NYT: Value Not Added
Our old friend Kevin Carey popped up in the New York Times this week, using the death of William Sanders as a case to soft-pedal VAM. The article has some interesting points to make about VAM, and it also unintentionally reveals some of the reasons that Value-Added Measuring of teacher performance is a fool's game.
Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. So their objectivity in these matters is suspect. In the past Carey has turned up trying to support Common Core, attacking public education, using shoddy research to slam higher ed, and helping spread PR for Mark Zuckerberg's AltSchool.
Carey apparently met Sanders and talked to the inventor of the Value Added Measure (specifically, the one known these days as VAAS-- the one that a Houston court just threw out). That provides a fascinatingly specific tale of what started Sanders, who had a doctorate in statistics and quantitative genetics, on the path to evaluating teacher performance:
“In 1945, the United States government set off an atomic bomb.”
That’s how Mr. Sanders began telling me the story of his life, when we met several years ago....
Nuclear weapons tests had released clouds of radiation that had drifted with the weatherCURMUDGUCATION: NYT: Value Not Added: