New Report Rebukes Central Feature of 'Race to the Top'
The central feature of the Obama administration's $5 billion "Race to the Top"program was sharply refuted last week by the American Statistical Association, one of the nation's leading scholarly organizations. Spurred on by the administration's combination of federal cash and mandates, most states are now using student test scores to rank and evaluate teachers. This method of evaluating teachers by test scores is called value-added measurement, or VAM. Teachers' compensation, their tenure, bonuses and other rewards and sanctions are tied directly to the rise or fall of their student test scores, which the Obama administration considers a good measure of teacher quality.
Secretary Arne Duncan believes so strongly in VAM that he has threatened to punish Washington state for refusing to adopt this method of evaluating teachers and principals. In New York, a state court fined New York City $150 million for failing to agree on a VAM plan.
The ASA issued a short but stinging statement that strongly warned against the misuse of VAM. The organization neither condemns nor promotes the use of VAM, but its warnings about the limitations of this methodology clearly demonstrate that the Obama administration has committed the nation's public schools to a policy fraught with error. ASA warns that VAMs are "complex statistical models" that require "high-level statistical expertise" and awareness of their "assumptions and possible limitations," especially when they are used for high-stakes purposes as is now common. Few, if any, state education departments have the statistical expertise to use VAM models appropriately. In some states, like Florida, teachers have been rated based on the scores of students they never taught.
The ASA points out that VAMs are based on standardized tests and "do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes." They New Report Rebukes Central Feature of 'Race to the Top' | Diane Ravitch: