William Sanders was an agricultural statistician who developed a secret, patented formula for measuring teacher effectiveness. It’s call EVASS. It was tossed out by a Houston judge who said it was wrong to judge teachers by a secret algorithm that they could neither examine nor question.
As Stuart Egan reports, North Carolina clings to EVASS, no matter how many times it has been discredited (by scholars such as Audrey Amerein-Beardsley) or by courts that findit arbitrary and inscrutable.
Want to understand how teachers in North Carolina are evaluated?
Egan writes:
“Actually, the chain is from a .gov to a .org to a .com.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ohio has the same shamefully wrong value-added metrics sold by SAS, andmislabled a growth measure.
EVASS is a totally false form of teacher evalution. An algorithm designed for animal husbandry has been adopted to evaluate teachers through test scores. The non-system is wildly inaccurate, but the Tea Party judges in North Carolina will not let it go despite court rulings in Houston and elsewhere that have proven its inaccuracy. The lunacy of the situation demonstrates that political intention designed to keep teachers under the thumb of fake reform carries more weight than evidence and logic. The suspension of reality highlights the dishonesty and corruption in the leadership of the state. It has been claimed that North Carolina is no longer a democracy, and the continuance of such dishonest policy is more like North Korea than a state in the US.
Can’t be just an accident that the acronym contains both EVA and ASS
Sorry, hackronym
Actually, the chain is from a .gov to a .org to a .con.”
Fixed
The DEFORMERS don’t know squat.
This comes to mind … what the DEFORMERS don’t do:
Those DEFORMERS have NO CLUE. The do not understand the scientific process. Even my kindergarteners knew what the scientific process is and they, like my the other students I taught, know about observations, hypothesis, and testing hypothesis.
The DEFORMERS don’t know they are WRONG … why $$$$$$$$ and profits.
As an aside: Reading …. Chasing New Horizons by Stern & Grinspoon. WOWZER BOOK with groundbreaking scientific information and authors take readers on a spectacular journey. Hope some of you will read this groundbreaking and incredibly well-written book.
and most likely the deformers see ONLY making a profit as being ‘right’
“If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” — Isaac Newton, who invented differential calculus and wrote down what are now known as Newton’s Laws of Motion
“If I have seen fodder, it is by standing on the horns of cattle” — William Sanders, who applied his VAM, (developed to monitor the growth of cattle) to teachers and wrote down Sanders’ Laws of Self-promotion and teacher demotion
I have related before that I am from the same county that Sanders grew up in. I met him once at a special inservice where he explained his methods to us. He was very friendly and sure that his stastical approach to evaluation would save education from bad teachers.
When it was over, I asked him what he was going to do about teachers who did not teach the same material. He was speechless, as though he had never considered that two classes might teach different material or the same material in a different way.
That seems so long ago now. We still use value added scored as part of our evaluation. Teachers still feel crappy or happy, depending on a new set of tests that malfunction every year so that the legislature has to pass some emergency legislation to give teacher the right to reject the scores if that helps their evaluation. Then no one really knows whether their evaluation is done correctly or not. Where I teach, we are in such need of teachers that all of this is a moot point anyway.
How removed are policy makers from the day to day of trying to teach kids.
Excellent points, Roy.
He should have stuck to something he knew about:: evaluating livestock growth.
Sanders is the poster boy for what happens when a person goes far afield (pun intended).
They end up knee deep in manure.
Not incidentally, one does not need to be a statistician to see where Sanders went wrong. It’s quite obvious.
Livestock growth can actually be measured with a scale and tape measure. And one can hold all condition s constant except for one (eg, fodder) to see what makes a difference.
Human intellectual growth is a completely different story and there are so many things affecting the outcome that one has NO control over that it is actually quite ridiculous to isolate the teacher contribution.
It’s actually just dumb to claim that one can.
It’s hard to say who is dumber, Sanders or the people who bought into his malarkey.
And the biggest problem is that there is no precise, agreed upon definition of intellectual growth nor any precise way of gauging it.
And even if one could precisely define it, actually measuring it is out of the real of possibility.
Measurement applies o physical attributes like weight, height, speed, acceleration, etc, not to nebulous imaginary mental attributes.
None of that is meant to I play that everyone who pushed VAM was dumb.
On the contrary, some of those involved in what appear on their face to be scientific studies concluding that VAM could predict ones future knew exactly what they were doing.
The proof is in the cherry picking.
The latter type merely saw in VAM a chance to advance their career and win a prize in the process.