You’re probably correct about Obama mandating random placements. He need not micromanage to that degree. Thanks for the slap back to reality on that one. What I am saying is local districts should not be able to use student/teacher placement as the excuse not to go toward VAM’s. They’re simply a tool in the evaluation process whose time has come and something as insignificant as placements should never be allowed to be the deciding factor against their use. And I say the placement process to be insignificant because I believe far too many school personnel think placements are the be all and end all in the educational process. THEY ARE NOT. They might be a cog in the process but they are certainly not the whole enchilada. Kids need to be exposed to a variety of teachers during their formal school experience and teachers certainly the same.

Are you kidding?

You write:

“Obama could easily imply/mandate to states interested in receiving RTTT monies that randomized placements of students and/or teachers be mandatory to qualify for the funds …”

Have we gotten to the point where people are so sure of their pet theories that they would have federal micromanaging to that point? You would seriously consider that level of top down mandates, over-riding people on the ground who might want to consider the people side of education? We would subordinate human preferences, not allowing for subjective, local decisions in order to make some command and control models more effective? What about different teachers and kids having different talents, different chemistry, different feelings, different desires? After all we are talking about peoples’ children!?! You expect parents to cede that authority to D.C.? Different children and different adults click differently with each other. You want a federal Big Brother to ban adjustnebts based on personalities?

Perhaps you are just being argumentative. Otherwise you are crossing the line into social engineering.

Braun’s article articulates the main drawback to a fair VAM as one of randomization. As someone involved in the placement process for three and a half decades I would have to consider this concern to be a mole hill, not a mountain, especially in lieu of what it could harvest.

Obama could easily imply/mandate to states interested in receiving RTTT monies that randomized placements of students and/or teachers be mandatory to qualify for the funds which according to Braun’s findings would greater validate the process.

If random placement is the major roadblock in this process for school administrators then get them out of the way and bring in a trained cohort of new administrators who are willing and able to rectify this minutia. Beyond that, have the local teacher union oversee the process to EQUALLY protect all its dues paying members. Come on! This is not as challenging as some are attempting to make it.

Massachusetts MCAS tests are not lousy. They’ve been refined over time and are quite possibly the best in the country. Other states could easily use MCAS as a model, validating their results in the process. They might not want to until they discovered their reluctance would effectively foreclose any reasonable opportunity to qualify their state for federal funds.

If our principal said, “Study each others lessons”, we would do it. We don’t need merit pay to get there. What we need is a principal who possesses sound ideas about education instead of the half-baked stuff that comes out of administrator conferences and education schools. The merit pay movement seems premised on the notion that, if only teachers really tried hard, they’d teach better. In my experience, teachers DO try very hard –executing the flawed ideas about education that administrators and professors foist upon them.

And I don’t see many successful young teachers bailing out of the profession because veterans make more than they do. I reckon that many bright young teachers leave because of harsh and unsupportive working conditions.

I discussed the problems with Sanders’ model my May and December Phi Delta Kappan Research columns. The best short, readable work on the topic is Henry Braun’s “Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A Primer to Value Added Models.” http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICVAM.pdf. I summarized Henry’s monograph in my February, 2006 Kappan column.

There was also a special issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics devoted to VAM’s, but if you’re not an expert in statistics, you’ll find only a couple of the pieces accessible. The closer you get to the topic, the more impossible it looks.

The issue of value-added also reveals one of the many internal contradictions in the rapidly growing collection known as The Inane Ramblings of Arne Duncan. Arne says the tests we have are bad. I agree. He demands, though, that states develop data bases so that student performance can be linked to teacher performance. And what will be in these data bases? Scores from the lousy tests.

Jerry Bracey

As for test scores being used to evaluate the (in)effectiveness of teachers, I also support Obama and Duncan on this policy. The existing system US public schools employ to evaluate teachers is an embarrassment to the teaching profession, an absolute embarrassment. Anything, I repeat, ANYTHING would be an improvement over the subjective evaluation system used to embellish the performance of 98.5% of every public school teacher in America. IT MUST BE TERMINATED.

Are there problems and/or potholes with using test scores in evaluating teachers? Of course there are. But those indiscretions can and should be worked out between the local teacher union and district administrations.

Hold the high stakes decisions that could potentially be attached to these scores in abeyance for some predetermined grace period (i.e two to three years). Use the test scores only to help improve instruction. No one loses their job or is denied tenure during this grace period until many/most of the potential snags can be remedied. Tweak this new system. Folks like William Sanders have worked to improve value-added-assessments and they’re close – very close to being what we need to determine the effectiveness of our teachers.

With all due respect to Diane Ravitch, and I have nothing but the utmost regard for her body of work, I believe she’s being a bit hasty on RTTT and her judgments on this program I consider to be somewhat premature.

How would merit pay make any difference?

Ravitch seems even less familiar with the scholarly literature on merit pay; it would be one thing to disagree with the relevant studies, but to say they don’t exist?