John Thompson: Legal Woes Growing for VAM-Based Teacher Evaluations
Guest post by John Thompson.
I used to be a legal historian. That did not mean I could practice law without a license, but I could be a pretty fair consumer of legal analyses. It also made me aware of how attorneys and judges think.
When the idea of incorporating value-added into teacher evaluations was first introduced, I checked with lawyers who I knew to have solid legal minds. Like me, they were offended by the idea of using such an algorithm for evaluating individual teachers. Almost all of my sources were confident that such evaluations would not withstand judicial review. Typically, their appraisals were based less on the details of the experimental statistical models than on case law.
Then, Oklahoma joined other states and passed a law mandating value-added evaluations, and the consensus changed. To defend decisions based on these new laws, systems only had to show that the terminations were not irrational. Unless a value-added model was used in a way that was arbitrary and/or virtually absurd, the court was likely to defer to a district's firing of teachers.
I read national experts' recommendations to advocates of value-added evaluations and, sadly, I had to agree with their judgments. Attorneys warned that the process of using statistical models to help fire or deny performance pay to teachers should be done carefully. As long as systems played their