat
kids’ test score results = quantity/quality of the milk cows produce
Well, it’s gets even crazier.
One of the Gates’ VAM (or AGT) people Deasy let run wild at LAUSD,shared the following nonsense with a teacher or administrator. (I forget which.)
This is when we get to the topic of “statistical anomalies.”
When doing the VAM (or AGT) study with cows, data from the top 10% of milk-producing cows (i.e. producing the best, most milk) were always omitted from the study, as that arbitrary percentage was thought to be outliers — or “statistical anomalies” for the exact quote — that should be omitted. That top 10% would have produced the same milk with whatever feed (read: teacher) it was provided, so just go ahead throw out those scores. With that 10%, the quality of the cow food was irrelevant, and not a result of quality of the food (READ: teachers’ teaching)
Well, it worked the same way with teachers, and data from a teachers’ highest scoring students, with the Gates folks believing that you had to impose the same system for teachers that you did for cow food.
A teacher sent a mass email about this,. which I saved.
Here it is:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
From: (NAME OMITTED) <(NAME OMITTED)@earthlink. net<mailto:(NAME OMITTED)earthlink.net>>
To: (73 NAMES OMITTED). com<mailt(NAME OMITTED)>
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 8:09 PM
Subject: RE: [LASUBS] AGT Scores article
“Before you make any comments about the accuracy or fairness of the AGT scores, you need to go to the (LAUSD VAM-AGT) site, get your own report and look at the rosters class by class. In my case I had 196 students tested last year, but only 174 had their scores counted in determining my AGT score.
“Among the students that were NOT counted were the five students that had scored Proficient or Above on the CST.
“Do you think including their scores might have improved my score?
“Oh, none of the students that score BELOW Basic or FAR BELOW Basic had their scores eliminated from determining my AGT score.
“Their site says that certain student scores are excluded because they *”represent statistical anomalies disparate from the general scores earned by your students an cannot be considered to be a reflection of your teaching prowess” whatever that means!*
“This is a scam that was never intended to make any of us look good. Take a close look at your own AGT reports.
“(NAME OMITTED), I don’t think it’s all Public School Teachers; they are only going to discredit the experienced Teacher that Deasy feels cost the District too much in salary. As my Chapter Chair put it, ‘I bet they didn’t exclude any of the students that scored Below Basic and Far Below Basic, because they came into the class lacking the skills and behavior to learn the standards, did they?’
“The Gates’ folks running Superintendant Deasy’s dubious Pilot Program have made a conscious decision to exclude all students who have *”grown” significantly in their scores, or who have “grown” the most when evaluating “teaching prowess”.
“Why?
“Addressing the participating teachers, the website says that high-scoring students’ scores are excluded because they— QUOTE—“represent statistical anomalies disparate from the general scores earned by your students, and cannot be considered to be a reflection of your teaching prowess.”*— UNQUOTE
“(NAME REMOVED), you gotta be freakin’ kidding me !!!!
“The Deasy/Gates folks are are openly claiming such impressive scores on the part of students are *”statistical anomalies”, and should not be credited to the teachers* (???!!!)
“How on God’s green earth can they make this determination that high scores are, in fact, *”statistical anomalies”, and as such, must be excluded from a teacher’s evaluation?*
“And exactly who is making that determination?
“And on what basis? (The cow milk production stuff, of course)
“It’s the teacher who is with all of the children—high scoring, low scoring, and in-between—every day, all the ding-dong day, not these cold statisticians up in the ivory tower rendering bogus verdicts on the abilities and hard work of these teachers.
“The teachers are the ones with the intimate knowledge of the students—their home lives, socio-economic status, innate abilities/deficiencies
“The teachers are the experts as to why and how their students are achieving or not achieving.
“Furthermore, none of the students with LOW scores are excluded on the basis of their being *”statistical anomalies”?*
“Why not? Shouldn’t what’s good for the “HIGH scores” goose be good for the “LOW scores” gander? (Sorry for the awkwardly paraphrased euphemism.)
“Such a decision to exclude high-scoring students could only lower a teacher’s AGT score. The system is thus biased against the teacher in such a way that makes it almost impossible for him/her to get a high AGT score,
“and in turn,
“the system makes him/her vulnerable to being fired unfairly, with his/her firing based on a demonstrably false score.
“Someone with a sinister agenda to lower the line item cost of teachers salary at the expense of quality teaching would thus wholeheartedly embrace such a warped system of evaluation.
“In short, Deasy’s/Gates’ AGT model is rigged in the following manner:
“1) *if a student “growth” score is HIGH, the model attributes 100% of the credit for that score arises from the abilities and hard work of that student; and 0% of the credit to the abilities and hard work of the student’s teacher;
“2) *if a student “growth” score is LOW, the study attributes and assesses 100% Of the blame for that score to the teacher’s lack of abilities and lack of hard work; and 0% of the blame for that score to lack of abilities and lack of hard work of that student, and/or to the student’s innate disabilities or limitations..
“After teachers discover this—how can they ever again trust the superintendant in anything else that he proposes?
“If and when the press or someone questions Deasy or someone in the District about this, what can they say to defend this?
“They’ll be trying to defend the indefensible.
“The effects were biggest for the teachers whose initial scores were lowest, and there was no evidence that the improvement was due to “teaching to the test.”
Or maybe these teachers were assigned students who simply scored better. These numbers people have so little understanding of programming as a political tool at a school that they are totally blind to what happens in the counseling office.
When a friend of mine changed schools from our low ses to a high ses school, she found a group of teachers were dividing up the high scorers for themselves and assigning the “new teacher” the low scoring students. She stayed long enough to have political power over the assignments. Now instead of being asked (as she was when she began at the high ses school )why her scores were low at the low ses school, she has great scores. This is not a consequence of having improved but a consequence of whom she chooses to teach.
These reports are such B. S. and that doesn’t stand for beautiful studies.
There was this snippet
“Pope’s research showed that Los Angeles teachers’ performance, as measured by their value-added scores, improved after their scores were published. The effects were biggest for the teachers whose initial scores were lowest, and there was no evidence that the improvement was due to “teaching to the test.” ”
The “lowest scorers improving most” is an artefact of a statistical phenomenum called “regression to the mean”. If you measure something that has variability and it seem extreme then next time it is measured then it won’t be so extreme.
Suppose every teachers true score is 50 but it can only be measured within plus or minus 5 points e.g. a person might score 46 one day and 52 the next but (on a well designed measure) they would average out at 50 over many measurements.
On one day if you test a whole lot of teachers, some of them will score at 46 just because of the variability. If you take those teachers and look at their next scores then the next time their scores will be more likely to be higher than 46 rather than lower than 46 – if their true average is 50 then they have to get a higher score sometime to “balance” that 46.
The more variable or imprecisely that something is measured the more likely it is to suffer from regression to the mean.