Monthly Archives: March 2017

Rest in Peace, EVAAS Developer William L. Sanders

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Over the last 3.5 years since I developed this blog, I have written many posts about one particular value-added model (VAM) – the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), formerly known as the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS), now known by some states as the TxVAAS in Texas, the PVAAS in Pennsylvania, and also known as the generically-named EVAAS in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina (and many districts throughout the nation). It is this model on which I have conducted most of my research (see, for example, the first piece I published about this model here, in which most of the claims I made still stand, although EVAAS modelers disagreed here). And it is this model that is at the source of the majority of the teacher evaluation lawsuits in which I have been or still am currently engaged (see, for example, details about the Houston lawsuit here, the former Tennessee lawsuit here, and the new Texas lawsuit here, although the model is more peripheral in this particular case).

Anyhow, the original EVAAS model (i.e, the TVAAS) was originally developed by a man named William L. Sanders who ultimately sold it to SAS Institute Inc. that now holds all rights to the proprietary model. See, for example, here. See also examples of prior posts about Sanders here, here, here, here, here, and here. See also examples of prior posts about the EVAAS here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It is William L. Sanders who just passed away and we sincerely hope may rest in peace.

Sanders had a bachelors degree in animal science and a doctorate in statistics and quantitative genetics. As an adjunct professor and agricultural statistician in the college of business at the University of Knoxville, Tennessee, he developed in the late 1980s his TVAAS.

Sanders thought that educators struggling with student achievement in the state should “simply” use more advanced statistics, similar to those used when modeling genetic and reproductive trends among cattle, to measure growth, hold teachers accountable for that growth, and solve the educational measurement woes facing the state of Tennessee at the time. It was to be as simple as that…. I should also mention that given this history, not surprisingly, Tennessee was one of the first states to receive Race to the Top funds to the tune of $502 million to further advance this model; hence, this has also contributed to this model’s popularity across the nation.

Nonetheless, Sanders passed away this past Thursday, March 16, 2017, from natural causes in Columbia, Tennessee. As per his obituary here,

  • He was most well-known for developing “a method used to measure a district, school, and teacher’s effect on student performance by tracking the year-to-year progress of students against themselves over their school career with various teachers’ classes.”
  • He “stood for a hopeful view that teacher effectiveness dwarfs all other factors as a predictor of student academic growth…[challenging]…decades of assumptions that student family life, income, or ethnicity has more effect on student learning.”
  • He believed, in the simplest of terms, “that educational influence matters and teachers matter most.”

Of course, we have much research evidence to counter these claims, but for now we will just leave all of this at that. Again, may he rest in peace.

New Texas Lawsuit: VAM-Based Estimates as Indicators of Teachers’ “Observable” Behaviors

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Last week I spent a few days in Austin, one day during which I provided expert testimony for a new state-level lawsuit that has the potential to impact teachers throughout Texas. The lawsuit — Texas State Teachers Association (TSTA) v. Texas Education Agency (TEA), Mike Morath in his Official Capacity as Commissioner of Education for the State of Texas.

The key issue is that, as per the state’s Texas Education Code (Sec. § 21.351, see here) regarding teachers’ “Recommended Appraisal Process and Performance Criteria,” The Commissioner of Education must adopt “a recommended teacher appraisal process and criteria on which to appraise the performance of teachers. The criteria must be based on observable, job-related behavior, including: (1) teachers’ implementation of discipline management procedures; and (2) the performance of teachers’ students.” As for the latter, the State/TEA/Commissioner defined, as per its Texas Administrative Code (T.A.C., Chapter 15, Sub-Chapter AA, §150.1001, see here), that teacher-level value-added measures should be treated as one of the four measures of “(2) the performance of teachers’ students;” that is, one of the four measures recognized by the State/TEA/Commissioner as an “observable” indicator of a teacher’s “job-related” performance.

While currently no district throughout the State of Texas is required to use a value-added component to assess and evaluate its teachers, as noted, the value-added component is listed as one of four measures from which districts must choose at least one. All options listed in the category of “observable” indicators include: (A) student learning objectives (SLOs); (B) student portfolios; (C) pre- and post-test results on district-level assessments; and (D) value-added data based on student state assessment results.

Related, the state has not recommended or required that any district, if the value-added option is selected, to choose any particular value-added model (VAM) or calculation approach. Nor has it recommended or required that any district adopt any consequences as attached to these output; however, things like teacher contract renewal and sharing teachers’ prior appraisals with other districts in which teachers might be applying for new jobs is not discouraged. Again, though, the main issue here (and the key points to which I testified) was that the value-added component is listed as an “observable” and “job-related” teacher effectiveness indicator as per the state’s administrative code.

Accordingly, my (5 hour) testimony was primarily (albeit among many other things including the “job-related” part) about how teacher-level value-added data do not yield anything that is observable in terms of teachers’ effects. Likewise, officially referring to these data in this way is entirely false, in fact, in that:

  • “We” cannot directly observe a teacher “adding” (or detracting) value (e.g., with our own eyes, like supervisors can when they conduct observations of teachers in practice);
  • Using students’ test scores to measure student growth upwards (or downwards) and over time, as is very common practice using the (very often instructionally insensitive) state-level tests required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and doing this once per year in mathematics and reading/language arts (that includes prior and other current teachers’ effects, summer learning gains and decay, etc.), is not valid practice. That is, doing this has not been validated by the scholarly/testing community; and
  • Worse and less valid is to thereafter aggregate this student-level growth to the teacher level and then call whatever “growth” (or the lack thereof) is because of something the teacher (and really only the teacher did), as directly “observable.” These data are far from assessing a teacher’s causal or “observable” impacts on his/her students’ learning and achievement over time. See, for example, the prior statement released about value-added data use in this regard by the American Statistical Association (ASA) here. In this statement it is written that: “Research on VAMs has been fairly consistent that aspects of educational effectiveness that are measurable and within teacher control represent a small part of the total variation [emphasis added to note that this is variation explained which = correlational versus causal research] in student test scores or growth; most estimates in the literature attribute between 1% and 14% of the total variability [emphasis added] to teachers. This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers [emphasis added] accounts for a small part of the variation [emphasis added] in [said test] scores. The majority of the variation in [said] test scores is [inversely, 86%-99% related] to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.”

If any of you have anything to add to this, please do so in the comments section of this post. Otherwise, I will keep you posted on how this goes. My current understanding is that this one will be headed to court.

New Article Published on Using Value-Added Data to Evaluate Teacher Education Programs

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A former colleague, a current PhD student, and I just had an article released about using value-added data to (or rather not to) evaluate teacher education/preparation, higher education programs. The article is titled “An Elusive Policy Imperative: Data and Methodological Challenges When Using Growth in Student Achievement to Evaluate Teacher Education Programs’ ‘Value-Added,” and the abstract of the article is included below.

If there is anyone out there who might be interested in this topic, please note that the journal in which this piece was published (online first and to be published in its paper version later) – Teaching Education – has made the article free for its first 50 visitors. Hence, I thought I’d share this with you all first.

If you’re interested, do access the full piece here.

Happy reading…and here’s the abstract:

In this study researchers examined the effectiveness of one of the largest teacher education programs located within the largest research-intensive universities within the US. They did this using a value-added model as per current federal educational policy imperatives to assess the measurable effects of teacher education programs on their teacher graduates’ students’ learning and achievement as compared to other teacher education programs. Correlational and group comparisons revealed little to no relationship between value-added scores and teacher education program regardless of subject area or position on the value-added scale. These findings are discussed within the context of several very important data and methodological challenges researchers also made transparent, as also likely common across many efforts to evaluate teacher education programs using value-added approaches. Such transparency and clarity might assist in the creation of more informed value-added practices (and more informed educational policies) surrounding teacher education accountability.

David Berliner on The Purported Failure of America’s Schools

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My primary mentor, David Berliner (Regents Professor at Arizona State University (ASU)) wrote, yesterday, a blog post for the Equity Alliance Blog (also at ASU) on “The Purported Failure of America’s Schools, and Ways to Make Them Better” (click here to access the original blog post). See other posts about David’s scholarship on this blog here, here, and here. See also one of our best blog posts that David also wrote here, about “Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs).”

In sum, for many years David has been writing “about the lies told about the poor performance of our students and the failure of our schools and teachers.” For example, he wrote one of the education profession’s all time classics and best sellers: The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public Schools (1995). If you have not read it, you should! All educators should read this book, on that note and in my opinion, but also in the opinion of many other iconic educational scholars throughout the U.S. (Paufler, Amrein-Beardsley, Hobson, under revision for publication).

While the title of this book accurately captures its contents, more specifically it “debunks the myths that test scores in America’s schools are falling, that illiteracy is rising, and that better funding has no benefit. It shares the good news about public education.” I’ve found the contents of this book to still be my best defense when others with whom I interact attack America’s public schools, as often misinformed and perpetuated by many American politicians and journalists.

In this blog post David, once again, debunks many of these myths surrounding America’s public schools using more up-to-date data from international tests, our country’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), state-level SAT and ACT scores, and the like. He reminds us of how student characteristics “strongly influence the [test] scores obtained by the students” at any school and, accordingly, “strongly influence” or bias these scores when used in any aggregate form (e.g., to hold teachers, schools, districts, and states accountable for their students’ performance).

He reminds us that “in the US, wealthy children attending public schools that serve the wealthy are competitive with any nation in the world…[but in]…schools in which low-income students do not achieve well, [that are not competitive with many nations in the world] we find the common correlates of poverty: low birth weight in the neighborhood, higher than average rates of teen and single parenthood, residential mobility, absenteeism, crime, and students in need of special education or English language instruction.” These societal factors explain poor performance much more (i.e., more variance explained) than any school-level, and as pertinent to this blog, teacher-level factor (e.g., teacher quality as measured by large-scale standardized test scores).

In this post David reminds us of much, much more, that we need to remember and also often recall in defense of our public schools and in support of our schools’ futures (e.g., research-based notes to help “fix” some of our public schools).

Again, please do visit the original blog post here to read more.