Governor Brownback is now promoting teacher merit pay as part of the new school funding formula. That idea has largely been rejected after years of experience in other states.
Here’s a summary of some of the research.
“You can be certain that members of the American Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, know a thing or two about data and measurement. That makes the statement that the association just issued very important for school reform.
“The ASA just slammed the high-stakes ‘value-added method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers that has been increasingly embraced in states as part of school-reform efforts. VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the ‘value’ a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been…
“Assessment experts have been saying for years that this is an unfair way to evaluate anybody, especially for high-stakes purposes such as pay, employment status, tenure or even the very survival of a school…
“Here’s part of what they said:
*VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.
*VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model…
“The evidence against VAM is at this point overwhelming. The refusal of school reformers to acknowledge it is outrageous.”
Read more here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/13/statisticians-slam-popular-teacher-evaluation-method/