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GOOD NEWS! VAM Is Dead in Houston!

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2017 //
43

After a long court fight in Houston, the school district agreed not to use value-added scores to evaluate teachers, because it was unable to explain what the algorithms for evaluating teacher performance meant or how they were calculated. The district also agreed to pay the lawyers’ fees for the Texas AFT, which fought the use of VAM.

What is the purpose of unions? To fight for the rights of teachers. No individual teacher (unless married to a lawyer) could have pursued this remedy on his or her own. The union had the resources to protect teachers from an unfair, nonsensical, illegitimate way of evaluating their teaching.

By the way, the courts in Houston were a lot wiser than the courts in Florida, which upheld the practice of evaluating teachers based on the test scores of students they do not teach in subjects they do not teach. The court in Florida said it was “unfair,” but constitutional. How can it be constitutional to have your teaching license depend on the work that others do, in which you have no part at all?


For Immediate Release
October 10, 2017

Contact:
Zeph Capo
713-623-8891
zcapo@hft2415.org

Janet Bass
202-879-4554
jbass@aft.org

Federal Suit Settlement: End of Value-Added Measures
for Teacher Termination in Houston

HOUSTON—In a huge victory for the right of teachers to be fairly evaluated, the Houston Independent School District agreed, in a settlement of a federal lawsuit brought by seven Houston teachers and the Houston Federation of Teachers, not to use value-added scores to terminate a teacher as long as the teacher is unable to independently test or challenge the score.

Value-added measures for teacher evaluation, called the Education Value-Added Assessment System, or EVAAS, in Houston, is a statistical method that uses a student’s performance on prior standardized tests to predict academic growth in the current year. This methodology—derided as deeply flawed, unfair and incomprehensible—was used to make decisions about teacher evaluation, bonuses and termination. It uses a secret computer program based on an inexplicable algorithm: = + (Σ∗≤Σ∗∗ × ∗∗∗∗=1)+ .

In May 2014, seven Houston teachers and the Houston Federation of Teachers brought an unprecedented federal lawsuit to end the policy, saying it reduced education to a test score, didn’t help improve teaching or learning, and ruined teachers’ careers when they were incorrectly terminated. Neither HISD nor its contractor allowed teachers access to the data or computer algorithms so that they could test or challenge the legitimacy of the scores, creating a “black box.” In May 2017, the federal district court in Houston issued a decision stating that, “HISD teachers have no meaningful way to ensure correct calculation of their EVAAS scores, and as a result are unfairly subject to mistaken deprivation of constitutionally protected property interests in their jobs.”

HFT President Zeph Capo said: “This victory should mark the end of a destructive era that put tests and a broken evaluation system over making sure our students leave school well prepared for college, career and life. As a practical matter, this ends the use of value-added to terminate teachers in HISD because the district does not have a contractor that is willing or able to meet the constitutional due process standards spelled out by the court.”

Daniel Santos, one of the plaintiffs and an award-winning sixth-grade teacher at Navarro Middle School who was rated ineffective by the flawed EVAAS method, was elated with the settlement.

“I have always been devoted to my students and proud of my teaching skills. Houston needs a well-developed system that properly evaluates teachers, provides good feedback and ensures that educators will receive continuous, targeted professional development to improve their performance,” Santos said.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the agreement not to use value-added measures for this purpose is the latest nail in the coffin of using tests as a punitive tool. The Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal education law that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, eliminated the emphasis on test scores.

“Testing and EVAAS don’t measure critical or analytical thinking skills, don’t allow for engaging learning, and certainly don’t improve or create joy in teaching or learning. Instead of value-added methods, let’s value what kids really need: attention to their well-being, engaging and powerful learning, a collaborative school environment, and opportunities for teachers to build their skills throughout their careers,” Weingarten said.

In addition to agreeing to restrict its use of value-added measures, including EVAAS scores, the school district agreed to create an instructional consultation panel—with representatives from the district and the faculty—to discuss and make recommendations on the district’s teacher appraisal process. The settlement also requires HISD to pay Texas AFT $237,000 for attorney’s fees and expenses related to the lawsuit.

Here is the amended summary judgment opinion.

Categories Houston, Teacher Evaluations, VAM

Gary Rubinstein: “I Taught at Houston’s XQ Super School” (A MUST READ!)

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2017 //
26

This is one of Gary Rubinstein’s best posts ever.

He watched Laurene Powell Jobs’ extravaganza about her efforts to redesign the American high school into XQ Super Schools. The one where she bought time on four networks.

The one where celebrities said again and again that high schools have not changed in 100 years; Gary does a good job of shredding that myth. Yes, high schools have changed in the past 100 years, but some things should never change and will be found in high schools all over the world.

He notes that the show has had no effect. It seems to have disappeared as soon as it was on the air.

But it didn’t disappear for him because he realized that he taught at one of the XQ Super Schools, a high school in Houston that allegedly was a failing school that was miraculously transformed.

Gary shows that it was not the nightmare school that the producers claimed it to be, nor has it had the miraculous transformation that the show now boasts about.

It was a good school when he was there, even though there was a gang population in the ninth grade.

What he discovers is that the school now has a charter school on campus, which apparently serves as a dumping ground for the kids who are not going to graduate. The regular school raised its statistics by pushing out the bad kids.

No miracle there!

But the school does have a really nice garden. That’s new. That’s good. Is that what caused the claimed spike in test scores? Not likely.

He writes:

One thing that this program definitely accomplished is product placement. It seems that one feature of innovative high schools is that students use a lot of laptops and it seems like most of those laptops are Apple products. While iPads were once considered to be something that was going to be a big part of education, the thing most schools are actually using are a type of laptop called a Chromebook, which is an inexpensive Google product. Since the kids in these schools are using Apple laptops, maybe one purpose of this show was to help with Apple’s competition with Google for the education market.

One thing we did not see a lot of in this was overt teacher bashing. I suppose this is why Randi Weingarten attended and tweeted about how wonderful a program this is. Now even though there wasn’t overt teacher bashing, there was some less direct bashing like the part where celebrities were asked what they wish they learned in high school. Based on their answers, the only conclusion is that their teachers must not have taught those things to them very well.

This program didn’t really seem to resonate with anybody and most people on both sides of the education reform wars have pretty much forgotten about it already. It was a colossal waste of money and shows that being rich doesn’t mean that you necessarily have the right to dictate education policy.

I think that it is not an accident that there was no mention of evil unions or miracle charter schools or school choice in this program. My sense is that reformers realize that most of the talking points from Waiting For Superman don’t work anymore. The public has wised up. They don’t believe as much that teacher’s unions are the problem or that charter schools are the solution. So this program is an attempt to get a new rationale that the public can believe and get behind whatever reforms the reformers want to try, which of course will be more union busting and charters and vouchers. So the new thing is that schools haven’t evolved much in the past 100 years and that’s a problem. All that matters is that the public believes there is some problem, whatever it is. It doesn’t need to be the unions, but it must be something so the 100 year thing will likely be repeated a lot of over the next decade as the new villain for them to save us from.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Houston, Innovation, Privatization

A+ Rated Agencies Providing Help to Hurricane Harvey Victims

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2017 //
16

If you want to help people who have been harmed by the flooding in the Houston area, here is a list of A+ rated agencies, rated based on the percentage of finds that go to services rather than overhead.

Categories Houston

A Message from My Family in Houston

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2017 //
6

As many of you know, I was born in Houston and attended public schools there from K-12. I have a large family, and many still live there. I have been in touch with my family members and all of them are safe. Here is a list of organizations coordinating donations to help victims of Hurricane Harvey.

I just received this email from my nephew Nicholas Silvers with an up-to-the-minute report:


All,

I will try to keep this brief:

First of all I am sorry for the mass email but I bcc’d so that emails are hidden. Second, we are all fine. The outpouring of support, calls, texts, emails to me from around the globe has been amazing and is not unnoticed so thank you again.

While we are fine, the City of Houston is far from it. We have hit the 1000 year flood plain and 1,000,000+ people are going to be without their homes. Any and all help is needed. The two simplest ways are through the Red Cross (https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation) both individually or as a corporate, or if you are in the US and want to send care packages (clothes, blankets, pillows, toys/books for children), you can fed ex ground them to me (just email me back and I will send my home address) and I will get everything delivered to the shelters.

Again, thank you all for checking in. Lastly, please feel free to pass this email or my email address on to anyone you think would want to help.

Best,

Nicholas A. Silvers
713-828-2533
Sent from my iPhone
Nikko19@aol.com

Categories Houston

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Two Houston Mothers Want to Sue KIPP for Charging Fees

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2017 //
6

Dr.Julian Vasquez Heilig reports that two mothers in Houston want to sue the KIPP charter chain for collecting fees from them.

They “have been speaking out against KIPP’s ‘optional athletic fees, field trip fees, academic fees, etc and they state that these optional fees ‘have been charged as required fees at at least ten KIPP schools since 1994 and that the optional fees go into one account and are used for whatever purpose KIPP decides.’”They believe these fees violate state and federal laws.

KIPP denies that it collected fees illegally. The mothers want to know when they will be reimbursed.

Categories Houston, KIPP Charter Schools, Parents

KIPP-Houston Rips Off Poor Parents

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2017 //
26

Charter schools lain they are public schools. They are not. What public school is part of a corporate chain? What public school operates for profit? What public schools charges fees for service?

The KIPP schools in Houston have been charging fees to poor parents. Now that the scam has been exposed, KIPP refuses to refund the money to parents who need the money far more than the multi-million dollar KIPP organization does. KIPP sgoukf ask its patron, the rightwing Walton Family Foundation, for a few more dollars, enough to reimburse the needy families that it ripped off.

The Houston Chronicle writes:

“Mary Courtney was one of KIPP Houston’s biggest advocates, even as she had to borrow money from relatives to keep up with payments to the charter school.

“She drove to Austin during School Choice Week, talking to lawmakers about why they should better fund charter schools. She volunteered on campus. She paid thousands in fees so her boys and other students could have access to books and science materials.

“But that was before she realized the fees she was paying were optional, something never mentioned by teachers or principals or on the fee agreement forms that the schools – KIPP Liberation College Prep and KIPP PEACE Elementary – tied to student registration. Now, Courtney and several other KIPP Houston parents are furious because they believe they were duped by the charter nonprofit system into paying for what they believe should be a free public education.

“At no time if I thought the fees were optional would I have paid for them, especially when I’m struggling to put food on the table or clothes on my children’s backs,” Courtney said. “It’s a lot to ask of a single parent, and it’s wrong for them to allocate fees from parents, especially knowing the demographic area where a majority of their school campuses are.”

“A Texas Education Agency investigation last year, a copy of which was obtained by the Houston Chronicle, found KIPP Houston schools violated the Texas Education Code by collecting millions of dollars a year in unallowable student fees. Its mostly low-income and minority families paid hundreds of dollars per student each year for things such as reading materials, classroom supplies and parent associations.”

KIPP Houston joins the Wall of Shame for taking advantage of poor families. KIPP should fully refund the money it illegally collected from parents.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Houston, KIPP Charter Schools, Wall of Shame

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley Reviews the Court Decision Slamming VAM in Houston

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2017 //
10

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley of Arizona State University is one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of teacher evaluation. She is especially critical of VAM (value-added measurement); she has studied TVAAS, EVAAS, and other similar metrics and found them deeply flawed. She has testified frequently in court cases as an expert witness.

In this post, she analyzes the court decision that blocks the use of VAM to evaluate teachers in Houston. The misuse of VAM was especially egregious in Houston, which terminated 221 teachers in one year, based on their VAM scores.

This is a very important article. Amrein-Beardsley and Jesse Rothstein of the University of California testified on behalf of the teachers; Tom Kane (who led the Gates’ Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Study) and John Friedman (of the notorious Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study) testified on behalf of the district.

Amrein-Beardsley writes:

Of primary issue will be the following (as taken from Judge Smith’s Summary Judgment released yesterday): “Plaintiffs [will continue to] challenge the use of EVAAS under various aspects of the Fourteenth Amendment, including: (1) procedural due process, due to lack of sufficient information to meaningfully challenge terminations based on low EVAAS scores,” and given “due process is designed to foster government decision-making that is both fair and accurate.”

Related, and of most importance, as also taken directly from Judge Smith’s Summary, he wrote:

HISD’s value-added appraisal system poses a realistic threat to deprive plaintiffs of constitutionally protected property interests in employment.

HISD does not itself calculate the EVAAS score for any of its teachers. Instead, that task is delegated to its third party vendor, SAS. The scores are generated by complex algorithms, employing “sophisticated software and many layers of calculations.” SAS treats these algorithms and software as trade secrets, refusing to divulge them to either HISD or the teachers themselves. HISD has admitted that it does not itself verify or audit the EVAAS scores received from SAS, nor does it engage any contractor to do so. HISD further concedes that any effort by teachers to replicate their own scores, with the limited information available to them, will necessarily fail. This has been confirmed by plaintiffs’ expert, who was unable to replicate the scores despite being given far greater access to the underlying computer codes than is available to an individual teacher [emphasis added, as also related to a prior post about how SAS claimed that plaintiffs violated SAS’s protective order (protecting its trade secrets), that the court overruled, see here].

The EVAAS score might be erroneously calculated for any number of reasons, ranging from data-entry mistakes to glitches in the computer code itself. Algorithms are human creations, and subject to error like any other human endeavor. HISD has acknowledged that mistakes can occur in calculating a teacher’s EVAAS score; moreover, even when a mistake is found in a particular teacher’s score, it will not be promptly corrected. As HISD candidly explained in response to a frequently asked question, “Why can’t my value-added analysis be recalculated?”:

Once completed, any re-analysis can only occur at the system level. What this means is that if we change information for one teacher, we would have to re- run the analysis for the entire district, which has two effects: one, this would be very costly for the district, as the analysis itself would have to be paid for again; and two, this re-analysis has the potential to change all other teachers’ reports.

The remarkable thing about this passage is not simply that cost considerations trump accuracy in teacher evaluations, troubling as that might be. Of greater concern is the house-of-cards fragility of the EVAAS system, where the wrong score of a single teacher could alter the scores of every other teacher in the district. This interconnectivity means that the accuracy of one score hinges upon the accuracy of all. Thus, without access to data supporting all teacher scores, any teacher facing discharge for a low value-added score will necessarily be unable to verify that her own score is error-free.

HISD’s own discovery responses and witnesses concede that an HISD teacher is unable to verify or replicate his EVAAS score based on the limited information provided by HISD.

According to the unrebutted testimony of plaintiffs’ expert, without access to SAS’s proprietary information – the value-added equations, computer source codes, decision rules, and assumptions – EVAAS scores will remain a mysterious “black box,” impervious to challenge.

While conceding that a teacher’s EVAAS score cannot be independently verified, HISD argues that the Constitution does not require the ability to replicate EVAAS scores “down to the last decimal point.” But EVAAS scores are calculated to the second decimal place, so an error as small as one hundredth of a point could spell the difference between a positive or negative EVAAS effectiveness rating, with serious consequences for the affected teacher.

Hence, “When a public agency adopts a policy of making high stakes employment decisions based on secret algorithms incompatible with minimum due process, the proper remedy is to overturn the policy.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Houston, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

AFT Kills VAM in Houston! Major Victory for Common Sense!

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
14

Today, teachers in Houston won a major court victory against the discredited teacher evaluation method called VAM, or “value-added measurement.” The court battle was led by the AFT and the Houston Federation of Teachers.

VAM was originally developed by an agricultural statistician, William Sanders, who believed that the rise or fall of student test scores can be attributed to the students’ teachers. This theory was incorporated into the Race to the Top program, which led many states to adopt it, despite the fact that it had never been proven to Wotan in a real-world situation. Seventy percent of teachers do not teach tested subjects, which led to bizarre strategies of evaluating teachers by scores of students they never taught in subjects they never taught.

Here is the press release from the AFT about the decision:

May 4, 2017

AFT, Houston Federation of Teachers Hail Court Ruling
on Flawed Evaluation System

Statements by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Houston Federation of Teachers President Zeph Capo on U.S. District Court decision on Houston’s Evaluation Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), known elsewhere as VAM or value-added measures:

AFT President Randi Weingarten: “Houston developed an incomprehensible, unfair and secret algorithm to evaluate teachers that had no rational meaning. This is the algebraic formula: 𝑦𝑖𝑗𝑘𝑙= 𝜇𝑗𝑘𝑙+ (Σ𝑘∗≤𝑘Σ𝑤𝑖𝑗𝑘∗𝑙∗𝑡 × 𝜏𝑖𝑗𝑘∗𝑙∗𝑡𝑇𝑖𝑗𝑘∗𝑙∗𝑡=1)+ 𝜖𝑖𝑗𝑘𝑙

“U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith saw that it was seriously flawed and posed a threat to teachers’ employment rights; he rejected it. This is a huge victory for Houston teachers, their students and educators’ deeply held contention that VAM is a sham.

“The judge said teachers had no way to ensure that EVAAS was correctly calculating their performance score, nor was there a way to promptly correct a mistake. Judge Smith added that the proper remedy is to overturn the policy; we wholeheartedly agree. Teaching must be about helping kids develop the skills and knowledge they need to be prepared for college, career and life—not be about focusing on test scores for punitive purposes.”

HFT President Zeph Capo: “With this decision, Houston should wipe clean the record of every teacher who was negatively evaluated. From here on, teacher evaluation systems should be developed with educators to ensure that they are fair, transparent and help inform instruction, not be used as a punitive tool.”

###

Categories Houston, Teacher Evaluations, VAM, VAM (value-added modeling)

Houston: Protest Rally Tomorrow

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2017 //
4

Community Voices for Public Education is grassroots group in Houston that is a leader in the fight against high stakes testing and test prep mania. It is holding a rally tomorrow to protest DeVos and to share some good news about HISD.

4:30 pm

HISD Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center

The good news:

*Students do not need to take or pass the STAAR test this year to be promoted

*HISD school board will pass a resolution supporting immigrant families

*HISD board will not use student test scores as part of teacher evaluations this year

Categories Betsy DeVos, Houston, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley: Why Houston Kicked Out EVAAS, Its Teacher Evaluation Vendor

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
9

Last week, the Houston Independent School Board deadlocked in a 3-3 tie vote on whether to renew its contract with the vendor supplying the teacher evaluation program.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley explains their decision here.

At least three board members realized that five years of this program had not moved the needle by an inch. If performance matters, then EVAAS was a failure.

Beardsley is one of the nation’s leading researchers in the study of teacher evaluation.

She writes:

Seven teachers in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), with the support of the Houston Federation of Teachers (HFT), are taking HISD to federal court over how their value-added scores, derived via the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), are being used, and allegedly abused, while this district that has tied more high-stakes consequences to value-added output than any other district/state in the nation. The case, Houston Federation of Teachers, et al. v. Houston ISD, is ongoing.

But just announced is that the HISD school board, in a 3:3 split vote late last Thursday night, elected to no longer pay an annual $680K to SAS Institute Inc. to calculate the district’s EVAAS value-added estimates. As per an HFT press release (below), HISD “will not be renewing the district’s seriously flawed teacher evaluation system, [which is] good news for students, teachers and the community, [although] the school board and incoming superintendent must work with educators and others to choose a more effective system.”

Open the link, read the full article, and read her links. This is excellent news.

The bad part of her post is the news that the federal government is still giving out grants that require districts to continue using this flawed methodology, despite the fact that it hasn’t worked anywhere.

Apparently, HISD was holding onto the EVAAS, despite the research surrounding the EVAAS in general and in Houston, in that they have received (and are still set to receive) over $4 million in federal grant funds that has required them to have value-added estimates as a component of their evaluation and accountability system(s).

So Houston will have to find a new vendor of a failed methodology.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Houston, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)
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