Good Test Scores = Good Teachers?

Yesterday JS Online ran a story about Senate Bill 95, saying it would allow "School boards across Wisconsin could use teacher evaluations - which rely in part on the results of students' standardized state test scores - as part of the reason for dismissing and disciplining educators, according to legislation considered by the Assembly and Senate education committees Monday."

This is similar to legislation going on around the country, the "value-added modeling" approach.

Like New York- where test scores will account for 40% of teacher's evaluations

And Georgia, where 50% of the evaluations are based on student test scores

And New Jersey

And Massachusetts

But do good test scores = good teachers?  Do good teachers = good test scores?  Is it really that simple of an equation- so simple that teachers' should be evaluated based on how well their students do on a test?

According to an article by the Economic Policy Institute, there are problems with using test scores to evaluate teachers.  "A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation. Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50% of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation decisions to scores on existing tests of basic skills in math and reading. Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise."

I would encourage everyone to read the entire study, which can be found here.  Here's one excerpt:

"For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors."

And another:

"Adopting an invalid teacher evaluation system and tying it to rewards and sanctions is likely to lead to inaccurate personnel decisions and to demoralize teachers, causing talented teachers to avoid high-needs students and schools, or to leave the profession entirely, and discouraging potentially effective teachers from entering it. Legislatures should not mandate a test-based approach to teacher evaluation that is unproven and likely to harm not only teachers, but also the children they instruct."

Roger Tilles, a member of the New York State Board of Regents, recently made this position statement.  In it, he said, "If these value-added techniques were applied to other professions as they are being applied to teachers, it would mean that dentists be would evaluated not on their skills but only on how many cavities a dentist’s patients gets in a year or with a doctor on how many times his patients get sick in a year. Similarly, police are not evaluated on the number of crimes committed on their beat, nor fire personnel on number of fires in their jurisdiction. We would all acknowledge that such rating systems are at best incomplete."

And another study by RAND:  "Finally, our analysis and simulations demonstrate that VAM- based rankings of teachers are highly unstable, and that only large dif- ferences in estimated impact are likely to be detectable given the effects of sampling error and other sources of uncertainty. Interpretations of differences among teachers based on VAM estimates should be made with extreme caution."

Millions and Millions of Dollars

There's been some interesting talk about Wisconsin millionaires in the news.   

Here's some information from back in March.

And a blog post today from Will Blog for Food.

And yesterday this article came out: Wisconsin Millionaires Expected to Double in 10 Years.  Basically the article says that some millionaires lost that status during the recession and they are expected to get that status back as the economy continues to recover.  But this in itself is important to me and many other middle class Americans who are going to see their salaries shrink.  The article quotes Patrick Mehigan from Deloitte's tax branch in Milwaukee. 

“But for those that say that we're losing millionaires in Wisconsin because of whatever possible policy, I think this study would at least suggest that's not the case."

You know who "those" are, don't you?  Why our own Governor Walker and his far right Republican Congress!  And every other Republican politician in this country.

Republicans are always saying that taxing the rich will cause them to leave a state for another one with lower taxes.  But is that really true?  Not according to this post.  

"Earlier this month, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts (PERI) released a study by Jeffrey Thompson that concluded that the availability of jobs, rather than relative levels of taxation, is the leading factor that causes people to move from one state to another. It also found 'that the impact of taxes on cross-state migration is very weak.'”

And here's some further information from the Wisconsin Budget Project.  It quoted:

"Evidence from surveys of migrating households, the existing economic literature, and the new analysis in this paper all suggest that taxes do not play any notable role in causing people to leave a state. The most important factors in influencing household migration are economic and family-related reasons. If anything, higher state income taxes are shown to decrease the numbers of people leaving a state. Taxes do appear to influence the choice of which state to live in once a person has decided to move, but the impact is modest. If states use the revenues from higher taxes to create jobs, reduce unemployment, and reduce property crime, the small negative impacts from taxes can be easily overcome.”

So see?  You don't have to harbor that sympathy for the rich anymore.  They will do just fine, no matter what state they live in and what taxes they pay.

Unions: All for One and One for All

You may have seen these statistics already.  They hit home the reality of what's happening to our middle class in America.  On this blog, Karla Walter, Senior Policy Analyst and David Madland, Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, wrote:

"The middle class is markedly stronger when workers join together in unions.  The power of unions to create prosperity for working families is well recognized: Organized labor is one of the few voices for the economic interests of the middle class in our government. Unions were key to creating and protecting the social safety net."


Not only are middle class wages decreasing, but as I've demonstrated in previous posts, wages of the rich continue to increase, creating a wider and wider income gap in our country.


The Center for American Progress Action Fund published this article.  It said, 


"The essence of what labor unions do—give workers a stronger voice so that they can get a fair share of the economic growth they help create—is and has always been important to making the economy work for all Americans. And unions only become more important as the economy worsens."


And they provided this interactive map to see what's happening in your state.


Yet with all this data showing how important unions are to all middle class workers, here was the headline from JS online yesterday:  
Unions might drop state status

And here's what it said,

"If Gov. Scott Walker's union bargaining measure becomes law and forces do-or-die recertification votes for public employee unions, some large public unions might simply skip the votes and drop their official status with the state."


I am sad today.

Here's where we are headed middle class, right down to the bottom of the barrel...without a voice.  

Fight on!

Super PACs

Back in this post, I talked about the Citizens United ruling.

Russ Feingold has started a campaign to fight back- Progressives United.  I am proud to be a member of this group.

On April 28th Russ appeared on the Colbert Nation.  Besides providing some comic relief, it also does a great job of explaining the Super PAC.

Sign the pledge against the Super PACs here.