Last Saturday Night Live’s VAM-Related Skit

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

For those of you who may have missed it last Saturday, Melissa McCarthy portrayed Sean Spicer — President Trump’s new White House Press Secretary and Communications Director — in one of the funniest of a very funny set of skits recently released on Saturday Night Live. You can watch the full video, compliments of YouTube, here:

In one of the sections of the skit, though, “Spicer” introduces “Betsy DeVos” — portrayed by Kate McKinnon and also just today confirmed as President Trump’s Secretary of Education — to answer some very simple questions about today’s public schools which she, well, very simply could not answer. See this section of the clip starting at about 6:00 (of the above 8:00 minute total skit).

In short, “the man” reporter asks “DeVos” how she values “growth versus proficiency in [sic] measuring progress in students.” Literally at a loss of words, “DeVos” responds that she really doesn’t “know anything about school.” She rambles on, until “Spicer” pushes her off of the stage 40-or-so seconds later.

Humor set aside, this was the one question Saturday Night Live writers wrote into this skit, which reminds us that what we know more generally as the purpose of VAMs is still alive and well in our educational rhetoric as well as popular culture. As background, this question apparently came from Minnesota Sen. Al Franken’s prior, albeit similar question during DeVos’s confirmation hearing.

Notwithstanding, Steve Snyder – the editorial director of The 74 — an (allegedly) non-partisan, honest, and fact-based backed by Editor-in-Chief Campbell Brown (see prior posts about this news site here and here) — took the opportunity to write a “featured” piece about this section of the script (see here). The purpose of the piece was, as the title illustrates, to help us “understand” the skit, as well as it’s important meaning for all of “us.”

Snyder notes that Saturday Night Live writers, with their humor, might have consequently (and perhaps mistakenly) “made their viewers just a little more knowledgeable about how their child’s school works,” or rather should work, as “[g]rowth vs. proficiency is a key concept in the world of education research.” Thereafter, Snyder falsely asserts that more than 2/3rds of educational researchers agree that VAMs are a good way to measure school quality. If you visit the actual statistic cited in this piece, however, as “non-partison, honest, and fact-based” that it is supposed to be, you would find (here) that this 2/3rds consists of 57% of responding American Education Finance Association (AEFA) members, and AEFA members alone, who are certainly not representative of “educational researchers” as claimed.

Regardless, Snyder asks: “Why are researchers…so in favor of [these] growth measures?” Because this disciplinary subset does not represent educational researchers writ large, but only a subset, Snyder.

As it is with politics today, many educational researchers who define themselves as aligned with the disciplines of educational finance or educational econometricians are substantively more in favor of VAMs than those who align more with the more general disciplines of educational research and educational measurement, methods, and statistics, in general. While this is somewhat of a sweeping generalization, which is not wise as I also argue and also acknowledge in this piece, there is certainly more to be said here about the validity of the inferences drawn here, and (too) often driven via the “media” like The 74.

The bottom line is to question and critically consume everything, and everyone who feels qualified to write about particular things without enough expertise in most everything, including in this case good and professional journalism, this area of educational research, and what it means to make valid inferences and then responsibly share them out with the public.

Badass Teachers (BATs) Respond to TIME Magazine

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

Following up on a recent post about “TIME Magazine Need[ing] a TIME Out,” the leaders of the Bad Ass Teachers Association (BAT) sent the following letter to TIME magazine in response. They also sent the letter to Diane Ravitch (see here), and I’ve also pasted their letter below. It’s certainly worth a read of what they wrote:

As delegates of an organization that represents the collective voices of 53,000 teachers, we take issue with the cover [see below] selected for the November 3 edition of Time. We believe that the image is journalistically irresponsible because it unfairly paints teachers and teacher tenure in a negative light.

The gavel as a symbol of corporate education, smashing the apple – the universal symbol of education – reinforces a text applauding yet another requested deathblow to teacher tenure. Instead of clarity, this continues the misconception that tenure ensures a job for life. It does not. It ensures “just cause” rationale before teachers can be fired. [Related, see a recent Washington Post article about how an all round “excellent” teacher is suing the state of New York given her lack of due process here].

In addition, the cover perpetuates the pernicious myth of the “bad” teacher and tenure as the prime enablers of larger failures in American education. This is a false narrative. These failures are due to structural inequalities and chronic underfunding in our educational systems, not due to teachers and teacher tenure.

The cover feeds this narrative with the misleading statement, “It is nearly impossible to fire bad teachers.” A few months ago talk show host Whoopi Goldberg made similar statements suffering under the same basic misunderstanding of teacher tenure as something akin to what college professors enjoy rather than a simple guarantee of procedural due process which is its function in K-12 education.

Nevertheless, opponents of teacher tenure have consistently invoked the “bad teacher” argument as pretext to attack not only teachers but also teacher unions, arguing that they place the needs of students second to the protection of underperforming teachers.
In fact, teacher tenure has served as an important protection to allow teachers to advocate for students— especially with regard to maintaining manageable class sizes, safe instructional spaces, the needs of students who are English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities.

Given the massive increase in student enrollments, one of the greatest shortfalls is in the number of teachers themselves. A simple accounting of all the teaching positions lost in the great recessions reveals that the nation would need 377,000 more teachers in the classroom just to keep pace not to mention combat the shameful shortage of teachers of color.

In its haste to disparage teachers, the cover inadvertently tells a larger truth. The instrument used to destroy teacher tenure is wielded against the entire profession. It seeks to obliterate due process for all teachers rather than to ensure its proper use.

More significantly, the cover uncritically situates the tech millionaires as saviors without revealing their own self-interest in the tenure fight, the creation of a nation of corporate-run franchise schools taught by untrained teachers and measured by high stakes test[s] developed and administered by those same millionaires.

In an age where transparency in politics and journalism is sorely needed, we regret Time’s decision to proceed with a cover so clearly at odds with the truth.

The Badass Teachers Association
(Created by BAT Administrators and edited by Marla Kilfoyle, Melissa Tomlinson, Steven Singer, and Dr. Yohuru Williams)

Vergara in New York, Thanks (in Part) to Campbell Brown

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

In a post I wrote about “Vergara Going on Tour,” I wrote about how the financier of the Vergara v. California case was preparing to bring similar suits to New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico, Idaho, and Kansas. As well, the law firm that won the Vergara case for the plaintiffs, was also reported to have officially signed on to help defend the Houston Independent School District (HISD) on the forthcoming lawsuit during which, this time, the court will be investigating the EVAAS value-added system and its low- and high-stakes uses in HISD (this is also the source of a recent post here).

Last month, it was reported that New York was the next state on the tour, so-to-speak. To read a post from July about all of this, written by Bruce Baker at Rutgers titled “The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State!” click here.

It also seems that Campbell Brown, previous host of the Campbell Brown Show on CNN and award winning news anchor/journalist for multiple media outlets elsewhere, has joined “the cause” and even started her own foundation in support, aptly named the Partnership for Education Justice. Read more about their mission, as well as “The Challenge” and “The Solution” in America’s public schools as per America’s public school teachers as they define these here.

In New York specifically, via their first but unfortunately and likely not their last “project,” they are helping families “fight for the great teachers their children deserve by challenging factory-era laws that keep poorly-performing teachers in the classroom.” Read also about “The Problem,” the “Roadblocks,” and the like as they pertain to this specific suit in New York here. It probably won’t surprise you to see what research they are using to justify their advocacy work either – give it a quick guess and then check to verify here. Here is also a related article Brown recently wrote about how she (with all of her wisdom about America’s public school system – sorry) feels about teacher tenure.

Anyhow, last month (July 31, 2014) she was interviewed by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report on the Comedy Channel. Give this a watch to see what this is all about, in her terms and as per her (wrongheaded, misinformed, etc.) perspectives. See also Colbert’s funny but also wise response(s) to her aforementioned perspectives.

Watch it here:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

The Colbert Report i

The Study that Keeps on Giving…(Hopefully) in its Final Round

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

In January I wrote a post about “The Study that Keeps on Giving…” Specifically, this post was about the study conducted and authored by Raj Chetty (Economics Professor at Harvard), John Friedman (Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard), and Jonah Rockoff (Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Harvard) that was published first in 2011 (in its non-peer-reviewed and not even internally reviewed form) by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and then published again by NBER in January of 2014 (in the same form) but this time split into two separate studies (see them split here and here).

Their re-release of the same albeit split study was what prompted the title of the initial “The Study that Keeps on Giving…” post. Little did I know then, though, that the reason this study was re-released in split form was that it was soon to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Its non-peer-reviewed publication status was a major source of prior criticism. While journal editors seemed to have suggested the split, NBER seemingly took advantage of this opportunity to publicize this study in two forms, regardless and without prior explanation.

Anyhow, this came to my attention when the study’s lead author – Raj Chetty – emailed me a few weeks ago, emailed Diane Ravitch on the same email, and also apparently emailed other study “critics” at the same time (see prior reviews of this study as per this study’s other notable “critics” here, here, here, and here) to notify all of us that this study made it through peer review and was to be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Economic Review. While Diane and I responded to our joint email (as other critics may have done as well), we ultimately promised Chetty that we would not share the actual contents of any of the approximately 20 email exchanges that went back and forth among the three of us over the following days.

What I can say, though, is that no genuine concern was expressed by Chetty or on behalf of his co-authors, in particular, about the intended or unintended consequences that came about as a result of his study, nor how many policymakers since used and abused study results for political gain and the further advancement of VAM-based policies. Instead, emails were more or less self-promotional and celebratory, especially given that President Obama cited the study in his 2012 State of the Union Address and that Chetty apparently continues to advise U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about his similar VAM-based policies. Perhaps, next, the Nobel prize committee might pay this study its due respects, now overdue, but again I only paraphrase from that which I inferred from these email conversations.

As a refresher, Chetty et al. conducted value-added analyses on a massive data set (with over 1 million student-level test and tax records) and presented (highly-questionable) evidence that favored teachers’ long-lasting, enduring, and in some cases miraculous effects. While some of the findings would have been very welcomed to the profession, had they indeed been true (e.g., high value-added teachers substantively affect students incomes in their adult years), the study’s authors overstated their findings, and they did not duly consider (or provide evidence to counter) the alternative hypotheses in terms of what other factors besides teachers might have caused the outcomes they observed (e.g., those things that happen outside of schools while students are in school and throughout students’ lives).

Nor did they consider, or rather satisfactorily consider, how the non-random assignment of students into both schools and classrooms might have biased the effects observed, whereas the students in high “value-added” teachers’ classrooms might have been more “likely to succeed” regardless of, or even despite the teacher effect, on both the short and long term effects demonstrated in their findings…then widely publicized via the media and beyond throughout other political spheres.

Rather, Chetty et al. advanced what they argued were a series of causal effects by exploiting a series of correlations that they turned attributional. They did this because (I believe) they truly believe that their sophisticated econometric models and the sophisticated controls and approaches they use in fact work as intended. Perhaps this also explains why Chetty et al. give pretty much all credit in the area of value-added research to econometricians, and they do this throughout their papers, all the while over-citing the works of their economic researchers/friends but not the others (besides Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, see the full reference to his study here) who have also outright contradicted their findings, with evidence. Apparently, educational researchers do not have much to add on this topic, but I digress.

But this is too a serious fault as “they” (and I don’t mean to make sweeping generalizations here) have never been much for understanding what goes into the data they analyze, as socially constructed and largely context dependent. Nor do they seem to care to fully understand the realities of the classrooms from which they receive such data, or what test scores actually mean, or when using them what one can and cannot actually infer. This, too, was made clear via our email exchange. It seems this from-the-sky-down view of educational data is the best (as well as the most convenient) approach that “they” might even expressly prefer, so that they do not have to get their data fingers dirty and deal with the messiness that always surrounds these types of educational data and always comes into play when conducting most any type of educational research that relies (in this case solely) on students’ large-scale standardized test scores.

Regardless, I decided to give this study yet another review to see if, now that this study has made it through the peer review process, I was missing something. I wasn’t. The studies are pretty much exactly the same as they were when first released (which unfortunately does not say much for peer review). The first study here is about VAM-based bias and how VAM estimates that control for students’ prior test scores “exhibit little bias despite the grouping of students” and despite the number of studies not referenced or cited that continue to evidence the opposite. The second study here is about teacher-level value-added and how teachers with a lot of it (purportedly) cause grander things throughout their students’ lives. More specifically, they found that “students [non-randomly] assigned to high [value-added] teachers are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have children as teenagers.” They also found that “[r]eplacing a teacher whose [value-added] is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by approximately $250,000 per classroom [emphasis added].” Please note that this overstated figure is not per student; had it been broken out by student it would have rather become “chump change,” for the lack of a better term, which serves as one example of just one of their classic exaggerations. They do, however, when you read through the actual text, tone their powerful language down a bit to note that, on average, this is more accurately $185,000, still per classroom. Again, to read the more thorough critiques conducted by scholars with also impressive academic profiles, I suggest readers click here, here, here, or here.

What I did find important to bring to light during this round of review were the assumptions that, thanks to Chetty and his emails, were made more obvious (and likewise troublesome) than before. These are the, in some cases, “very strong” assumptions that Chetty et al. make explicit in both of their studies (see Assumptions 1-3 in the first and second papers). These are also the assumptions they make explicit, with “evidence” why they should not reject these assumptions (most likely, and in some cases clearly) because their study relied on such assumptions. The assumptions they made were so strong, in fact, at one point they even mention that it would be useful could they have “relaxed” some of the assumptions they made. In other cases, they justify their adoption of these assumptions given the data limitations and methodological issues they faced, plain and simply because there was no other way to conduct (or continue) their analyses without making and agreeing to these assumptions.

So, see if you agree with the following three assumptions they make most explicit and use throughout both studies (although other assumptions are littered throughout both pieces), yourselves. I would love for Chetty et al. to discuss whether their assumptions in fact hold given the realities the everyday teacher, school, or classroom face. But again, I digress…

Assumption 1 [Stationarity]: Teacher levels of value-added as based on growth in student achievement over time follows a stationary, unchanging, constant, and consistent process. On average, “teacher quality does not vary across calendar years and [rather] depends only on the amount of time that elapses between” years. While completely nonsensical to the average adult with really any commonsense, this assumption, to them, helped them “simplif[y] the estimation of teacher [value-added] by reducing the number of parameters” needed in their models, or more appropriately needed to model their effects.

Assumption 2 [Selection on Excluded Observables]: Students are sorted or assigned to teachers on excluded observables that can be estimated. See a recent study that I conducted with a doctoral student of mine (that was just published in this month’s issue of the highly esteemed American Educational Research Journal here) in which we found, with evidence, that 98% of the time this assumption is false. Students are non-randomly sorted on “observables” and “non-observables” (most of which are not and cannot be included in such data sets) 98% of the time; both types of variables bias teacher-level value-added over time given the statistical procedures meant to control for these variables do not work effectively well, especially for students in the extremes or on both sides of the normal bell curve. While convenient, especially when conducting this type of far-removed research, this assumption is false and cannot really be taken seriously given the pragmatic realities of schools.

Assumption 3 [Teacher Switching as a Quasi-Experiment]: Changes in teacher-level value-added scores across cohorts within a school-grade are orthogonal (i.e., non-overlapping, uncorrelated, or independent) with changes in other determinants of student scores. While Chetty et al. themselves write that this assumption “could potentially be violated by endogenous student or teacher sorting to schools over time,” they also state that “[s]tudent sorting at an annual frequency is minimal because of the costs of changing schools” which is yet another unchecked assumption without reference(s) in support. They further note that “[w]hile endogenous teacher sorting is plausible over long horizons, the high-frequency changes [they] analyze are likely driven by idiosyncratic shocks such as changes in staffing needs, maternity leaves, or the relocation of spouses.” These are all plausible assumptions too, right? Is “high-frequency teacher turnover…uncorrelated with student and school characteristics?” Concerns about this and really all of these assumptions, and ultimately how they impact study findings, should certainly cause pause.

My final point, interestingly enough, also came up during the email exchanges mentioned above. Chetty made the argument that he, more or less, had no dog in the fight surrounding value-added. In the first sentence of the first manuscript, however, he (and his colleagues) wrote, “Are teachers’ impacts on students’ test scores (“value-added”) a good measure of their quality?” The answer soon thereafter and repeatedly made known in both papers becomes an unequivocal “Yes.” Chetty et al. write in the first paper that “[they] established that value-added measures can help us [emphasis added as “us” is undefined] identify which teachers have the greatest ability to raise students’ test scores.” In the second paper, they write that “We find that teacher [value-added] has substantial impacts on a broad range of outcomes.” Apparently, Chetty wasn’t representing his and/or his colleagues’ honest “research-based” opinions and feelings about VAMs in one place (i.e., our emails) or the other (his publications) very well.

Contradictions…as nettlesome as those dirtly little assumptions I suppose.

The Study That Keeps On Giving…

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

About two months ago, I posted (1) a critique of a highly publicized Mathematica Policy Research study released to the media about the vastly overstated “value” of value-added measures, and (2) another critique of another study released to the media by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). This one, like the other, was not peer-reviewed, or even internally reviewed, yet it was released despite its major issues (e.g., overstated findings about VAMs based on a sample for which only 17% of teachers actually had value-added data).

Again, neither study went through a peer review process, both were wrought with methodological and conceptual issues that did not warrant study findings, and both, regardless, were released to the media for wide dissemination.

Yet again, VAM enthusiasts are attempting to VAMboozle policymakers and the general public with another faulty study, again released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). But, in an unprecedented move, this time NBER has released the same, highly flawed study three times, even though the first study first released in 2011 still has not made it through peer-review to official publication and it has, accordingly, not proved itself as anything more than a technical report with major methodological issues.

In the first study (2011) Raj Chetty (Economics Professor at Harvard), John Friedman (Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard), and Jonah Rockoff (Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Harvard) conducted value-added analyses on a massive data set and (over-simplistically) presented (highly-questionable) evidence that favored teachers’ long-lasting, enduring, and in some cases miraculous effects. While some of the findings would have been very welcomed to the profession, had they indeed been true (e.g., high value-added teachers substantively affect students incomes in their adult years), the study’s authors way-overstated their findings, and they did not consider alternative hypotheses in terms of what other factors besides teachers might have caused the outcomes they observed (e.g., those things that happen outside of schools).

Accordingly, and more than appropriately, this study has only been critiqued since, in subsequent attempts to undo what should not have been done in the first place (thanks to both the media and the study’s authors given the exaggerated spin they spun given their results). See, for example, one peer-reviewed critique here, two others conducted by well-known education scholars (i.e., Bruce Baker [Education Professor at Rutgers] and Dale Ballou [Associate Professor of Education at Vanderbilt)) here and here, and another released by the Institute of Education Sciences’ What Works Clearinghouse here.

Maybe in response to their critics, maybe to drive the false findings into more malformed policies, maybe because Chetty (the study’s lead author) just received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association, or maybe to have the last word, NBER just released the same exact paper in two more installments. See the second and third releases, positioned as Part I and Part II, to see that they are exactly the same but being promulgated, yet again. While “they” acknowledge that they have done this on the first page of each of the two, it is pretty unethical to go the second round given all of the criticism, the positive and negative press this “working paper” received after its original release(s), and given the study has still not made it through to print in a peer-reviewed journal.

*Thanks to Sarah Polasky for helping with this post.

The 2013 Bunkum Awards & the Gates Foundation’s $45 MET Studies

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

Tis the award season, and during this time every year, the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) recognizing the “lowlights” in educational research over the previous year, in their annual Bunkum Awards. To view the entertaining video presentation of the awards, hosted by my mentor David Berliner (Arizona State University), please click here.

Lowlights, specifically defined, include research studies in which researchers present, and often oversell thanks to many media outlets, “weak data, shoddy analyses, and overblown recommendations.” Like the Razzies are to the Oscars in the Academy of Film, are the Bunkums to the best educational research studies in the Academy of Education. And like the Razzies, “As long as the bunk [like junk] keeps flowing, the awards will keep coming.”

As per David Berliner, in his introduction in the video, “the taxpayers who finance public education deserve smart [educational] policies based on sound [research-based] evidence.” This is precisely why these awards are both necessary, and morally imperative.

One among this year’s deserving honorees is of particular pertinence here. This is the, drum roll: ‘We’re Pretty Sure We Could Have Done More with $45 Million’ Award — Awarded to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for Two Culminating Reports they released this year from their Measures of Effective (MET) Project. To see David’s presentation on this award, specifically, scroll to minute 3:15 (to 4:30) in the aforementioned video.

Those at NEPC write about these studies: “We think it important to recognize whenever so little is produced at such great cost. The MET researchers gathered a huge data base reporting on thousands of teachers in six cities. Part of the study’s purpose was to address teacher evaluation methods using randomly assigned students. Unfortunately, the students did not remain randomly assigned and some teachers and students did not even participate. This had deleterious effects on the study–limitations that somehow got overlooked in the infinite retelling and exaggeration of the findings.

When the MET researchers studied the separate and combined effects of teacher observations, value-added test scores, and student surveys, they found correlations so weak that no common attribute or characteristic of teacher-quality could be found. Even with 45 million dollars and a crackerjack team of researchers, they could not define an “effective teacher.” In fact, none of the three types of performance measures captured much of the variation in teachers’ impacts on conceptually demanding tests. But that didn’t stop the Gates folks, in a reprise from their 2011 Bunkum-winning ways, from announcing that they’d found a way to measure effective teaching, nor did it deter the federal government from strong-arming states into adoption of policies tying teacher evaluation to measures of students’ growth.”

To read the full critique of both of these studies, written by Jesse Rothstein (University of California – Berkeley) and William Mathis (University of Colorado – Boulder), please click here.

Follow-Up to Previous Post

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

I want to bring attention to a revision I made on the previous post about the 44 teachers “misclassified” in DC. I want to be clear that while only 44 teachers were officially acknowledged as having received incorrect teacher evaluation scores, this number is unquestionably much higher than that given these formulas are always “subject to error”… and actually subject to gross errors, always, across the board. Regardless of what the official reports might reveal, it should be duly noted that it was not just these 44 who were “misclassified” due to this “minor glitch.”

Thanks to Bruce Baker, Professor at Rutgers and author of School Finance 101, for the collegial reminder to clarify this point.

AFT’s Randi Weingarten (Finally) Speaking Out Against VAMs

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

As just posted on Diane Ravitch’s blog, Randi Weingarten, the current president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), has (finally) expressed her full opposition against using value-added models (VAMs), the statistical measures of utmost interest on this blog, for teacher evaluation, accountability, and merit pay purposes.

I echo Diane’s sentiments that this is indeed “great news!” and that Weingarten should be saluted for her courage and insight, particularly as Weingarten has given up her previously held position, given the research evidence. She is now launching a campaign against VAMs and their (mis)uses.

As background, Randi wrote the foreword to the only academic book that has been released on VAMs to date — Value-Added Measures in Education — written by now Tulane Associate Professor of Economics, Douglas Harris. In addition, Weingarten unfortunately wrote the foreword in support of Harris’s overall (and, in my opinion, highly misguided and prematurely enthusiastic) stance on VAMs, writing things like Harris “presents a convincing argument that value-added’s imprecision need not be a deal breaker as long as we understand where it comes from and how to account for it when these measures are used in schools. We cannot expect any measures of teacher quality – value-added or others – to be perfect.” Unfortunately, Weingarten co-signed Harris’s stance that VAMs are “good enough” for their current uses and utilities, mainly riding on the fact that they are better than the other test-based accountability options used in the past. For more about Harris’s book and his overall position, read a commentary I wrote in Teachers College Record in review of his book and his “good enough” stance.

As per a recent post on politico.com, Weingarten’s new mantra is that “VAM is a sham.” This is “a notable shift for the AFT and its affiliates, which have previously ratified contracts and endorsed evaluation systems that rely on VAM. Weingarten tells Morning Education that she has always been leery of value-added ‘but we rolled up our sleeves, acted in good faith and tried to make it work. Now, she says, she’s disillusioned.”

“What changed her mind? Weingarten points to a standoff in Pittsburgh over the implementation of a VAM-based evaluation system the union had endorsed. She says the algorithms and cut scores used to rate teachers were arbitrary. And she found the process corrosive: The VAM score was just a number that didn’t show teachers their strengths or weaknesses or suggest ways to improve. Weingarten said the final straw was the news that the contractor calculating VAM scores for D.C. teachers made a typo in the algorithm, resulting in 44 teachers receiving incorrect scores — including one who was unjustly fired for poor performance.”

“What’s next? The AFT’s newly militant stance against VAM will likely affect contract negotiations in local districts, and the union also plans to lobby the Education Department.”

“Evaluation Systems that are Byzantine at Best and At Worst, Draconian”

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

As per the New Year, Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post recently released the top 11 education-related “The Answer Sheet’s” articles of the year, the top article focused on a letter to the Post explaining why he finally decided to leave the teaching “profession.” For multiple reasons, he writes of both his sadness and discontent, and most pertinently here, given the nature of this blog, he writes (as highlighted in the title of this post): “Evaluation Systems that are Byzantine at Best and At Worst, Draconian”

He writes: “My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common [i.e., the common core] to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom [i.e., value-added and its inputs and outputs].”

He continues: “[D]ata driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core…Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education.”

He then concludes: “After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists.”

Take a read for yourself, as there is much more to read not directly related to the teacher evaluation systems he protests. And perhaps take a read, with a New Year’s resolution to help this not [continue to] happen to others.

VAMboozled!

VAMboozled! A blog by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

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