Publicizing Evaluations Isn't About Shaming Teachers

Sand: Publicizing Evaluations Isn’t About Shaming Teachers

Larry Sand argues that rankings aren’t a tool for shaming, but instead serve to educate and prompt debate among the public, promoting wider education knowledge.

Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, argues that teacher rankings should be made public, and that far from being merely an attack on teachers and unions, they fulfill the vital function of making parents and legislators more aware of education debate.

Teaching unions were recently angered by the decision in New York to continue to allow teacher evaluations to be made public and there has been recent publication in the New York Times of teacher’s value-added rankings.

The value added technique of rating teachers is “based on their students’ progress on standardized tests year after year. The difference between a student’s expected growth and actual performance is the ‘value’ a teacher adds or subtracts during the year.”

Unions feel that rankings and evaluation data should only be seen by select individuals such as the Principal, the teachers themselves and perhaps the school board. That to release this information to the public is tantamount to an invasion of privacy. That putting the information in the public domain is publicly shaming the poor teachers.

If we ignore for the moment the argument that a little shaming might be good for teachers who are failing in their responsibilities to educate children else the failing system simply perpetuates and a wide range of societal problems ensue, then there is still a definite case for the information being available to the public as it is ultimately they, as taxpayers, who fund the teachers’ salaries.

Sand compares this publication of data to publishing a baseball player’s batting average. Some will take offense at this analogy and say that education is far more important than sport. However as Sand points out this is exactly the point:

So if there is any shame to be identified, it is that, as a country, we are more informed about the intricacies of baseball than about how best to assess the people who are educating the next generation of Americans.

If nothing else, the posting of teachers’ VA scores has opened a Pandora’s Box which the American public must deal with sooner rather than later.

This also addresses the second point of contention that people arguing against the release of ranking often make; that the statistic in question is unfair and unreliable. Few argue that VA is a perfect measure of a teacher’s ability. However, as the public and educators become more involved in the debate over education, better statistics and measures will be developed and the education knowledge of people will advance.

Comments

Bob Rose

April 6, 2012 at 2:07 pm

Without teaching ranking, how on earth would we know which ones are doing a lousy job?

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- Laurel
  
  April 10, 2012 at 5:46 pm
  
  Sounds great – can I read your job evaluation in the newspaper? I’d like to know who’s doing a lousy job in EVERY situation.
  
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- Michelle Dempsey
  
  April 10, 2012 at 5:51 pm
  
  Yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater is as constructive as the evaluations presented today. It directs the conversation off in the wrong direction. It misinforms people who do not understand how tests prove to be valid and reliable. One person in the state of Washington, who helped to construct that state’s test, when told how the test does not measure up to tests of reliability merely stated that the “tests were reliable enough for the state.” That showed complete ignorance of testing constructs.
  
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mcp_43

April 7, 2012 at 6:18 am

What formula is used to determine a student’s expected growth? The formula should be able to answer the two following questions without any subjective hand-waving. What is the expected growth of a student who has been growing at a rate of .8 years each year? What is the expected growth of a student who has been growing at a rate of 1.2 years each year?

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- Catlike
  
  April 10, 2012 at 10:07 am
  
  Even defining what constitutes a year’s worth of growth is harder than it seems. Most standardized tests haven’t been explicitly designed to measure growth, and actually most accountability tests for a certain grade don’t do a good job of capturing the performance of students who are significantly above or below grade level. Most of the questions, say on the 5th grade test are written at the 4th grade level. That makes sense, right? However, what if you have a kid who is at 3rd grade of understanding, and one at the 2nd grade. Both answer all of the questions wrong. They get the same score, but because there aren’t enough easier questions on the test, you can’t really distinguish between the student actually performing at the 1st grade level and the one performing at 2nd grade (which would be important for capturing growth the next year). Most of the 1 year of growth calculations are often based on very rough rules of thumb (.25 standard deviation different in score is defined as the equivalent of 1 year of learning), rather calculated using an assessment that is vertically aligned and scaled across grade levels.
  
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  - Michelle Dempsey
    
    April 10, 2012 at 5:59 pm
    
    Add to that and the question of how do you measure growth in students with severe and profound disabilities? And what about the child with a progressively more debilitating condition? There is no way in good conscience that a generalized test can be constructed for those students. The IEP team is the one that should be determining if the needs of the child are being adequately met, not the government which has no real knowledge of the student.
    
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tiredteacher

April 8, 2012 at 7:01 am

if you are going to publish the job evaluations of teachers because the “public has a right to know” then why not cops? Firefighters? how about ALL public employees? Why not all employees of publicly traded companies?

or instead of putting flawed data into the hands of a public that can not understand it completely why not make trust the people you hire to perform the evaluations? That is what business does correct? and isn’t business the holy grail to you “reformers”?

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Linda Brees

April 8, 2012 at 2:54 pm

If it isn’t about shaming teachers, what is it about? It isn’t about giving parents information because the value of this “information” is very debatable, and it isn’t about actually implementing any kind of improvements. So if this isn’t some kind of name and shame effort, what is it about?

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Joe

April 8, 2012 at 2:54 pm

Parents are entitled to this information. Those who say different are pushing an agenda.

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- tired teacher
  
  April 10, 2012 at 7:58 am
  
  if by agenda you mean reality then yes.
  
  how about i turn it around, those pushing shaming teachers and value added analyses and charter schools, and vouchers and merit pay and everything else called “reform” have an agenda
  
  unfortunately their agenda has no nobility. at least my agenda is to create a climate that fosters quality education.
  
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- Toni
  
  April 10, 2012 at 5:10 pm
  
  If the public is entitled to teacher evaluations of the students in their class, I think that the teacher should also be able to public print their evaluation of the parents’ involvement and support of those same students. How many parents help prepare, motivate and support their own children?
  
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  - mary
    
    April 10, 2012 at 11:47 pm
    
    Precisely, Toni. Educators are not the child’s primary teachers. Parents play a bigger role.
    
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- Michelle Dempsey
  
  April 10, 2012 at 6:05 pm
  
  Parents have the right to visit the classroom and see for themselves. The more involved a parent is the more they keep up with their child’s work, their homework the more they will know if their child is getting a good education. Given inadequate information passed off as accurate or meaningful when it is not only causes confusion, frustration, and a rift between teacher and parent.
  
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Catlike

April 9, 2012 at 7:10 am

“This also addresses the second point of contention that people arguing against the release of ranking often make; that the statistic in question is unfair and unreliable. Few argue that VA is a perfect measure of a teacher’s ability. However, as the public and educators become more involved in the debate over education, better statistics and measures will be developed and the education knowledge of people will advance.”

Actually it doesn’t address this. There is a difference between using a less than perfect measure that is still reasonably reliable for what it does measure (i.e., maybe it doesn’t capture all of the important aspects of teaching, but what it does measure, it does so quite reliably) and using a less than perfect measure that is actually quite unreliable (i.e., it’s imprecision leads to too many incorrect inferences about teachers’ true performance or suffers from huge swings from year to year or even class period to class period).

I work at an organization that has commissioned value added models and worked with results, and I can tell you they are so far from prime time in terms of doing what policy makers want them to do. There is insufficient attention being placed on data quality (e.g., quality of teacher and student matches on rosters, missing data at certain grade levels, poor quality tests), and the assumptions under-girding many of the value-added models. I’ve become a bit skeptical about how much better some of these models can get, since they fundamentally fail to address some of the unique aspects of teaching as a profession. I still think VAM can be a useful research tool for some uses, but policy makers are making the same mistake the leaders of big banks did prior to the financial meltdown. They made decisions trusting their statisticians and failing to ask tough questions about the assumptions embedded in the models.

Baseball stats capture very discrete behaviors that are extremely easy to measure/count (e.g., Did a hitter hit the ball? YES/NO. Did the pitcher throw a ball as called by the ump? YES/NO). In part this is the nature of the sport, which is much easier to decompose than other sports such as basketball or soccer. Baseball unfolds as a set of discrete episodes and it’s fairly easy to assign responsibility to events to individuals (the pitch, the hit, the catch) and to count whether the player performed a task positively or negatively. There are some situations where measurements requires judgment (assignment of an error). But it’s not like basketball, where the action involves high levels of interdependence–what one player on a team does or does not do directly affects the performance of others). Yes, there are some easy stats to calculate in basketball, especially on offense. But it’s telling that there are relatively few individual statistics on defense (other than steals and rebounds), because defense relies more on teamwork (positioning, double teaming, helping, etc.). There are many players whose defensive contributions aren’t captured by any stats.

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Mike

April 10, 2012 at 9:58 am

Publicizing evaluations will expose the sham teacher evaluations actually are (in most cases). What will be the public outcry when publicized ratings show the “poor” teachers are actually doing their jobs (if student performance is not overweighed). Whose neck will be on the line then? Administrators, whose job it is to evaluate the teachers and make decisions for their removal long before tenure occurs. If that isn’t happening its the administrators at fault not the teachers. Administrators should be the ones most afraid.

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snowmom

April 10, 2012 at 5:44 pm

A baseball player stats reflect how the player performs his or her job based on how well that player practices. No other person is responsible for their growth…unless, the player’s stats are a reflection of the coaches that train him. Then, if the player does not meet standard, it would be the fault of the coach, not the player. The coach then, would be the one assessed by the player’s stats.

Also, if the teachers are assessed based on the growth of their students, and that is made public, GREAT! The names of students in their class should be made public, too. Parents would LOVE that. I think every time a homework assignment is not returned, reading logs and library books are not returned, science fair projects not completed, and conferences that get “forgotten”, that those things should be reported as well.

This a CHILD we are talking about…each one very different from the next. There is no recipe or trick or anything that works for every child. Education is not assembly line work, nor should it be.

Consider a doctor. Should a doctor be assigned a group of patients that reside within a jurisdiction and once a year be assessed on the general health and well being of each person he is responsible for? No? How about the patients then that choose that doctor and go in once a year for a check up? No? Why not? Maybe doctors, dentists, care providers of any kind should all be assessed by the care they give. Let’s assess them during a two week window in the spring each year and call it good! Then, let’s publish their grades. I’m sure that will improve the health care of all.

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Tom

April 10, 2012 at 11:13 pm

How does individual student/parent involvement get assessed into the equation? As Snowmom says, if the teachers are going to be evaluated on what the kids do, measure in the kids and their parents at the same time. There is no way a teacher can force a student to read instead of playing a video game. Schools can’t require parents to get their kids’ faces away from the TV and in front of their homework.

I’ll tell you straight up, if my teachers had been evaluated this way, they would’ve hated me. I should have been a 4.0 student, as I was very capable in every way an academic would want, but as far as school went, I shut down in third grade because it was too easy. I never did any homework, nor did I participate in *anything* at school if I could possibly get out of it. Those would cut into my reading time.

There were only two classes I enjoyed: Drama, because it was very unstructured *and* I got to learn a LOT, and any Literature class, because for both of those I had to read. Hurt me. But there were problems there, too. Write about what I read? Or about the stage productions? Sorry, that would cut into my reading time.

I disrupted classes and got thrown out. I skipped classes or school. I feigned illness & forged notes from Mom, who didn’t know I’d missed school, because she’d been at work. I’d go to class and totally ignore the teacher, because I was reading a book that was more interesting. School bored me to tears, so I saw no reason to pay any attention to it or do what they wanted.

I graduated high school with a 1.34 GPA. Was that my teachers’ fault? I think not. Was I unskilled? To the annoyance of some staff, I occasionally tutored some friends for classes I wasn’t allowed to take. Two weeks into tenth grade I tossed my US History book on the teacher’s desk, filled with bookmarks. “The bookmarks are where the obvious errors are. I’m sure there are more.”

When students completely refuse to do any school work, sometimes even their parents can’t get them to do it. Mine couldn’t. I’ve been told many times that from birth I could out-stubborn a Missouri mule. Was my refusal to do any homework other than reading literature books my parents fault? Again, that’s not what I think. They tried. Oh boy, did they try.

If it helps my image any, after making my public school teachers’ lives miserable on three continents, I went Navy, did college, and have been teaching middle school English for 30+ years.

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