Value-added model doesn’t find bad teachers, causes administrators to cheat

This is a good follow up to my earlier post about big data.

mathbabe

There’ve been a couple of articles in the past few days about teacher Value-Added Testing that have enraged me.

If you haven’t been paying attention, the Value-Added Model (VAM) is now being used in a majority of the states (source: the Economist):

But it gives out nearly random numbers, as gleaned from looking at the same teachers with two scores (see this previous post). There’s a 24% correlation between the two numbers. Note that some people are awesome with respect to one score and complete shit on the other score:

Final thing you need to know about the model: nobody really understands how it works. It relies on error terms of an error-riddled model. It’s opaque, and no teacher can have their score explained to them in Plain English.

Now, with that background, let’s look into these articles.

First, there’s this New York Times article from yesterday…

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