Restart of VAM = More Unfair Teacher Evaluations = More Good Teachers Resigning

This Advocate article about the restart of VAM (Value Added Model) for evaluating teachers in 2017-18 reminds us about why teachers are advising young people to avoid the teaching profession as a career. More and more, teaching is just becoming something people do until they can get a better job where they get a little respect. Teaching in Louisiana is no longer a true profession.

Governor Jindal and John White helped change the law so that teachers in charter schools no longer need a degree in education, and Teach for America corps members can enter any public school classroom with only 5 or 6 weeks of training. But these folks are only interested in being in the classroom for three years or less. People being hired as teachers of the basic subjects of English, math, science and social studies don't need to be real teachers who try to inspire and teach a love of learning. They only need to be able to rehearse students for their all important state tests. But if they are unlucky, the VAM score of their students may run them out of teaching. Here is one example.

Four years ago, right after the first year of VAM I visited several schools to talk to educators about how the VAM rating system had worked. I spoke to a principal of a small rural school, where students generally scored above average on their state LEAP tests. The school was rated a "B" using the state rating system based mostly on student test scores. I asked the principal for her opinion about how effective VAM had been in identifying the best and worst teachers. She responded that actually, VAM had labeled her best math teacher as being ineffective. This had forced the teacher to be placed on remediation even though she was the most qualified in the school to teach a remediation course!

I asked how could that be possible? The principal said that this weird result occurred because she had moved the teacher from teaching 4th grade math to 5th grade math in the year where VAM was applied. The teacher ended up teaching the exact same students she had taught before when their test scores had been spectacular. But because the VAM formula raised the growth score prediction unreasonably and the students hit a plateau in their performance, the teacher got a terrible VAM score even though her students were still performing above grade level! The principal told me that this teacher was devastated by this result. She lost her tenure, was put on remediation, and was seriously considering leaving teaching. I wonder how many times this result was repeated all over the state.

Statistics tell us that VAM was extremely unstable and unreliable from year to year because of such factors as above. The worst result I heard about was the teacher who got a failing VAM because the teacher the year before had given the students the correct answers on the state test, causing them to have an inflated VAM which doomed the teacher the next year!

A major part of the problem with the application of VAM for teacher evaluations is that it is based on a system called stack ranking of employee evaluations. This system was first developed by the Microsoft Corporation. It ranks employees on their relative performance evaluations and guarantees that a certain percentage will be ranked unsatisfactory each year, without regard to other factors. Microsoft found out very quickly that such a system destroyed teamwork by pitting employees against each other and resulted in lower overall productivity. Microsoft has long ago abandoned this defective process, but that did not stop education reformers from putting it in all over the country. There is not one state where the prevailing opinion is that it works to improve teacher effectiveness, yet it survives in many places because reformers will never admit that they were wrong.

Representative Frank Hoffman, a retired educator who was the author of the original VAM legislation, has expressed serious doubts about the effectiveness of VAM, and has tried to pass new legislation to make make it optional for local school systems. But the education reform bosses at LABI and CABL who have never taught a day in their lives, said no and killed the legislation!

The new application of VAM for 2017-18 will be reduced from 50% to 35%, but if everything else is equal, it can still have a detrimental effect on teacher morale which ultimately drives good people away from the teaching profession. Just exactly the opposite of what VAM was supposed to do.