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November 11, 2013 12:00 am GMT
The once respectable Los Angeles Times is leveraging its dwindling platform to attack individual teachers under the guise of data transparency. The editorial board won a court case allowing them to use a highly contentious, self-designed algorithm to rank the best and worst teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Neither the suicide of one of the shamed teachers, nor the wide-spread criticism of the statistical methods have aroused the editorial board’s better judgement. Many school districts, such as the LAUSD, estimate teacher performance based off of their students’s standardized test results. So-called “value-added modeling” attempt to estimate a teacher’s relative abilities based on how they expect students to do given their past performance. The school district will be forced to release the data on teacher evaluations to The Times for publication. While I’m all for transparency of government data,there’s a few glaring problems with value-added scores that the public might not be aware of. 1. Value-added measures are as unstable as a chain-smoker on a flight from LA to Japan. Teacher ratings often swing wildly from year to year and are sensitive to tiny changes in the statistical methods. The University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that only about half (46.4%) of LAUSD teachers retained their same effectiveness rating under slight tweaks to the model [PDF]. Specifically, the NEPC added measures of school ranking and early elementary grades into their own value-added model to see how it might disrupt the rankings (and it did). There’s many reasons why such variables might not have been originally included: adding in past performance and school transfers makes it difficult to know what in the history of student ultimately led to their current abilities. Statistical geeks can debate the best models, but if a series of very reasonable decisions leads to radically different rankings, it’s way too unstable to shame a teacher in a national newspaper. 2. Standardize tests suck at measuring the value of a teacher. “Test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach,” notes Stanford Professor Education, Linda Darling-Hammond. “In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students.” The LA Times appears oblivious to this well know fact. In an email, a representative tells me, “Research has repeatedly found that teachers are the single most important
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aDiqkgvYg7g/
The LA Times Trolls Innocent Teachers
The once respectable Los Angeles Times is leveraging its dwindling platform to attack individual teachers under the guise of data transparency. The editorial board won a court case allowing them to use a highly contentious, self-designed algorithm to rank the best and worst teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Neither the suicide of one of the shamed teachers, nor the wide-spread criticism of the statistical methods have aroused the editorial board’s better judgement. Many school districts, such as the LAUSD, estimate teacher performance based off of their students’s standardized test results. So-called “value-added modeling” attempt to estimate a teacher’s relative abilities based on how they expect students to do given their past performance. The school district will be forced to release the data on teacher evaluations to The Times for publication. While I’m all for transparency of government data,there’s a few glaring problems with value-added scores that the public might not be aware of. 1. Value-added measures are as unstable as a chain-smoker on a flight from LA to Japan. Teacher ratings often swing wildly from year to year and are sensitive to tiny changes in the statistical methods. The University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that only about half (46.4%) of LAUSD teachers retained their same effectiveness rating under slight tweaks to the model [PDF]. Specifically, the NEPC added measures of school ranking and early elementary grades into their own value-added model to see how it might disrupt the rankings (and it did). There’s many reasons why such variables might not have been originally included: adding in past performance and school transfers makes it difficult to know what in the history of student ultimately led to their current abilities. Statistical geeks can debate the best models, but if a series of very reasonable decisions leads to radically different rankings, it’s way too unstable to shame a teacher in a national newspaper. 2. Standardize tests suck at measuring the value of a teacher. “Test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach,” notes Stanford Professor Education, Linda Darling-Hammond. “In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students.” The LA Times appears oblivious to this well know fact. In an email, a representative tells me, “Research has repeatedly found that teachers are the single most importantOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aDiqkgvYg7g/
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