I don’t spend much time debunking our most powerful educational fad: assessments of teachers to determine how much value they have added to a student’s career. Unfortunately, value-added is still growing in every corner of our nation. It’s like those monsters lumbering through this year’s action films. We’ve got to stop them! Let me fling my small, aged body in their way with the best argument against value-added I have seen in some time.
It comes from education analyst and teacher trainer Grant Wiggins and his “Granted, but … ” blog. He starts with the reasons many people like the idea of value-added. Why not rate teachers by how much their students improve over time? In theory, this allows us to judge teachers in low- and high-income schools fairly, instead of declaring, as we do, that the teachers in rich neighborhoods are better than those in poor neighborhoods because their students’ test scores are higher.
“I have seen this sham firsthand over many years,” Wiggins writes. “Lots of so-called good N.J. and N.Y. suburban districts are truly awful when you look firsthand (as I have for three decades) at the pedagogy, assignments and local assessments; but those kids outscore the kids from Trenton and New York City, even though both city systems have a number of outstanding schools and teachers.”
Money makes a big difference. “For every $10,000 increase in family income, SAT scores rise approximately 15 points,” he said.
Also, Wiggins wrote, valid research on value-added exposes “hidden truths,” such as ‘it IS true that models accurately predict over a three-year period, performance at the extremes. Thus, the really effective teachers stay so and the really ineffective ones are really ineffective.”
Schools with high test scores discover through value-added analysis that they need more than that. One outstanding prep school, Wiggins said, gave a professionally designed test of critical thinking to freshmen and seniors. There was no improvement. Similar results have come from colleges giving the Collegiate Learning Assessment of analytical skills, given to freshmen and seniors.
Our mistake was thinking this valuable long-term research tool would work as a one-year teacher rating system. “It becomes like a sick game of telephone: What starts out as a reasonable idea, when whispered down the line to people who don’t really get the details — or don’t want to get them — becomes an abomination,” he wrote. “By looking at individual teachers, over only one year (instead of the minimum three years as the psychometricians and valued-added model designers stress), we now demand more from the tests than can be obtained with sufficient precision.”
New value-added assessments in Washington, New York and elsewhere carry a whiff of Stalinist economic planning: secretive measures immune to review or logic. Wiggins said we have re-invented “the Russian wheat quotas of the 1950s. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.”
What should we do instead? Wiggins suggests we look at how we create success in sports. Many great classroom teachers have told me the same thing. Follow the methods of great coaches, Wiggins said: “Utterly transparent and valid measures, timely and frequent results, the ability to challenge judgments made, many diverse measurements over time, teacher-coach ownership of the rules and systems, and tiered leagues in which we have reasonable expectation and good incentive to make genuine improvement over time.”
I would add one more athletic device: working as a team. That is the way the best schools I know operate. They focus on how well the whole school improves rather than trying to rate precisely how much each teacher’s students improve each year.
We don’t need teacher evaluations to measure lofty goals, like how much they matter in a kids live. We need teacher evaluations to weed the lousy teachers out of a system that has too little accountability. Bad teacher, like all teachers, tend to stay in their jobs for their entire lives. We need tools that encourage them to move along.
Bad teachers, like most teachers, tend to find different careers. 40% of Education Graduates will never teach finding out early that they were bad teachers. Another 40-50% will weed themselves out in the first 5 years. There is a reason unemployment for teachers is less than 4%.
Have you ever been a school teacher-I have?Lot’s of great teachers leave the teaching field due to working conditions, lack of parental support-respect and low pay. Who wants to take on all of those loans to start out at a little over 30k? Your second sentence makes no sense. How does one find out they are bad teachers if they never teach?
I was referring to the student teaching process when people find out they do not have what it takes to be a teacher. I do not believe that everyone who leaves teaching are automatically bad teachers. I was pointing out how bad teachers exit themselves out of the career routinely. There is a reason so few teachers are dismissed publicly. Most know and leave because they do not want to harm the students or are counselled out.
A lot of young student teachers are soured by the person that has taken them on as a student teacher. At 22 one is not likely to know if they have what it takes. The average teacher lasts three years or in my case until I served on the contract committee.