I Vote No on VOTE (Videotaped Observations for Teacher Evaluation)

Here is a post from Stephen Krashen on the Gates efforts to reform teacher evaluation. It comes to us from Monty Neill at Fairtest:

I Vote No on VOTE (Videotaped Observations for Teacher Evaluation)
Stephen Krashen

The New York Times recently ran two articles on videotaped observations for
teacher evaluation. One of the articles reported that Bill Gates has invested
$335 million on research to evaluate this approach (“Teacher Ratings Get New
Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher,” Dec. 3).

Research uses a bogus measure
The goal of the Gates-funded research is to find correlations between teaching
practices observed on the videotapes and achievement. Achievement will be
measured by the use of value-added scores, gains on standardized tests. The use
of value-added scores has already been thoroughly criticized as being unstable
and invalid as a measure of teaching effectiveness. The Times did not mention
the controversy surrounding the use of value-added ratings, sending the
incorrect message that the use of this method is perfectly fine.

The expense: If they are “validated,” the use of videotaped observations by
school districts promises to be extremely expensive. The estimated cost,
according to a private company quoted in the Times, is about one million dollars
per year ($1.5 million start-up, $800,000 per year) for a district with 140
schools and 7000 teachers. Extrapolated to the entire country, using a
conservative estimate of 10,000 districts in the US, this amounts to about ten
billion dollars. (Assuming $150 per teacher, and about 40 million teachers in
the US, the estimate is six billion dollars per year.) Paying this much money
to private companies for cameras, software, etc, makes no sense at a time when
school districts are suffering huge financial problems.

Unnecessary: Despite constant claims in the media, there is no evidence that
there is a serious crisis in teacher quality in the United States. When we
control for poverty, American students score at the top of the world on
international tests. This means there is no serious problem in teacher quality,
teacher education or teacher evaluation.

Conclusion: Videotaped observations for teacher evaluation (VOTE?) is another
red herring, a distraction from the real problem. The real problem is poverty,
and the real solution is protecting children from the effects of poverty.
Spending an extra six to ten billion per year on nutrition, health care, and
school libraries makes more sense than spending it on video-taping teachers.

I vote no on VOTE.

Sources:
Value-added measures: Sass, T. 2008. The stability of value-added measures of
teacher quality and implications for teacher compensation policy. Washington
DC: CALDER. (National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational
Research.); Kane, T. and Staiger, D. 2009. Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student
Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation. NBER Working Paper No. 14607
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607;Papay, J. 2010. Different tests, different
answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures.
American Educational Research Journal 47,2.
When we control for poverty:Bracey, G. (2009). Education Hell: Rhetoric versus
reality. Alexandria, VA: Educational Research Service; Payne, K. and Biddle, B.
1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement.
Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.