Gates Signals Moderation on Value-Added Measures

The Prichard Committee, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grantee, recently sent messages to Kentucky educators alerting them to Bill Gates's recent New York Times Op Ed  titled "Shame Is Not the Solution." Gates who supports value-added measures (and has supported them with millions of dollars in grant funds) had remained silent on the publication of teacher evaluation results by newspapers. In fact, Gates had created a stir when he called student testing the model for teacher evaluation, noting: "It is amazing how little feedback teachers get to help them improve, especially when you think about how much feedback their students get." Now, having created the system, Gates realizes the damage done by publicly reporting the results.

I imagine Gates feels similarly to the way Albert Shanker must have felt once he realized how his innovation-minded charter schools were co-opted for purposes he had not imagined.

 

But it's doubtful Gates can get the genie back into the bottle any more than Shanker could. As the New York State Court of Appeals has confirmed, creating this kind of information down to the teacher level, makes it public information. And that can be published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Herald-Leader and the Courier-Journal. It is clearly news.

But he's trying...and evolving. The Gates Foundation annual letter on philanthropic activities for 2012 marks a significant shift in his thinking. The 2012 letter argues strongly in favor of teacher peer review, a more holistic, classroom-observation-based evaluation strategy that is popular with teachers and their unions. Ladywonk Dana Goldstein believes Gates has learned a lot from dialogue with classroom teachers. 

Just as he nimbly moved in business matters, he appears to be shifting positions again. But in the public sector, where he cannot control the variables, his efforts are likely to take on a life of their own, and in this case, residual effects may hurt what he had hoped to help.

Bill Gates Really Has Evolved on Teacher Quality

This from Dana Goldstein:

I heard some push back last month when I praised Bill Gates for adopting a more holistic view of teacher evaluation, one focused less on student test scores and more on peer review and continuous improvement. But today he's signaling his evolution on these ideas in the loudest way possible, by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times that argues against releasing teachers' value-added scores to the public--a policy the Bloomberg administration and Arne Duncan support--and in favor of using value-added as just one measure of teacher effectiveness...

Of course, the Gates Foundation is not abandoning value-added entirely; it continues to commit its own resources to developing value-added as an evaluation tool, in part by creating new, more stable student assessments, and in part by researching what combination of evaluation tools--both qualitative and quantitative--are least volatile and most predictive. But given Gates' history of statements on teaching, it's no longer credible to argue he hasn't evolved significantly in a direction most classroom teachers support: toward multiple measures of teacher quality....

Do Value-Added Models "Control For Poverty?"

This from the Shanker Blog:  

There is some controversy over the fact that Florida’s recently-announced value-added model (one of a class often called “covariate adjustment models”), which will be used to determine merit pay bonuses and other high-stakes decisions, doesn’t include a direct measure of poverty.

Personally, I support adding a direct income proxy to these models, if for no other reason than to avoid this type of debate (and to facilitate the disaggregation of results for instructional purposes). It does bear pointing out, however, that the measure that’s almost always used as a proxy for income/poverty – students’ eligibility for free/reduced-price lunch – is terrible as a poverty (or income) gauge. It tells you only whether a student’s family has earnings below (or above) a given threshold (usually 185 percent of the poverty line), and this masks most of the variation among both eligible and non-eligible students. For example, families with incomes of $5,000 and $20,000 might both be coded as eligible, while families earning $40,000 and $400,000 are both coded as not eligible. A lot of hugely important information gets ignored this way, especially when the vast majority of students are (or are not) eligible, as is the case in many schools and districts...

Gates Weighs In as New York City Releases 'Value Added' Scores

This from Teacher Beat:

New York City will release to news outlets tomorrow "value added" reports that purport to estimate a teacher's impact on his or her students' standardized test scores—an action certain to thrust discussion of these measures into the public eye once again, and one that also raises big questions about journalism ethics.

The city teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, has doggedly tried to prevent such a release. But its last legal defense fell last week, when the state's supreme court declined to hear the union's appeal to a ruling requiring such a release under open-records laws—with teachers' names attached.

That means that it will be up to individual news outlets in the state to make a determination about how, and under what conditions, they will use this information or make it available.

This is a more complicated question than you might think. If they do choose to make the information available, with teachers' names attached, will there be disclosures about the limitations of these data? Will it include margins of error around the results? The Shanker Institute's Matthew DiCarlo has an interesting discussion about many of these factors.

Stepping into the fray, seemingly as a preventive measure, is Bill Gates. He penned an op-ed in The New York Times that calls publicly revealing individual teachers' scores "a big mistake."...