professor

To Sir: Where are you?

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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2011 Population Survey indicates that men make up 18.3 percent of elementary and middle school teachers and 2.3 percent of preschool and kindergarten instructors, down from 2007 pre-recession proportions of 19.1 percent for grades 1 to 8, and 2.7 percent for preschool and kindergarten, reports Sarah Sparks in Education Week.

High school educators are more evenly divided: 42 percent in 2011 were men, down from 43.1 percent in 2007. The diminishing status of teachers generally, coupled with continuing sexism against men working with children, may be discouraging men from entering the field. Chanté Chambers, who recruits at historically black colleges and universities for Teach For America, sees the trend play out among high-achieving college students. Education's low status is "a major barrier" to bringing more men, particularly black men, into the field. "They're coming from communities that are not necessarily affluent, so it adds to pressure to be that breadwinner, to have financial stability," she explains.

According to Shaun Johnson, a former D.C. teacher and now a professor at Towson University, "Teacher-bashing is a new national pastime ... and [one] which you could argue is highly gendered. [Teaching's] status as a profession isn't going to improve in this climate; it's only going to get worse."

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Why Pay for Performance Should Get the Sack

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The following article discusses the problems with perfoamcne pay in the financial sector, the heat of capitalism. Extrapolating this compensation gimmick to educators as corporate education reformers are seeking to do continues to be proven problematic

By Bruno S. Frey, Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich and Margit Osterloh, Professor (em.) for Business Administration and Management of Technology and Innovation, University of Zürich; and Professor, Warwick Business School. Cross posted from VoxEU

As the bonus culture in the financial sector once again comes under attack, this column rubbishes the typical defence that banks need to pay top dollar to attract the best talent.

Scientific literature has extensively dealt with variable pay-for-performance. Despite the fact that serious problems linked to this approach have thus become obvious, many authors continue to support compensation according to predetermined performance criteria because they are committed to the traditional concept of the ’homo oeconomicus’.
Overall, there has been a marked change of opinion in academia (see for instance Bryson and Freeman 2008 on this site). The idea that people are solely self-interested and materially orientated has been thrown overboard by leading scholars. Empirical research, in particular experimental research, has shown that under suitable conditions human beings care for the wellbeing of other persons. Above all, they are not solely interested in material gains (see eg Frey and Osterloh 2002). Recognition by co-workers is greatly important. Many workers are intrinsically motivated, ie they perform work for its own sake because it is found challenging and worth undertaking. This applies not only to qualified employees but also to persons fulfilling simple tasks. They often are proud of their work and performance.

There are four major arguments against variable pay-for-performance:

  • In a modern economy, it is practically impossible to determine tasks that are to be fulfilled in the future precisely enough so that variable pay-for-performance can be applied. In a society continually faced with new challenges, superiors oftentimes find it impossible to fix ex ante what an employee will have to do in the future.
  • It would be naïve to assume that the persons subjected to variable pay-for-performance would accept the respective criteria in a passive way and fulfil their work accordingly. Rather, they spend much energy and time trying to manipulate these criteria in their favour. This is facilitated by the fact that employees often know the specific features of their work better than their superiors. The wage explosions observable in many sectors of the economy can at least partly be attributed to such manipulations, eg when managers are able to contract easily achievable performance goals.
  • Variable pay-for-performance results in employees restricting their work to those areas covered by the performance criteria. In the literature, this is known as the ’multiple tasking’ problem. This may induce employees to spend considerable time and energy during their work trying to find a better-paid job with another firm. They therefore neglect their tasks insofar as they are not contractually fixed by the performance criteria.
  • Variable pay-for-performance tends to crowd out intrinsic work motivation and therewith the joy of fulfilling a particular task. However, such motivation is of great importance in a modern economy because it supports innovation and helps to fulfil tasks going beyond the ordinary.

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Testing experts warn about use of VAM

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Testing experts recently joined together to issue a letter to the NY State Board of Regents, where they recently approved using value added measurements to account for 40% of a teachers assessment. In Ohio, under HB153 50% would be accounted through testing.

In summary, their conclusion

VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

Here's the full letter:

May 15, 2011

To The New York State Board of Regents:

As researchers who have done extensive work in the area of testing and measurement, and the use of value-added methods of analysis, we write to express our concern about the decision pending before the Board of Regents to require the use of state test scores as 40% of the evaluation decision for teachers.

As the enclosed report from the Economic Policy Institute describes, the research literature includes many cautions about the problems of basing teacher evaluations on student test scores. These include problems of attributing student gains to specific teachers; concerns about overemphasis on “teaching to the test” at the expense of other kinds of learning; and disincentives for teachers to serve high-need students, for example, those who do not yet speak English and those who have special education needs.

Reviews of research on value-added methodologies for estimating teacher “effects” based on student test scores have concluded that these measures are too unstable and too vulnerable to many sources of error to be used as a major part of teacher evaluation. A report by the RAND Corporation concluded that:

The research base is currently insufficient to support the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions about individual teachers or schools.

The Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences stated,

…VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness … should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

Henry Braun, then of the Educational Testing Service, concluded in his review of research:

VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the kinds of data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such interpretations.

According to these studies, the problems with using value-added testing models to determine teacher effectiveness include:

*Teachers’ ratings are affected by differences in the students who are assigned to them. Students are not randomly assigned to teachers – and statistical models cannot fully adjust for the fact that some teachers will have a disproportionate number of students who may be exceptionally difficult to teach (students with poor attendance, who are homeless, who have severe problems at home, etc.) and whose scores on traditional tests have unacceptably low validity (e.g. those who have special education needs or who are English language learners). All of these factors can create both misestimates of teachers’ effectiveness and disincentives for teachers to want to teach the neediest students, creating incentives for teachers to seek to teach those students those expected to make the most rapid gains and to avoid schools and classrooms serving struggling students.

*Value-added models of teacher effectiveness do not produce stable ratings of teachers. Teachers look very different in their measured effectiveness when different statistical methods are used. In addition, researchers have found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings differ from class to class, from year to year, and even from test to test, even when these are within the same content area. Henry Braun notes that ratings are most unstable at the upper and lower ends of the scale, where many would like to use them to determine high or low levels of effectiveness.

*It is impossible to fully separate out the influences of students’ other teachers, as well as school and home conditions, on their apparent learning. No single teacher accounts for all of a student’s learning. Prior teachers have lasting effects, for good or ill, on students’ later learning, and current teachers also interact to produce students’ knowledge and skills. Some students receive tutoring, as well as help from well-educated parents. A teacher who works in a well-resourced school with specialist supports serving students from stable, supportive families may appear to be more effective than one whose students don’t receive these supports.

These problems are exacerbated further by the fact that the kind of grade-level tests and end-of-course tests used in New York are not designed to measure student growth.

While value-added models based on student test scores are useful for looking at groups of teachers for research purposes – for example, to examine the results of professional development programs or to look at student progress at the school or district level, they are problematic as measures for making evaluation decisions for individual teachers.

We urge you to reject proposals that would place significant emphasis on this untested strategy that could have serious negative consequences for teacher and for the most vulnerable students in the State’s schools.

Eva Baker, Distinguished Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education
Director, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST)
President, World Educational Research Association, 2010-2012
Past President, American Educational Research Association

Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Executive Board Member, National Academy of Education

Edward Haertel, Vida Jacks Professor of Education, Stanford University
Chair, Board on Testing and Assessment, National Research Council
Vice-President, National Academy of Education
Past President, National Council on Measurement in Education

Helen F. Ladd, Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
President, Association of Public Policy and Management

Henry M. Levin, William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Past President, Evaluation Research Society
Past President, Comparative and International Education Society

Robert E. Linn, Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Past President, National Council on Measurement in Education

Aaron Pallas, Professor of Sociology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Fellow, American Educational Research Association

Richard Shavelson, Dean Emeritus and Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
Past President, American Educational Research Association

Lorrie A. Shepard, Dean & Distinguished Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder
Past President, American Educational Research Association
Past President National Academy of Education
Past President National Council on Measurement in Education

Lee S. Shulman, Charles E. Ducommun Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
President Emeritus, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Past President, American Educational Research Association

Can Teachers be Evaluated by their Students Test Scores?

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More Value Add research, this time from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, that should cause pause to those in a headlong rush to implement high stakes testing and measurmenet as a means of judging teaching effectiveness and compensation.

Prepared by Sean Corcoran, assistant professor of educational economics at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and research fellow at the Institute for Education and Social Policy in collaboration with the Annenberg Institute

Value-added models have become increasingly popular in today’s policy environment as a way to evaluate, reward, and dismiss teachers. These statistical models aim to isolate each teacher’s unique contribution to their students’ educational outcomes based in part on student test scores.

But NYU professor Sean Corcoran uses data analysis to argue that value-added models are not precise enough to be useful for high-stakes decision making or professional development. Corcoran cautions policy-makers, in particular, to be fully aware of the limitations and shortcomings of these models and consider whether their minimal benefits outweigh the cost. (September 2010)

The Use of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness - Executive Summary

The full report can be read here.