Value-added: An important measure

A fantastic study published by the Brookings Institute called “Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added,” explores the benefits and challenges of a system that evaluates teachers by their students improvement on objective measures like standardized tests.

Here are the main points of the study and discussion:

Current evaluation systems that use principals to evaluate teachers end up classifying 99 percent of teachers as effective. Obviously principal evaluations alone cannot accurately determine a teacher’s effectiveness.

Value-added is “not a perfect system of measurement,” but it can “complement” other measurements like parent and student feedback, observations, and self assessments.

Many teachers are skeptical of value-added systems because they are afraid of being labeled as bad teachers solely because of their students’ test scores. “But framing the problem in terms of false negatives places the focus almost entirely on the interests of the individual who is being evaluated rather than the students who are being served. It is easy to identify with the good teacher who wants to avoid dismissal for being incorrectly labeled a bad teacher. From that individual’s perspective, no rate of misclassification is acceptable.”

The authors of this study illustrate the problem with this argument well when they point out that SAT scores are only moderately correlated to success in college, and between-season batting averages for baseball players are only moderately correlated to professional batting averages. Nevertheless, we use these measurements because they are the best we have. In the authors’ words, “We should not set unrealistic expectations for the reliability or stability of value-added. Value-added evaluations are as reliable as those used for high stakes decisions in many other fields.”

Value-added measurements are especially important when we examine the alternatives for measuring teacher performance: seniority (experience) or principal evaluations. This study finds that value-added measurements are the best way to determine effectiveness.

Teachers are worried that value-added indicators unfairly measure their effectiveness. While it is true that value-added will not be a perfect measure, it is still an important one. Combining an objective measure of student performance with more objective measurements is the only way to create a fair and comprehensive evaluation system.

StudentsFirst: A Call for Respectful Education Reform Dialogue

It is important to remember that in the education reform debate, teachers, unions, school administrators, government officials, parents, and students all have a lot at stake. Each party in the reform movement, however, is either fighting for personal reasons (i.e. for government officials to keep their jobs), for selfless reasons (i.e. what’s in the best interest of your child), or a combination of the two. While all of the sides may disagree about the problems within the American education system as well as the perceived effectiveness of proposed solutions, each party in the reform debate does not have to be disagreeable. One would hope, that at least on some level, all parties involved are advocating for greater success among American public school children, and that is a goal that we can all agree on. Unfortunately, education reform debates have turned ugly in many areas recently.

Olivia Demas, a mother of three from Ohio blogged Sunday on the Students First website about the actions that many opposed to education reform measures are taking to halt progress. While I’m sure that both sides of the debate have, at times, been less than civil, the drastic responses from teachers, unions, and other official outlined by Demas must end. Active debate in the education arena should be encouraged, but when that debate turns into the usurpation of free speech rights and the intimidation of parents and teachers who want the best for their kids, we fail to have a constructive dialogue and all parties in the education reform domain lose out, one way or another.

The article, published on StudentsFirst, can be found here: http://www.studentsfirst.org/blog/entry/a-call-for-civility/

How Expensive Is It (Federally)?

Soon, I will be publishing a blog post that highlights the four most daunting obstacles to education reform in America. One of those reform barriers is the perception that switching to a merit based system for teacher pay would drastically increase education expenditures at the local, state, and national levels. While deficit hawks are sorely needed in today’s fiscally irresponsible Washington atmosphere, education reform is simply not the policy arena that they should be scrutinizing for two reasons.

First, the education of American students is absolutely critical for the future success of this country. While it is almost impossible to cut spending in entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the government simply cannot focus on critical domestic policy arenas, like education, to try and appear fiscally responsible. Second, education spending is a miniscule part of the federal budget, taking up approximately 1.8% of federal spending annually. Although a majority of the education spending in the United States comes from state and local government coffers, there are far larger sectors of the federal budget for those interested in fiscal responsibility. These statistics and a wealth of additional information can be found at the Federal Education Budget Project.

For those interested in exploring how federal education spending affects the national budget, be sure to check out the Committee For a Responsible Budget’s budget simulator. You’ll notice that only a few levers within the domestic part of the simulator touch on education reforms, and these changes do not drastically affect the overall federal budget. Try the simulator yourself at: http://crfb.org/stabilizethedebt/ .