From the NYT, on value added – profiling a young, energetic and by all accounts highly successful teacher with a bad value added score.
I guess it was a matter of time before the media stopped acting 100% in love with value added scores; but what a relief.
I had a conversation with an old friend today who works in the federal government, in the department of labor. We were talking about various unhealthy, ineffective patterns and dynamics (and people, truth be told) in our respective professional worlds. Both of us are depressed by lack of effectiveness.
It is in the name of effectiveness, of course, that districts across the nation have been jumping headlong into the practice of rating teachers based on an opaque calculation with their students’ test scores, on tests that were already dubious measures of anything worthwhile, and then using these ratings to make decisions affecting teachers’ jobs. I don’t know the best policy environment to promote teacher effectiveness, but I know for certain it’s not this. If you want to find a perfect system for diverting all teachers’ attention away from their students’ learning and their own growth, look no further than value added ratings.
I don’t want to be preaching to the choir here (although I probably am), so to the proponents of value-added measures, let me say this:
I know what I’m saying sounds counterintuitive to you – why wouldn’t incentivizing having your students perform well on measures of their learning lead you to focus on their learning? I will put aside for the moment the extremely important question of whether state tests are a measure of students’ learning (let alone whether value-added methodology really measures teachers’ contribution to it), and respond with an even more fundamental question:
Think of the last time you did something complicated and nuanced, something rich and interesting enough to require some creativity and artfulness from you. Imagine now that you were REALLY ANXIOUS about the outcome while you planned and performed your work. Would this anxiety really help you do it better?
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On a lighter note (well, sort of):
From Shawn Cornally, on teaching evolution:
So many people trying to tell us how to teach promote the just-say-it-better model of education. This doesn’t work. You can’t just talk at kids and say things ‘better’ than your teachers did. They need time to simmer. They need time to think. They need people to lay off and let them fucking think for a second.
Word.
Research in Practice 
This is all part of the “data driven” mania that transfers decision-making from thoughtful adult observers-thinkers to the data. (No need to think!) To me it is akin to the student who blames the calculator for coming up with a wrong answer. Operator error is the culprit here, too. There are people in classrooms who probably should not be teaching, but year after year they receive good, if not glowing, evaluations from administrators who have never taught, not taught recently (in era of standards & standards testing), and/or have no idea how to help a struggling teacher.
Mel Riddile’s Dec 15 post (Its poverty stupid) in the Secondary School Principals’ blog (The Principal Difference) should be required reading by every school board member, politician, and administrator.