VAM for Dummies

If you don't spend every day with your head stuck in the reform toilet, receiving the never-ending education swirly that is school reformy stuff, there are terms that may not be entirely clear to you. One is VAM-- Value-Added Measure.

VAM is a concept borrowed from manufacturing. If I take one dollar's worth of sheet metal and turn it into a lovely planter that I can sell for ten dollars, I've added nine dollars of value to the metal.

It's a useful concept in manufacturing management. For instance, if my accounting tells me that it costs me ten dollars in labor to add five dollars of value to an object, I should plan my going-out-of-business sale today.

And a few years back, when we were all staring down the NCLB maw requiring that 100% of our students be above average by this year, it struck many people as a good idea-- let's check instead to see if teachers are making students better. Let's measure if teachers have added value to the individual student.

There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, starting with the idea that a student is like a piece of manufacturing material and continuing on through the reaffirmation of the school-is-a-factory model of education. But there are other problems as well.

1) Back in the manufacturing model, I knew how much value my piece of metal had before I started working my magic on it. We have no such information for students.

2) The piece of sheet metal, if it just sits there, will still be a piece of sheet metal. If anything, it will get rusty and less valuable. But a child, left to its own devices, will still get older, bigger, and smarter. A child will add value on its own, out of thin air. Almost like it was some living, breathing sentient being and not a piece of raw manufacturing material.

3) All piece of sheet metals are created equal. Any that are too not-equal get thrown in the hopper. On the assembly line, each piece of metal is as easy to add value to as the last. But here we have one more reformy idea predicated on the idea that children are pretty much identical.

How to solve these three big problems? Call the statisticians!

This is the point at which that horrifying formula that pops up in these discussion appears. Or actually, a version of it, because each state has its own special sauce when it comes to VAM. In Pennsylvania, our special VAM sauce is called PVAAS. I went to a state training session about PVAAS in 2009 and wrote about it for my regular newspaper gig. Here's what I said about how the formula works at the time:

PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.

Here's how it's supposed to work. The magic formula will factor in everything from your socio-economics through the trends over the past X years in your classroom, throw in your pre-testy thing if you like,  and will spit out a prediction of how Johnny would have done on the test in some neutral universe where nothing special happened to Johnny. Your job as a teacher is to get your real Johnny to do better on The Test than Alternate Universe Johnny would.

See? All that's required for VAM to work is believing that the state can accurately predict exactly how well your students would have done this year if you were an average teacher. How could anything possibly go wrong??

And it should be noted-- all of these issues occur in the process before we add refinements such as giving VAM scores based on students that the teacher doesn't even teach. There is no parallel for this in the original industrial VAM model, because nobody anywhere could imagine that it's not insanely ridiculous.

If you want to know more, the interwebs are full of material debunking this model, because nobody-- I mean nobody-- believes in it except politicians and corporate privateers. So you can look at anything from this nifty three minute video to the awesome blog Vamboozled by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley.

This is one more example of a feature of reformy stuff that is so top-to-bottom stupid that it's hard to understand. But whether you skim the surface, look at the philosophical basis, or dive into the math, VAM does not hold up. You may be among the people who feel like you don't quite get it, but let me reassure you-- when I titled this "VAM for Dummies," I wasn't talking about you. VAM is always and only for dummies; it's just that right now, the dummies are in charge.

Duncan, Civil Rights, & Highly Qualified Teachers

Whether you're David Welch (StudentsMatter) financing the Vergara lawsuit in California, or Arne Duncan, crafting new shiny policies and talking points in DC, turning classroom teachers into a civil rights issue is all the rage. I owe thanks to Michele McNeil and Alyson Klein for some of the reporting on which this column is based.

Coming Attraction and Policy Balloons

Assistant Secretary Deb Delisle did some talking shortly after the State of the Union address about the new 50-state strategy regarding highly qualified teachers, presenting a kind of coming attractions trailer of possible policy. Fans of reformy stuff will remember that NCLB put a deadline on putting a highly-qualified teacher in front of every student in the country, and NCLB waivers initially kept that requirement in place, but the Obama administration has since quietly dropped that. George Miller, retiring top Democrat of House Education committee, NCLB co-architect, and bi-partisan educational twit, even squawked a bit about that.

This notion has floated to the surface of reformy soup at various points. There are folks who believe that we just find the Highly Effective Teachers and move them around so that they are covering the most challenging classrooms, and then a million education flowers will bloom. This policy has not yet been deemed ready for prime time because of that "move them around" part. How would that work? Would districts move teachers from school to school, or would states move teachers from district to district? Would teachers be offered bribes incentives to move, or would they just be forced? Various folks have dipped their toes in these waters, but nobody's really ready to take a swim yet.

But the new 50-state plan  redefines teachers as a civil rights issue by harnessing the enforcement power of the Office of Civil Rights to ensure that poor children will have just as many highly qualified teachers in front of them as anybody else. Predictably, not everyone thinks this idea is super-swell.

Ineffective Teaching: A Highly Effective Definition

Discussion of teaching of a civil right often circles back around to the assertion that poor students have more lousy teachers than non-poor students. This assertion rests primarily on a model of circular reasoning. Follow along.

A) Teachers are judged low-performing because their students score poorly on tests.

B) Students low test scores are explained by the fact that they have low-performing teachers.

Or, framed another way, this argument defines a low-quality teacher as any teacher whose students don't do well on standardized tests. The assumption is that teachers are the only single solitary explanation for student standardized test scores. Nothing else affects those scores. Only teacher behavior explains the low scores. That's it.

Ergo, the best runners are runners who run down hills. Runners who are running uphill are slow runners, and must be replaced by those good runners-- the ones we find running downhill. Or, the wettest dogs are the ones who are out in the rain, while the driest ones are the ones indoors. So if we take the indoor dogs outside, we will have drier dogs in the yard. While it rains.

As long as we define low-quality teachers as those who teach low-achieving students (who we know will mostly be the children of poor folk), low-achieving students will always be taught by low-quality teachers. It's the perfect education crisis, one that can never, ever be solved.

One More Growth Opportunity for TFA

Remember the budget deal last fall? You may have forgotten that part of the deal was an early Christmas gift for Teach for America-- a redefinition of "highly qualified" to include TFAers. Because passing a PRAXIS and taking a five-week summer training session are pretty much the same deal.

So TFA bodies are eligible to be foot soldiers in this battle to put effective teachers into the classroom. Now, despite their glowing PR, there's no reason to believe that TFA bodies can magically erase the effects of poverty, but by the time test data has been gathered up to indicate their ineffectiveness, they will have moved on anyway. An endless revolving door churn through a black hole of teacher ineffectiveness perfectly suits the TFA model.

You might imagine that two years as an "ineffective" teacher might be a black mark on the record of a blossoming young Master of the Universe, but take heart-- Michelle Rhee was ineffective as a classroom teacher and disastrous as a school leader, but that has not slowed her rise to lucrative fame as an education thought leader and celebrity spokesmodel one bit. You only have to be able to say you were in a classroom; it doesn't matter to your career if you were great or terrible.

Hold on There a Second!

So one can reasonably conclude that redefining an effective teacher as a civil right might not be a big win for public education. But fear not-- there are people in Congress willing to stand up for teachers and public schools and those people are--- Republicans!

Representatives John Kline and Todd Rokita have sent a letter to Duncan asking for clarification (Congress-ese for "You got some 'splainin' to do, Lucy"). Their questions are (I'm paraphrasing here):

1) Exactly how do you figure the Office of Civil Rights has legal authority over teachers?

2) How's this going to work, actually. Details, please.

3) When is this going to be released to the public and how will you be handling feedback from the stakeholders? Which is polite talk for "You'd best not be thinking you can unilaterally just slip this by everybody involved."

4) How many stakeholders have you talked to about this, and what feedback did you get? Which is polite talk for "We're betting the answers are 'zero' and 'none.'"

5) How are you going to incorporate comments and concerns into your final proposals? Which is polite talk for "We've noticed that this administration doesn't listen to anybody about anything."

The five questions could also be entitled "Five things we plan to lambaste you about when you formally propose this, so you might want to get your bullshit story straight and your cover in place." And the letter concludes with a directive to contact a staffer "immediately" to set up a meeting to talk about all this.

I don't know that much about Kline and Rokita, but these two GOP Reps and the not-a-minute-too-soon departing Miller are a reminder that teachers should never assume that Republicans are a threat and Democrats have our backs.

In the meantime, watch for the more-final-ish version of the 50-states proposal for turning the Office of Civil Rights into the Bad Teacher SWAT Unit.

A Quick Duncan-DVR Question

I have a simple question for Dennis Van Roekel.

Would you please list five points on which you disagree with Arne Duncan and the USDOE?

I ask because I realized this morning that I can't think of any, and that in my own mind, you and Arne Duncan have become like different manifestations of the same person. So I'm wondering.

I understand that disagreeing with the USDOE is not automatically a good thing, and I do not want to propose that union leadership should be judged based on how much they argue with the government. I even confess that I do not believe the government is always wrong. I also recognize that you are just about out the door, but I don't imagine that you single-handed set the tone and direction for NEA leadership.

However, if NEA leadership is simply traveling in lockstep with the current administration with no critical or independent views, I'm betting that's not A Good Thing. If NEA's policy is, "Hey, if it comes out of Duncan's office, that's good enough for us," it's not good enough for me.

I've been trying to think of a time you criticized an administration policy, a time when you said, "Mr. Duncan is just wrong on this," a time at which you said, "While it might be politically expedient to stay silent, on this matter I must speak up against the administration and on behalf of my members." I can't think of any.

Now, my memory is not as sharp as it-- well, my memory has never been sharp. So maybe I'm just forgetting something. In which case, you or someone can correct me. And I'm really hoping you will.

Because if there are no points of significant disagreement between the USDOE and the NEA, what exactly do we need the NEA for?

So I'll ask again-- can you name five significant policy points on which you disagree with Arne Duncan?

Duncan's Pre-K Top 10

On Monday, February 23, Arne Duncan laid down some speaks on the National Governor's Association Winter Meeting. His prepared remarks touched on many areas of education, but he devoted much of his speaking to the issue of Pre-K.

Mind you, Duncan did not speak about why Pre-K is a good idea or a valuable idea, nor did he speak about what Pre-K done right would look like. In fact, he didn't really talk about the educational aspects of Pre-K at all. What he addressed was its political inevitability.

So let's see what the compelling reasons for welcoming Pre-K might be. Here's Arne's Top Ten List.

#10: There is much greater public awareness today of the importance of the early years to the long-term health, learning, and success of our children and our communities--and it is coupled with widespread public support for a big expansion of early learning.

The political ground is fertile for the planting of Pre-K support. Lots of people believe this is a good thing, although most of them are imagining something completely different from our vision. You can win votes by backing this. Also, doesn't this sound much more attractive then testing and drilling four-year-olds?

#9: A powerful, bipartisan coalition of governors are funding expansions in the states—in some cases, big expansions—of high-quality early learning programs.

There is a big bunch of money pushing this. People are going to want to be your buddy when you have the power to make them rich. Also, note the new buzzword "high-quality," which means roughly, "carrying the USDOE seal of approval (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pearson, Inc)"

#8: There is a remarkably diverse and robust coalition of law enforcement officials, military leaders, clergy, CEOs, unions, parents, and others that strongly support expanding high-quality early learning opportunities.

Again, there is political support out there for this, from all sorts of folks. It's true that all these folks know next to nothing about the needs of four-year-olds, but they know plenty about the needs of politicians.


#7: The old arguments that states should have no role in providing low- and moderate-income families with voluntary access to early learning and child care have lost force.

We have broken down the traditional desire for local control.

#6: There is a growing recognition that quality matters tremendously when it comes to early learning. 

We have no idea what "quality" means, but it tests positive with all our focus groups. Some people think "quality" means games and fun and being a child while learning some stuff, instead of drilling and testing. We can use these people. And as long as we control the meaning of "quality," we control the Pre-K franchise.

#5: For the first time, a majority of the states are now assessing the school readiness of children when they enter kindergarten.

Testing five-year-olds will help generate the kind of fear and panic that are great for motivating people. Let's just skip over the question of what in the hell a five-year-old needs to be tested on, or the developmental appropriateness of making Kindergarten the new First Grade. Is your four-year-old writing complex historical analyses and reading Faulkner? Then get thee to Pre-K. And don't forget-- no child is ready for school without a working knowledge of politics in Mesopotamia.

#4: The enactment of third grade reading laws in many of your states is going to propel an expansion of high-quality early learning.

We're going to start labeling your eight-year-olds failures if they can't pass a standardized reading test. Again, don't ask why. Just relish the highly motivational panic this will create in your electorate.

#3: America is way behind high-performing countries in our provision of early learning--and there is a growing awareness that high-quality early learning is critical to sustaining our international economic competitiveness.

Actually, we're just making stuff up now. This talking point has been constructed without the use of a single verifiable fact. But yeah-- Estonia is going to bury us economically if our four-year-olds don't know fifty sight words!! OMGZZ!!

#2: America is currently in the midst of an unprecedented wave of innovation and capacity-building when it comes to early learning--and a new federal-state partnership helped unleash this wave of innovation.

Key word here is "capacity building." Somebody is going to have to create all those Pre-K schools and programs. Do you smell that? It's the smell of money just waiting to be made.

#1: The enormous unmet need and demand for high-quality early learning.    

Unmet, unverified, and unsubstantiated. But okay. We are doing our best to help create the illusion of need in order to drive a real demand.

The speech is directed at politicians, so the political nature is understandable, but I am still struck by how completely and utterly Duncan ignores the question of what "quality" looks like in a Pre-K program, which is exactly the conversation we should be having.

Look, I'm a high school teacher. But it sure looks to me like we are creating-- inventing from scratch-- a whole new grade of school, pushed on our most vulnerable citizens and promoted without the slightest conversation about what a new grade of school for four year olds should look like. What would be developmentally appropriate? What would best serve the needs of the children?  Everything we know about the USDOE, Duncan, CCSS, and the implementation of reformy stuff indicates that the USDOE doesn't know the answers and doesn't particularly care.

Declaring Pre-K "inevitable" for any number of reasons is irresponsible for a Secretary of Education. We should be talking about whether it should be evitable. We should be talking about what form it must take if we're going to allow it to happen.Set some policy. Ask not if it IS inevitable, but whether or not it SHOULD be.

Duncan ought to be saying things like, "Before we make any attempt to take very young children out of home to participate in new educational programs, we'd better make damn sure that every aspect of that program is carefully designed and vetted by educational and developmental experts." Instead, he's out cheerleading about a unique opportunity for investors and politicians. As with CCSS, children are just cannon fodder.

Gates Goes Shopping

Why shouldn't Bill Gates spend his money terraforming the education landscape? Why shouldn't rich guys use their power and influence to promote the issues that they care about? Haven't rich powerful guys always done so?

These are not easy questions to answer. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others made hugely important contributions to the American landscape, legacies that have continue to benefit Americans long after these dead white guys had moved on to Robber Baron Heaven.

How is Gates different? This post by Mercedes Schneider (whose blog you should already be following), helped me see one significant difference.

Rockefeller and Carnegie (the dead white guy philanthropists I'm most familiar with) helped invent modern philanthropy by discovering some basic issues. Mostly, they discovered that when people hear you want to give away money, the wold beats a path to your door. So they set up various entities whose job was to accept, filter and respond to the applications for big bucks that various groups sent to them, based on a set of criteria that the rich guys developed out of A) their own set of concerns and B) the opinions of knowledgeable people in their fields. That's how Rockefeller, a white guy who believed in homeopathic medicine, ended up revolutionizing the study of medical science and building a higher education system for African-Americans.

This is not how the Gates Foundation does business.

Where classic philanthropy says, "Come make your pitch and if we like your work, we will help support you," the Gates Foundation says, "We have a project we want to launch.Let's go shopping for someone to do that for us."

From the Gates Foundation Grantseeker FAQ:

Q. How do I apply for a grant from the foundation? A. We do not make grants outside our funding priorities. In general, we directly invite proposals by directly contacting organizations.

There is also this:

Q: Who makes decisions on investments and when?

A: As part of its operating model, the foundation continues delegate decision making on grants and contracts to leaders across the organization.  With our new process, decision makers are identified at the early stage of an investment.  Check-in points are built in to help ensure that decision makers are informed about and can raise questions during development, rather than holding all questions until the end.

I know it says "investments," but we're still on the foundations Grantseeker FAQ page, in the section that talks about how various data and progress reports will be used along the way as grant recipients complete whatever project Gates is funding.

We pick the project, we approach the people we want to have do it, we bankroll it, and we supervise it until completion. The Gates Foundation model looks less like a philanthropy and more like corporate subcontracts.

This model explains a few issues about the Gates approach.

Why do so many edu-groups funded by Gates seem to have no existence outside of doing Gates work? Because Gates isn't looking to find people already running proven programs that can use a financial boost, but instead is looking to sow money and reap groups doing exactly what Gates wants to have done. "I've got a gabillion dollars here to give to a group that will pilot and promote an unproven educational technique! I'd like to pay you guys to set that up for us?"

Occasionally Gates does work with a pre-existing group, but often this is a matter of shopping for someone who can provide brand recognition, like AFT or NEA. But those "grants" are still predicated on "I have a project I want you to do for us" and not "Let me help support the good work you're already doing."

This is far different from Rockefeller's "I've got a gabillion dollars to spend promoting Black education in the South. Find me some people who are doing good work in the field that I can help expand with this money."

The Gates Foundation model is astroturf philanthropy.

Look, if you're a rich guy who loves anchovy pizza and you want to use your clout, that's fine. If you open the door for successful anchovy pizza makers to apply for grants so they can expand, that's super. But if you decide that you are going to fund a whole new anchovy pizza plant, and hire health department inspectors to get all other pizza makers condemned, and hire consultants to flood the media with bogus reports about the healthful effects of anchovy pizza, and create other consulting firms to push legislation outlawing everything except anchovies on pizza-- if you do all that, you are not a philanthropist. You're just a guy using money and power to make people do what you want them to.

Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest were not saints, and it's arguable whether their philanthropic benefits offset their robber baronical misbehavior. But when it came to running a corporate-based oligarchy, they were small-timers compared to the folks at the Gates.

What's Not To Love About Pre-K

One of the most recent ed-issues du jour is Pre-K. There's a great deal of political and public support for earlier childhood education these days, but I find much of it far more troubling than encouraging. While the data on the success of pre-K programs could be called mixed, there are a motivations behind the current push that indicate it should be feared and resisted.

Investment Opportunity

One of the appeals of Pre-K for investors is that there is no pre-existing institution that has to be bulldozed first.

Turning public education into an investment opportunity has been a long, arduous process. Discrediting public schools, buying up enough political clout to dismantle the public system, aggressive marketing to steal public ed "customers"-- it has taken a lot of time to break down a cherished American institution in order to create investment opportunities.

But the Pre-K landscape is only occupied by a handful of relative lightweights. It's the difference between building your new Mega-Mart on an empty lot and having to condemn and clear a residential neighborhood. Easy pickings!

Brand Extension

Yes, I see what you did there. We've stopped calling it Pre-School because that would indicate that it isn't going actually going to be school. But that's not where the push is going.

Instead, we have politicians deciding that since Kindergartner's are having trouble meeting the developmentally inappropriate standards of CCSS, the problem must be that they aren't "ready" for kindergarten. So we have the spectacle of people seriously suggesting that what four-year-olds need is some rigorous instruction, and of course THAT means that we'll need to give those four-year-olds standardized tests in order to evaluate how well the program is going.

It's like some sort of unholy alliance between people who won't be happy until they're selling eduproduct to every child in this country and people who won't be happy until we've made certain that no child in this country is ever wasting time playing and enjoying life.

More Pipeline

The Big Data machine needs more data. Right now we can only plug your child in when she reaches age five. Oh, but if we could only get our hands on those children sooner. Even a year sooner would be an improvement. Pre-K programs will allow more data collection and fatter file for each child.

Don't you want to know what career your four-year-old is best suited for? Don't you want to be certain that your four-year-old is on track for college? The let us add another link to the Big Data Pipeline.

There's no question that, done correctly, Pre-K can be a Good Thing. Anecdotally, I tell friends who are obsessing over it that I could never look at my eleventh grade classroom and tell you which students had pre-school and which did not. But, still, putting a small child in a rich environment to play and socialize and learn a few things couldn't hurt.

However, I'm convinced that a vast number of the people currently pushing Pre-K have no intention whatsoever of doing things right. Instead, what many politicians and thought leaders and hedgucators are supporting is an extension of CCSS/reformy stuff baloney to four-year-olds.

So support Pre-K if you wish, but be damn sure that the people you're agreeing with are people you are actually agreeing with.

Testing Resistance & Reform Spring: Three Simple Goals

There's a new coalition in the ed world, one that you should be hearing more about. Here's the meat from their first press release:
 

Widespread resistance to the overuse and misuse of standardized testing is exploding across the nation. Testing Resistance & Reform Spring (TRRS) is an alliance of organizations that have come together to expand these efforts in order to win local, state and national policy changes: Less testing, more learning. 

To ensure that assessment contributes to all students having full access to an equitable, high-quality education, we unite around three goals:

            1) Stop high-stakes use of standardized tests;

            2)  Reduce the number of standardized exams, saving time and money for real learning; and

            3)  Replace multiple-choice tests with performance-based assessments and evidence of learning from students’ ongoing classwork (“multiple measures”).

 There's a lot to love about this. Let me look at those three goals:

STOP HIGH STAKES USE OF STANDARDIZED TESTS

There is no justification for this use of standardized tests. There never has been. The high stakes use of the test exists for only one purpose-- to force students and teachers to take the tests seriously. Making these tests high stakes is the last desperate action of a speaker who can't get the crowd to9 listen, so he finally threatens to shoot them if they won't shut up.

REDUCE THE NUMBER OF STANDARDIZED EXAMS

Is there seriously anybody who doesn't think this is a good idea? Other than, of course, the people who make money selling exam programs to schools. This year, because we have moved PA's Big Test from 11th to 10th grade at my school, I will get to teach my students an entire unit more than I have been able to include since we started testing. They will get at least two week's worth of additional education.

There are reformers claiming that we need to lengthen the school day or the school year. But we can just as easily put more hours back into education by wasting less time on costly, time-consuming tests.

REPLACE BUBBLE TESTS WITH REAL ASSESSMENT

Fans of the High Stakes Testing sometimes speak as if there would be no measuring of students at all if not for the big bubble tests. But of course classroom teachers are already doing constant, complex, nuanced assessment that is directly tied to what is being taught. Is it so crazy to suggest that we could just use it? 

TRRS has an action website and an impressive list of members, including Fair Test, United Opt Out, Parents Across America, Save Our Schools, and the Network for Public Education. It has a clear mission, and as more parents get to meet PARCC, SBA, and their bastard cousins, more communities are realizing that the mega-testing program cannot stand as is.

When people are up to no good, or simply don't know what they're talking about, you get twisted overblown jargonized gobbledygook. Compare the rhetoric of testing fans to the three simple goals laid out above. The time has come to make this happen. Proponents have said, "Well, don't tell us what you're against. What are you for?" There it is. Plain and simple. Come join the resistance.