Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

The Washington State legislature has drawn a line in the sand: the Daily Olympian reports that they are refusing to change their statewide teacher evaluation system to incorporate value added measures and, in so doing, are likely to “…lose control over roughly $38 million in Title I funds designed to help low-income students.” You are reading that correctly, because the State legislature refuses to adopt a teacher evaluation plan that incorporates an unproven method for assessing teacher performance the federal government is going to penalize districts serving the poorest children in the state.

A week earlier I read a post by Cathy O’Neill (aka the Mathbabe) who wrote about her failed efforts (thus far) to get the NYDOE to share the formula they use to calculate each teacher’s added value. Her  explanation for why she wanted to do this is straightforward: she thinks the VAM model “sucks”. She added the following elaboration:

Plus, since the New York Times and other news outlets published teacher’s VAM scores after a long battle and a FOIA request (see details about this here), I figured it’s only fair to also publicly release the actual black box which determines those scores.

Indeed without knowledge of what the model consists of, the VAM scoring regime is little more than a secret set of rules, with tremendous power over teachers and the teacher union, and also incorporates outrageous public shaming as described above.

I think teachers deserve better, and I want to illustrate the weaknesses of the model directly on anopen models platform.

Imagine! A college professor wanting to provide the public and teachers with a clear explanation of the method being used to rank them! Why hasn’t a newspaper done this? They seem willing to publish the results as definitive but ask no questions about how the numbers are derived and, therefore, can shed no real light on precisely what they mean.

There IS some hope that the VAM advocates and testing advocates have reached to far. Many parents are opting out of the testing regimen in states where it was imposed quickly and thoughtlessly and, in some cases, their actions are getting the attention of legislators… Here’s hoping against hope that the legislators will be as responsive to parents as they’ve been to test developers.