VAMboozled! in Indianapolis
Last week I was in Indianapolis for the annual conference of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) during which Diane Ravitch gave the keynote speech for the conference’s Welcoming Session. While the video of her live talk is not yet posted online, she talked mainly about the many hoaxes surrounding America’s public education system, all of which were framed by her main question that she revealed from underneath her jacket a t-shirt on which it was written: “Where’s the evidence?”
The key part of her speech, as most relevant here but captured by another author atEducation News, went as follows:
In a far-reaching speech in which [Diane Ravitch] lambasted a variety of players on the educational landscape — from self-styled education “reformers” to Teach for America to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — Ravitch said American schoolchildren are being shortchanged by an inordinate emphasis on testing. She took particular aim at teacher evaluation models known as value-added models, or VAMs, that seek to measure teacher effectiveness by the test scores of the students they teach. “For nearly five years, states and districts have been trying to evaluate teachers by test scores, and it hasn’t worked anywhere,” Ravitch said. “It makes testing too important, promotes teaching to the test, and gaming of the system. “We know all know this. But the policymakers don’t.