Dana Goldstein has written a truly excellent, and urgent story for The American Prospect about education reform and the intensifying world of standardized testing and value-added teacher evaluation.
Goldstein’s story is called The Test Generation and it asks: What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they “grow” their students’ test scores? Colorado is about to find out.
Here’s how it begins:
On exam day in Sabina Trombetta’s Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso’s “Weeping Woman,” a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist’s lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant — almost neon — greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, “Women are suffering machines.”
The test asked the first-graders to look at “Weeping Woman” and “write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion.” (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, “In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion.” (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.
Trombetta, 38, a 10-year teaching veteran and winner of distinguished teaching awards from both her school district, Harrison District 2, and Pikes Peak County, would have rather been handing out glue sticks and finger paints. The kids would have preferred that, too. But the test wasn’t really about them. It was about their teacher.
Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers — even those in art, music, and physical education — according to how much they “grow” student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape — bullet points on Colorado’s new fine-art curriculum standards.
All of this left Trombetta pretty frustrated, and on a November afternoon, she really wanted to talk. As she ate lunch (a frozen TV dinner) in her cheery, deserted classroom plastered with bright posters, she recounted the events of the past week. She liked the idea of exposing her young students, many of whom had never visited a museum, to great works of art. But, Trombetta complained, preparing the children for the exam meant teaching them reductive half-truths about art — that dark colors signify sadness and bright colors happiness, for example. “To bombard these kids with words and concepts instead of the experience of art? I really struggle with that,” she said. “It’s kind of hard when they come to me and say, ‘What are we going to make today?’ and I have to say, ‘Well, we’re going to write about art.'”
VALUE ADDED
Admittedly, the scene of the Picasso-analyzing 1st graders seems slightly absurd.
Yet, in the minds of most education watchers—or families with school age children—there is a strong push for some kind of merit-based method, other than seniority, to retain and promote public school teachers.
The hottest merit-based method right now is what is called value added, which—in the very simplest of terms—measures how kids in a given teacher’s class improved their scores on standardized tests from one year to the next. This movement in scores is presumed to be directly attributable to “value-added” elements provided by the skill of the teacher.
Most value-added models attempt to improve accuracy by employing one of a number of elaborate algorithms that control for different variables that might also affect the rise or drop in a student’s scores.
The LA Times controversial series about teacher ratings used one value-added model.
New York City schools have been fiddling with another one. Colorado has its own model.
Yet, even advocates admit that any value-added model based on student performance on standardized tests cannot help but have considerable flaws.
As Goldstein writes:
In the social sciences, there is an oft-repeated aphorism called Campbell’s Law, named after Donald Campbell, the psychologist who pioneered the study of human creativity: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” In short, incentives corrupt. Daniel Koretz, the Harvard education professor recognized as the country’s leading expert on academic testing, writes in his book Measuring Up that Campbell’s Law is especially applicable to education; there is a preponderance of evidence showing that high-stakes tests lead to a narrowed curriculum, score inflation, and even outright cheating among those tasked with scoring exams.
And there is this:
Rival groups of education researchers interpret the reliability of value-added differently but even the technique’s defenders have urged caution, as have the Educational Testing Service and the Department of Education’s own Institute for Education Sciences. Experts raise a number of powerful objections: that value-added measurements are often based on poorly designed, unsophisticated standardized tests; that the ratings are particularly volatile (a teacher who scores very well or very poorly using value-added has only a one-third chance of getting a similar score the following year, and it takes about 10 years of data to reduce the value-added error rate to 12 percent for any individual teacher); and that the technique gives the impression that the teacher is the only factor in student achievement, ignoring parental involvement, after-school tutoring, and other “inputs” that research shows account for up to 80 percent of a student’s achievement outcomes.
Goldstein’s story contains lots more in the way of interesting angles and information on the subject.
Thus I really urge you to read the whole thing.
Campbell’s Law ripples through every level of education. I know of at least three people who have been discouraged from enrolling in doctoral level literature programs because nearly all the major universities require students to master a specific standardized method of talking about and evaluating liturature;a far cry from the developement of creative style, which one would think would be the emphasis. The word I hear is the same one, I’m sure, that these elementary students would say: “BORING”