There is an unrivaled assault on the teaching profession.  It  emerged and has sustained itself when education policy makers convinced themselves that public education should be based on standards driven accountability model, combined with high-stakes testing.

The goal of this model of education is to improve student achievement test scores in mathematics, reading, and science.  There is also a goal of decreasing the gap in achievement scores between white students and black and Hispanic students.

According to the policy makers that are behind this accountability model, American students are lagging behind students in other countries on international tests including PISA and TIMMS.  Their claim is that America’s economic competitiveness is at risk, and unless we raise standards and the accompanying test scores, students will simply not be able to compete in the global marketplace.

There is ample evidence that student test scores are not a barometer of U.S. economic growth, or depression.  U.S. test scores did not cause or contribute to the Great Recession, any more than they caused the Economic Boom of the 1990s.

In order to boost test scores on high-stakes examinations given at the end of the year, and on international tests, we need to weed out bad teachers leaving the schools with only “good teachers.”

Here’s the rub.  The system that education policy reformers are using to evaluate teachers is called “Value-Added Model” (VAM).  It is a model designed to evaluate student test score gains from one year to the next.  The education policy wonks actually believe that they can measure a teacher’s effect on student achievement gains without taking into consideration other significant variables.

According to research reported by Linda Darling-Hammond and others, there other factors that actually influence students’ achievement scores more than any individual teacher.  The factors identified include:

• School factors such as class sizes, curriculum materials, instructional time, availability of specialists and tutors, and resources for learning (books, computers, science labs, and more);
• Home and community supports or challenges;
• Individual student needs and abilities, health, and attendance;
• Peer culture and achievement;
• Prior teachers and schooling, as well as other current teachers;
• Differential summer learning loss, which especially affects low-income children; and
• The specific tests used, which emphasize some kinds of learning and not others and which rarely measure achievement that is well above or below grade level.

And as these researchers state value-added model don’t really measure most of these factors.  Parsing out the actual affect of the teacher on student achievement gains is nearly impossible given the list of variables that also contribute to learning.  Darling-Hammond and colleagues highlight these two important issues with VAM as a way to evaluate teacher effectiveness.

• It’s been pointed out that the value-added models of teaching effectiveness is very unstable.  Teachers’ value added scores vary considerable from class to class  and from year to year.  There is substantial data to support the instability of individual teachers’ VAM.  So between years, or courses, a teacher’s scores could vary considerably.
• Another real problem of a teachers VAM is that it is highly dependent on the students that assigned to their classes and courses.  Indeed researcher have found that teachers’ VAMs can be advantaged or disadvantaged depending up the students they teach.

Even with the research data to show that using VAMs is a flawed methodology, and should not be sole measure of teacher effectiveness, the assault occurs when the department of education releases the value-added scores which are then published in the local newspapers.  Imagine, a data base that includes your name, your school, and your value-added score.

Lisa Delpit, Eminent Scholar and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University, and author of Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, and the forthcoming book, Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children, suggests that the “programmed, mechanistic strategies designed to achieve the programmed, mechanistic goal of raising test scores” strips away the humanity that should be the basis for education (Delpit, Other People’s Children, 2005).  The present obsession with standards and test scores has driven us further away from realistic goals that she calls for.  She puts it this way:

Nowhere is the result more glaring than in urban classrooms serving low-income children of color, where low test scores meet programmed, scripted teaching.  The reductionism spawned has created settings in which teachers and students are treated as nonthinking objects to be manipulated and “managed.”

Dr. Delpit explains that she is more concerned now with the development of the character of students than she was years before.  The reductionist goals of the present reform movement are not serving most children in American schools.

The assault continues in a variety of ways.  In the next post I am going to describe how Georgia will be using student achievement scores to grade each school in the state: A,B,C,D, or F.

Do you agree or disagree with the notion that teaching is being assaulted?