Guest Post: Teacher Opposition to VAM

by Kerri Tobin, PhD

Teacher opposition to value-added modeling gets portrayed in the media as teachers refusing to take any kind of responsibility for student learning or academic growth. But most teachers do not balk at the idea that they should be accountable for advancing their students’ knowledge. What they oppose is value-added modeling, or VAM, the highly-imprecise tool that is being used to measure teachers' impact on students' learning.. When the New York Times won the right to publishteacher VAM scores this spring, only the tiny print noted the inaccuracy of the data, including some standard errors larger than the purported effect sizes. Researchers familiar with value-added modeling have repeatedly voiced their concern about its use in high-stakes decisions like teacher evaluations (for example: here, here, and here).

Often, opponents of current uses of standardized testing fall back on attempts to draw parallels between teaching and medicine: “It’s like grading doctors on how many of their patients die!” But these analogies are imprecise; they do not do the problem justice. John Ewing’s fertilizer analogy is fascinating but perhaps too long for the common person. What we need is an “elevator speech” – one that can be delivered in the time it takes to get from the ground to the 3rd floor – to explain why teachers oppose VAM. A better analogy is this: using VAM to evaluate teachers is akin to evaluating chemotherapists based on how much their patients’ tumors shrink every year. The expected rate of tumor shrinkage is calculated based on patients’ race and socioeconomic status. So if a patient’s tumor shrinks more, over that year, than expected, the doctor gets a positive score. If it shrinks less than it “should,” the doctor gets a negative score. The average of these patients’ scores becomes the doctor’s overall VAM score. Sound reasonable? Maybe, until you consider that a) different kinds of tumors respond differently to chemotherapy; b) the doctor has no control over what patients do outside the office (for example, lung cancer sufferers who continue to smoke); c) his patients saw a different chemotherapist last year and will see another one next year; and, perhaps most importantly, d) the doctor is not allowed to treat any co-morbid conditions (for example, a cancer patient with diabetes gets no treatment to manage his blood sugar) – even if he wanted to, and even in cases where the patient or his family might prefer that other conditions be treated instead of the cancer (e.g., when parents value social or self-confidence issues more than test scores), there simply aren’t enough hours in his day. Factors like the overall health of the patient, his lifestyle, eating habits, substance use, weight, and blood pressure might impact the effectiveness of the chemo. But the doctor cannot control these, in much the same way teachers cannot control where students live, if they have enough to eat and get regular medical care, whether anyone reads to them at home, how much TV they watch, or what time they go to bed at night. And in the same way our VAM-assessed doctor would be powerless to decide that a patient dying of AIDS needs antiretroviral therapy before he can tolerate chemo for a concurrent cancer, teachers have neither the time, resources, nor training to solve the problems in their students’ lives – emotional problems, health challenges, family issues, etc. – that impact their academic growth. This is how VAM works, and why teachers oppose it.

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Kerri Tobin is Assistant Professor of Education at Marywood University in Scranton, PA, where she researches the educational needs of students living in poverty and prepares teachers and school leaders to meet those needs.