mathbabe

There’ve been a couple of articles in the past few days about teacher Value-Added Testing that have enraged me.

If you haven’t been paying attention, the Value-Added Model (VAM) is now being used in a majority of the states (source: the Economist):

But it gives out nearly random numbers, as gleaned from looking at the same teachers with two scores (see this previous post). There’s a 24% correlation between the two numbers. Note that some people are awesome with respect to one score and complete shit on the other score:

Final thing you need to know about the model: nobody really understands how it works. It relies on error terms of an error-riddled model. It’s opaque, and no teacher can have their score explained to them in Plain English.

Now, with that background, let’s look into these articles.

First, there’s this New York Times article from yesterday, entitled “Curious Grade for Teachers: Nearly All Pass”. In this article, it describes how teachers are nowadays being judged using a (usually) 50/50 combination of classroom observations and VAM scores. This is different from the past, which was only based on classroom observations.

What they’ve found is that the percentage of teachers found “effective or better” has stayed high in spite of the new system – the numbers are all over the place but typically between 90 and 99 percent of teachers. In other words, the number of teachers that are fingered as truly terrible hasn’t gone up too much. What a fucking disaster, at least according to the NYTimes, which seems to go out of its way to make its readers understand how very much high school teachers suck.

A few things to say about this.

1. Given that the VAM is nearly a random number generator, this is good news – it means they are not trusting the VAM scores blindly. Of course, it still doesn’t mean that the right teachers are getting fired, since half of the score is random.
2. Another point the article mentions is that failing teachers are leaving before the reports come out. We don’t actually know how many teachers are affected by these scores.
3. Anyway, what is the right number of teachers to fire each year, New York Times? And how did you choose that number? Oh wait, you quoted someone from the Brookings Institute: “It would be an unusual profession that at least 5 percent are not deemed ineffective.” Way to explain things so scientifically! It’s refreshing to know exactly how the army of McKinsey alums approach education reform.
4. The overall article gives us the impression that if we were really going to do our job and “be tough on bad teachers,” then we’d weight the Value-Added Model way more. But instead we’re being pussies. Wonder what would happen if we weren’t pussies?

The second article explained just that. It also came from the New York Times (h/t Suresh Naidu), and it was a the story of a School Chief in Atlanta who took the VAM scores very very seriously.

What happened next? The teachers cheated wildly, changing the answers on their students’ tests. There was a big cover-up, lots of nasty political pressure, and a lot of good people feeling really bad, blah blah blah. But maybe we can take a step back and think about why this might have happened. Can we do that, New York Times? Maybe it had to do with the $500,000 in “performance bonuses” that the School Chief got for such awesome scores?

Let’s face it, this cheating scandal, and others like it (which may never come to light), was not hard to predict (as I explain in this post). In fact, as a predictive modeler, I’d argue that this cheating problem is the easiest thing to predict about the VAM, considering how it’s being used as an opaque mathematical weapon.