Another UTLA Sell-Out on VAM
Most people would argue that teachers should be evaluated based on how well they teach and help their students to grow academically. The problem is that there is no accurate or consistent method of measuring the teacher impact on student academic growth. High stakes state and NCLB tests are particularly ill-suited for this.
Nevertheless, a growing number of school districts across the nation are either imposing Value-Added Measures (VAM) of teacher “effectiveness” on their teaching staffs, or forcing them to accept student test scores as part of their evaluations in exchange for other concessions like raises and maintaining benefits. VAM, which attempts to calculate teachers’ impact on their students’ improvement on standardized tests, has been shown to be inaccurate and unreliable (see here, here and here).
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has been under court order to reform its