John Thompson: The Gates Foundation’s Losing War for Value-Added Assessment
John Thompson, historian and teacher, says that the Gates Foundation is fighting a losing battle to justify value-added assessment. At its root, he says, is an assault on public education, facilitated by a worship of data and a belief in the value of teacher churn.
He writes:
One of the Gates Foundation’s star value-added scholars, Dan Goldhaber, has voiced “concerns about the use of VAM estimates at the high school level for the evaluation of individual teachers.” Two years ago, he asked and answered “yes” to the question of whether reformers would have placed less emphasis the value-added evaluations of individual teachers if research had focused on high schools rather than elementary schools.
I once saw Goldhaber’s statement as “a hopeful sign that research by non-educators may become more reality-based.”
As the use of estimates of test score growth in evaluations becomes even more discredited, Goldhaber is not alone in making statements such as, “The early evidence on states and localities using value added as a portion of more comprehensive evaluation systems suggests that it may not be differentiating teachers to the degree that was envisioned (Anderson, 2013).”
So, what is now happening in the aftermath of the latest warning against value-added evaluations? This time, the American Educational Research Association AERA Council “cautions against VAM being used to have a high-stakes, dispositive weight in evaluations.”
The logic used by the nation’s largest education research professional association is very similar to what I thought Goldhaber meant when he warned against using various tests and models that produce so many different estimates of the effectiveness of high school teachers. The point seems obvious. If VAMs are imposed on all types of schools and teachers with all types of tests and students, then they must work properly in that wide range of situations. It’s not good enough to say we should fire inner city high school teachers because some researchers believe that VAMs can measure the quality of teaching with random samples of low-poverty elementary students.
Goldhaber now notes, “AERA’s statement adds to the cacophony of voices urging either restraint or outright prohibition of VAMs for evaluating educators or institutions. Doubtless, these stakeholders are genuinely concerned about potential unintended consequences of adopting these performance measures.”
However, Goldhaber and other supporters of corporate reform still twist themselves into pretzels in arguing that we should remain on their value-added path. Ignoring the effects of sorting as one of the factors that John Thompson: The Gates Foundation’s Losing War for Value-Added Assessment | Diane Ravitch's blog: