"Value-added"

                                                    

by Brian

My wife owns her own business, a home decor shop, and I think I first heard the phrase "value-added" from her.  She talked about finding an article at an estate sale, adding something to it to increase its value, marking up the price, and making some money.  Value-added.

Now the phrase is being used with respect to evaluating teacher performance:  when you get a student in September she knows something.  Measure that and compare it to what she knows in June.  If she knows more in June, value has been added.  If she knows a lot more in June, there is real evidence that effective teaching has occurred.  If there is little improvement from September to June; well there's the rub, because there are a myriad of reasons to keep a student from advancing that are outside of a teacher's control.  So the largest teachers' unions (the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers) have been reluctant to endorse any kind of value-added component for teacher evaluation.  But doesn't this make more sense than measuring last year's class against this year's?  Or this year's against next year's?  The idea that each year the class we are testing should do better than the class we tested last year is so dumb it's not even wrong.

  

We have to start looking at individual students, not averages.  A recent article in the Los Angeles Times highlighted the efforts of Superintendent Terry Grier to bring value-added to the table in the San Diego Unified School District.  The problem for the unions was not that truly good teaching would be recognized, it was that the potential for singling out the most ineffective teachers would also be also possible.  And if we could identify effective teachers we could pay them more, which is merit pay, and like Charter Schools, that draws a knee-jerk NO from the unions.

Ask yourself this: Is there a teacher in your building who receives a satisfactory evaluation year after year because an administrator visits his classroom twice a year and decides it looks OK?  And is there any evidence that students are actually learning anything in his class?  Research says the most important factor in improving student performance is effective teaching.  But in current evaluation systems where is the evidence that students are learning?

So read the article, and tell me what you think about value-added as a tool for teacher evaluation.

Comments

[Mark]

I think the ultimately flaw with merit pay is in who or what is measuring the "merit." Test scores alone are not worthy measures, since they don't actually show student progress. If snapshot student performance is the measure by which teacher performance is being assessed, no teacher with a family to support with teach intervention, remediation, or inclusion...especially if there is only a one-time measure rather than a tracking of growth during the students' contact time with the teacher (not measuring their growth from 8th grade to 10th grade if I only have them in the 10th grade, for example).

[Brian]

Tom:
1. I am not a Biblical scholar; but I have always been fascinated by the parable of the 'Workers in the Vineyard'. The workers hired first were given the same pay as those that only worked an hour, and they were unhappy. If I teach a subject that is tested by the state, and I am accountable to the public for that responsibility, maybe I deserve more pay.
2. I am not opposed to teaching to the test. Actually, I think it is the rational thing to do, unless the test is flawed.
3. If I have 25 students, and I cannot move some of them to a higher level for reasons beyond my control, then the value-added formula needs to compensate for that. I'm a math guy; I think that can be done.

Your use of quotation marks on knee-jerk is interesting. I think it means you think the NEA is right. Is there any scenario in which you see merit pay working? Are we really all the same?

[Tom]

I think Value Added teacher assessment might be useful. But I have three caveats:

1. A lot of teachers teach subjects that aren't tested or even "testable." What happens to them?

2. Whenever you identify a certain student metric as the means by which you will assess and then differentially pay a teacher, you have to be prepared for that teacher to focus a lot of time and energy toward raising that metric. And away from everything else.

3. The external factors that affect a student's current level of achievement also affect a student's capacity to achieve. This matters, because students are not randomly placed into classrooms, and it has strong implications on the fairness of a value-added system.

By the way, these are three of the reasons why the NEA has a "knee-jerk" negative reaction to merit pay based on student test scores, including value-added systems.

[Brian]

Bob, with regard to the requirements of NCLB, I say let the chips fall where they may. It's a flawed law. My job is to move every student of mine farther along the path of learning math. When they meet the state standard, we celebrate.

Kristin, there seems to be a recurring theme in many of your posts/comments: It seems that you cannot suffer a bad teacher. I wonder if you would go so far as to endorse what I call the MLB (Major League Baseball) model: Every year, every teacher would have to compete for their job with a fresh crop of applicants? The best teacher gets the job. The hot-shot rookie replaces the aging veteran. Would you go that far?

Mark, you're right, electives are the biggest victim of NCLB. My son is an artist, and he just graduated from The Evergreen State College with a degree in, well, you know. A degree. But it is a Bachelor's Degree from a respected liberal arts college, and he would not have accomplished that without a rich menu of art electives in our high school. So we need to change NCLB, and start giving more value to the electives that keep kids in school, and enrich their lives. I don't know how you measure value-added in art, but I know good art when I see it :-)

[Mark]

I agree with the idea of a "value added" observation/evaluation but I wonder by what measures of student achievement that can be identified. To measure "value added" performance when students are assessed only once in a year (or in some cases, not at all, as in the case of anything except English, science, and math) seems to invite far too many variables which are not attributable to the teacher.

I administer the state reading and writing test to my sophomores, and if they have been residents in the state of Washington for three years, I can compare their HS scores to their MS scores, but there are many, many factors which might impact a positive change in test scores from middle school to high school which might not actually be the result of my instruction--the most obvious being that the 10th grade test is required for graduation and the middle school tests have no such stakes... hence student choose to take the 10th grade test more seriously (they've reported the same in perceiver surveys I administer). I could use my own assessments (pre and post) where I've tracked their gains and analyzed their progress, but I think there will be understandable reservations against a teacher's performance being assessed using data from instruments that teacher designed or chose... like the teacher who says they are a superior teacher because all his students have As in class, if the teacher is constructing the assessments and assigning those grades, that data is not reliable.

Since there are so few cells of the AYP report which gather data for this kind of assessment of teachers, the NCLB data seems the wrong data to choose for assessing teachers fairly. In my building, out of over 100 FTE, about 7 FTE teach the courses that are assessed by the state test (tenth grade English, math, and science). The other 93 FTE consists of many exceptional teachers who should be given the opportunity to also show their impact on student learning. Ultimately, in my building, if you teach electives, specialties, or anything in the junior or senior years, the NCLB data would not be useful to you or valid in assessing your performance.

[kristin]

I'd be grateful to anything that would identify and move ineffective teachers out of the classroom. The unions are wasting our time by working to protect teachers who should not be teaching.

Just this week I asked the counselor to move a student from my regular LA class to my honors LA class. She won't do it because it means he'd have teacher X for math, and she's trying not to put any kids there. This is so absolutely absurd, and so frustrating, that if I didn't live with it I wouldn't believe it happens.

Absolutely. Test the kids in September. Test them when they leave a class, whether it be in December or June. Take into account attendance and classroom observations that happen frequently and start rewarding and firing. I'm all for that.

[Bob Heiny]

Good points. I've thought of it as an attractive construct also. How do you see it related to NCLB requirements that all students will meet state minimum academic performance standards? Use value-added to account for gains above minimums?