Louisiana Educator: Muddying the Narritive on VAM

Louisiana Educator: Muddying the Narritive on VAM:

Muddying the Narritive on VAM

by Michael Deshotels

In the old days before the Jindal reforms, educators could count on our State Department of Education to provide us with the facts about various education programs. If a program was new and needed to be evaluated to see if it was really working, we could generally count on our DOE to give us a legitimate evaluation, without bias and spin. Sadly this is no longer the case. John White set the standard last year around the time of his confirmation hearings when it was discovered by Monroe News Star reporter, Barbara Leader that there were no standards at all originally for the approval of the new voucher schools. She next uncovered secret emails between White and Jindal's staff where White suggested that steps should be taken to "muddy the narrative".

More recently the State Department and BESE are required to make a report to the Legislature on the new teacher evaluation program which includes the controversial VAM component. Last year the report appropriately described the stability or reliability of VAM by giving statistics on how consistent the VAM was in identifying teachers as being ineffective from year to year. The data showed huge changes from year to year even if teachers taught exactly the same way each year. Now the new report approved this month by BESE muddies the narrative by changing the report to include irrelevant data. Here is an