About those Dice… Ready, Set, Roll! On the VAM-ification of Tenure
A while back I wrote a post (and here) in which I explained that the relatively high error rates in Value-added modeling might make it quite difficult for teachers to get tenure under some newly adopted and other proposed guidelines and much easier to lose it, even after waiting years to get lucky [& yes I do mean LUCKY] enough to obtain it.
The standard reformy template is that teachers should only be able to get tenure after 3 years of good ratings in a row and that teachers should be subject to losing tenure if they get 2 bad years in a row. Further, it is possible that the evaluations might actually stipulate that you can only get a good rating if you achieve a certain rating on the quantitative portion of the evaluation – or the VAM score. Likewise for bad ratings (that is, the quantitative measure overrides all else in the system).
The premise of the dice rolling activity from my previous post was that it is necessarily much less likely to roll