Debating “Value Added”

Around the educational blogosphere, there has been widespread criticism of the Department of Education’s “value added” pilot project. Particularly noteworthy are the posts by Eduwonkette and Sherman Dorn.

At The Quick and the Ed, Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey takes offense at Eduwonkette’s and Sherman’s posts, and at Eduwonk Ed Sector’s Andy Rotherham piles on for good measure. When challenged by Sherman, Carey quickly retreats — saying he had the UFT in mind when he called Sherman’s post hysterical for using a reference to botulism. There is the little problem that botulism was Sherman’s metaphor, not ours, but teacher unions are to blame for everything short of global warming, so why not go there? In fact, our posts seem to have so bothered Kevin that he had to make up his very own version to attribute to us, and then proudly vanquishes it.

Here’s a little taste of it how it goes. We said:

The DoE’s “value added” project is a fundamentally flawed exercise which can not possibly deliver what it promises. It is being pursued, with the full knowledge of its flaws, because technocratic ideology trumps sound educational practice at Tweed. Moving forward with such a flawed project is extraordinarily irresponsible because “value added” — the idea that one should measure how much academic progress students have made, rather than just their absolute academic standing — holds promise as an useful tool in the repertoire of schools and educators. But the way in which it is being recklessly pursued by Tweed will cast discredit on the entire enterprise.

Carey’s rendition:

The actual response from the UFT was nothing like that. Rather, it reflects a principled opposition to the use of test scores of any kind in evaluating teachers. Again, this is not an argument about methodology; it goes much deeper than that.

In fact, what is noteworthy about both Carey’s and Rotherham’s comments is that they make not the slightest attempt to engage what we actually wrote about the “value added” project, as if they had some sort of allergic reaction to quotation marks. Instead, they chose to argue by caricature and by beating up the straw arguments they construct.

Since Ed Sector consistently defends Joel Klein and Tweed with all of the passion of “true believers,” this method of argument serves a purpose. It allows them to avoid commenting  on the very flaws of the “value added” pilot project we raised. Not a word, for example, on the central problem that students would have at least two teachers and as many as five different teachers over the course of the period between the baseline test and the test which measures the “value added,” and that the DoE’s solution is to divide up the total progress between the two primary teachers, as if each had made identical contributions — in a study designed to measure individual contributions. On these substantive questions, Carey and Rotherham are born-again agnostics, unsure whether the methodology and metrics of the DoE’s “value added” project will be borne out. If nothing else, that posture tells us just how poorly done this project was — even Tweed’s most avid defenders want to avoid all discussion of the substance of the matter.

 Print