Linda Darling-Hammond and Edward Haertel of Stanford University explain why value-added assessment doesn’t work and how inaccurate it is.
Will John Deasy listen? Will the Gates Foundation listen?
Will the Los Angeles Times, which published their article, stop seeking names to publish inaccurate data about teacher “effectiveness”?
A retired educator in Los Angeles writes:
Los Angeles is the only city in the big 3(New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) that is not run by a mayor. It almost happened and is still a threat. Several years ago, when Mayor Villaraigosa did not get control of the schools, he threw money and support behind friendly board member candidates. This has been a disaster for Los Angeles children. One of the mayor’s favorites, Yolie Flores Aguilar, presented a plan to put LAUSD schools out to bid. This lead to disruption and more privatization. As a result, funding for traditional schools has been severely cut back with thousands of teachers laid off including librarians and nurses.
Robert Skeels has been a tireless advocate for all the children in LAUSD and if elected, would unseat Monica Garcia, one of the mayor’s favorites. This would end years of gridlock and political cronyism. It is even more important now because the candidates running for mayor next year have not shown independence from Villaraigosa’s failed policies, even though mayoral control in New York and Chicago has been an unmitigated disaster for the educational system in both these cities.
As an example, our mayor successfully pedaled the “Parent Trigger” law at a meeting of mayors from across the country even though the Parent Trigger has NEVER been implemented. It failed miserably in Compton, CA and now, in Adelanto, CA, a recent parent vote to pick a charter under California’s Parent Empowerment Act attracted only 53 voters, even though the school itself serves close to 700 students. And they call this Parent Empowerment?
Robert Skeels has revealed the true nature of the Parent Trigger whose two attempts in California were backed by Parent Revolution, which in turn is backed by the top school privatizers in this country. The tide is turning, with more and more members of the public realizing that there are hidden agendas within the privatization of our public schools. We need more potential board members, like Robert, to come forward and turn the tide all across the country to wrench control out of the hands of those whose only interest is to financially profit off of our public school children.
I am happy to endorse the candidacy of Robert D. Skeels for LAUSD school board.
He attended UCLA, is a veteran of the US Navy, and a staunch supporter of public education. He passionately defends the right of every child to a high-quality education.
His knowledge, experience and perspective would add a greatly needed new voice to the deliberations of the school board. He would stand up for children, parents and teachers.
The future of public education hangs in the balance, as the forces of privatization circle round it. I strongly urge voters to support Robert Skeels at this critical time.
Diane Ravitch
The United Teachers of Los Angeles has steadfastly refused to allow its members to be evaluated by the test scores of their students. Unlike the district leadership, UTLA understands that scholars have found that value-added assessment is inaccurate, invalid and unstable. By this method, excellent teachers may be labeled “ineffective,” and poor teachers who teach to the test may be labeled “effective.”
Despite intense pressure by the Los Angeles Unified School District leadership and the federal government, UTLA has insisted that its members should be evaluated by evidence-based methods, not by “value-added assessment” that has not been proven to work anywhere.
UTLA refused to sign off on the district’s request for $40 million in Race to the Top funding, which would have subjected its members to value-added assessment.
UTLA recognizes that accepting $40 million for RTTT would eventually cost the district hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with the federal government’s mandates. This has been the experience of other districts, where teachers have been laid off and class sizes have increased solely because of compliance with RTTT requirements.
Because it has remained true to principle, because it insists on evidence-based evaluation, because it insists on honest accounting for the public’s dollars, UTLA is a hero of public education and joins the honor roll.
The Los Angeles Times (!) has an outstanding article by reporter Teresa Watanabe about the new teacher evaluation system. It is based on growth in test scores and on computer modeling. The focus is on one teacher who seems to do all the right things: last year, he got a good rating but not this year. What changed? Nothing.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles has been fighting the LAUSD’s efforts to impose this flawed system on all teachers.
Eventually, after we have spent billions of dollars on these mechanical systems, the policymakers will figure out that the experts were right: the ratings reflect who is taught, not teacher quality.
Remember: no other nation in the world is judging teacher quality this way. This is our own nutty idea. It’s main accomplishment: demoralization of teachers.
I posted earlier about a charter leader who was accused of orchestrating cheating, was fired, and was given a $245,000 settlement.
The whole sordid mess associated with Crescendo Charter Schools in Los Angeles might never have come to light were it not for teachers who were whistle-blowers.
Robert Skeels tells the story here.
Without tenure, without the protection of a union, whistleblowers get fired or never surface to blow the whistle.
Part of the faculty at the charter chain belonged to the United Teachers of Los Angeles.
They blew the whistle on a corporate culture that condoned cheating.
They thought it was wrong.
Imagine that. They thought it was wrong to give students the answers to the questions.
It was alleged that the founder of the chain ordered principals to break the seals on the standardized tests and direct teachers to teach the tests, all to get higher scores and create the illusion of miracle schools.
That is the route to fame and fortune.
But it wasn’t because there were whistleblowers.
The whole chain was shut down.
Deregulation has its perils.
This is a strange story from Los Angeles.
The leader of a charter school chain had to resign when confronted with evidence he encouraged principals and teachers to cheat on tests. Allegedly, I must add.
The schools were closed down.
But then he got a $245,000 going away gift..
Anyone understand this?
The perils of deregulation? The risks of high-stakes testing?
What’s with the bonus pay?
Remember that the LA Times created a firestorm in 2010 when it created value added ratings for teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District and released the names and ratings of thousands of teachers. Arne Duncan said it was a good idea, but many researchers warned that the ratings were volatile, inaccurate, and unstable. And others saw a violation of confidentiality as well as ethical issues. In the aftermath, a teacher named Roberto Riguelas committed suicide, and his family said he was depressed to see what he thought was an unfair rating of his work.
New York City released the teacher ratings earlier this year, and again there were many complaints about inaccuracy. This time, Bill Gates published an op-Ed opposing the practice on grounds that it makes it impossible for supervisors to counsel teachers when their ratings are published.
Be all that as it may, the Los Angeles Times is now suing LAUSD for access to teachers’ names so they can release their ratings again.
I am still trying to understand what the newspaper thinks it is accomplishing, what purpose is served other than selling papers.
The Chicago Teachers Union strike has encouraged many educators around the nation, who are fed up with the virulent attacks on them by people who couldn’t manage a classroom for ten minutes. Or five, maybe.
Judging by the comments I am getting, CTU has lifted the spirits of teachers who were feeling as though no one would stand up to the shellacking they were taking.
CTU has stood up.
And we can expect counter-attacks. They have started. I read one news story fired by about 50 comments saying, “Fire them, fire them all.” I wonder if the people who write such letters have ever taught. I know the answer. I read a conservative blogger who predicted that the CTU would fold because the public thinks they are paid too much already.
The strike raises issues for teachers everywhere and for union locals everywhere.
What is the best strategy to ward off the corporate reform attacks?
Confronted with ceaseless attacks on public education, on the teaching profession, and on the right of unions to exist, what should unions do?
Should they collaborate or should they fight?
This post launched a heated discussion.
I am not a union member. I have never belonged to a union. But growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, I learned that the right to belong to a union is one of the hallmarks of a democratic society. Supporting the right of working people to bargain collectively was not at all controversial.
Today it is. Today unions are under fire, even from Democratic leaders like the mayor of Chicago and the mayor of Los Angeles.
What should unions do?
This reader comments:
I am surprised that this post has accepted the “reformers” moving of the goal posts so readily and assumes that it is commonly accepted. The purpose of unions is to advocate for members’ working conditions and pay. The “reformers” have used slick rhetoric to convince gullible people that the purpose of the union should be to “reform” schools. I don’t buy that at all. As has so often been stated, my working conditions are your child’s learning conditions. We can also work for school improvement but that is not our primary mission and if we accept the “reformers” re-imagining of our mission then we are setting ourselves up for accepting blame for failures caused by them.
For the last 16 years I have been involved quite deeply in both the AFT and the NEA (we have a cooperative union in Florida) and I have been a building rep for 14 of my 16 years as a teacher. I’ve visited my state legislature, written letters, called, rallied fellow teachers and worked the phone banks for GOTV. The first half of my career was spent in NYC. The second half in Florida, a right to work state. Unionism is vastly different in the many states that have adopted right to work, with little opposition or pushback from the national unions that it decimates and destroys. Why is that?
I’ve never bought the idea that it is our responsibility to conform ourselves to whatever our opposition chooses for their own comfort level in the hopes of preventing them from being even more extreme. The positions advocated in this post are exactly why we are in the situation we are in: an adoption of the Clinton-era “triangulation” strategies that supposedly reach compromise by taking the position of your opponent and making it your own. Thus we have Dennis Van Roekel and Randi Weingarten agreeing to VAM junk science, echoing the rhetoric of the “reformers” that schools are mess and in need of saving, and the list goes on and on.
I look at our colleagues in Australia and around the world who rally to shut down the entire school system when they are threatened with harmful, ridiculous reforms and then I compare that to American teachers who are an endangered species as public education is brought to the brink of extinction and I ask why aren’t we out in the streets? If you really believe that being nicer, quieter, and more accommodating will win this war then I refer you to the great Frederick Douglas who taught us that power never accedes ground without a fight and those who decry the battle are asking for a storm of change without the thunder and lightning that accompany it.
We are teachers. If our membership and the public are unaware of union history and the important gains procured through the labor movement then we must teach them these things. If we truly believe that truth and knowledge are the keys to good citizenship then we need to use these tools to further our ends. Playing old-school political games that no longer work will do nothing but hasten our end.
Steve Zimmer, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is a hero for public education. He joins the honor roll.
He has stood up to the powerful privatization lobby, which wants to hand more and more public schools over to private management.
Zimmer has the temerity to ask where the charter movement is going in Los Angeles. What is the end game? Who is looking out for the 86% of students who are not in charters? What are the consequences of “co-location” (i.e., giving charters free space in a public school, taking classrooms, facilities and resources away from the public school students)?
Zimmer has offered a resolution calling for greater oversight of charter schools in the city and requiring that the charters present the same data as public schools.
Zimmer points out that the 232 charters in the city of Los Angeles enroll 14.5% of the district’s students, yet the board approves charters without more than five minutes of deliberations.
Only 7 of the city’s 232 charters participate in the LAUSD data system, making it hard to know who they are serving and what they are doing.
He notes that charters are supposed to be incubators of innovation, yet they share nothing with public schools, and the board has no process by which to evaluate and share any best practices incubated in charters.
He notes that charters serve only 1/3 of the proportion of students with moderate-to-severe disabilities as compared to the public schools in the districts.
He wants the LAUSD superintendent to “issue a comprehensive report to the Board about the benefits, challenges andresponsibilities of being the largest charter authorizer in the world.”
He recommends a commission to “provide detailed recommendations to the Board about charter authorizations, renewals, amendments, Proposition 39 allocations, authorizing guidelines and issues of governance and oversight.”
Two charter chains object to his proposal. They want no constraints on their ability to continue expanding and drawing down public funding away from public schools without any oversight. It works for them. They claim Zimmerman wants to hamstring their growth. But in fact he is calling for responsible oversight of public-funded institutions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 