John Thompson: The Beginning of the End of VAM?
John Thompson, historian and teacher, takes a closer look at the New Mexuco court decision that imposed a preliminary injunction on the use of value-added measurement to evaluate teachers and to punish or reward them. In his judgment, VAM is on the way out.
New Mexico District Judge David K. Thomson granted a preliminary injunction preventing consequences from being attached to the state’s teacher evaluation data. As Audrey Amrein-Beardsley explains, “can proceed with ‘developing’ and ‘improving’ its teacher evaluation system, but the state is not to make any consequential decisions about New Mexico’s teachers using the data the state collects until the state (and/or others external to the state) can evidence to the court during another trial (set for now, for April) that the system is reliable, valid, fair, uniform, and the like.”
This is wonderful news. As the American Federation of Teachers observes, “Superintendents, principals, parents, students and the teachers have spoken out against a system that is so rife with errors that in some districts as many as 60 percent of evaluations were incorrect. It is telling that the judge characterizes New Mexico’s system as a ‘policy experiment’ and says that it seems to be a ‘Beta test where teachers bear the burden for its uneven and inconsistent application.’”
A close reading of the ruling makes it clear that this case is an even greater victory over the misuse of test-driven accountability than even the jubilant headlines suggest. It shows that Judge Thompson made the right ruling on the key issues for the right reasons, and he seems to be predicting that other judges will be following his legal logic. Litigation over value-added teacher evaluations is being conducted in 14 states, and the legal battleground is shifting to the place where corporate reformers are weakest. No longer are teachers being forced to prove that there is no rational basis for defending the constitutionality of value-added evaluations. Now, the battleground is shifting to the actual implementation of those evaluations and how they violate state laws.
Judge Thomson concludes that the state’s evaluation systems don’t “resemble at all the theory” they were based on. He agreed with the district superintendent who compared it to the Wizard of Oz, where “the guy is behind the curtain and pulling levers and it is loud.” Some may say that the Wizard’s behavior is “understandable,” but that is not the judge’s concern. The Court must determine whether the consequences are assessed by a system that is “objective and uniform.” Clearly, it has been impossible in New Mexico and elsewhere for reformers to meet the requirements they mandated, and that is the legal terrain where VAM proponents must now fight.
The judge thus concludes, “New Mexico’s evaluation system is less like a [sound] model than a cafeteria-style evaluation system where the combination of factors, data, and elements are not easily determined and the variance from school district to school district creates conflicts with the [state] statutory mandate.”
The state of New Mexico counters by citing cases in Florida and Tennessee as precedents. But, Judge Thomson writes that those cases ruled against early challenges based on equal protection or John Thompson: The Beginning of the End of VAM? | Diane Ravitch's blog:
