{"id":19294,"date":"2013-06-25T11:00:32","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T15:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=19294"},"modified":"2013-07-30T11:30:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T15:30:45","slug":"classroom-contemplations-the-worth-of-value-added","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/06\/25\/classroom-contemplations-the-worth-of-value-added\/","title":{"rendered":"Classroom Contemplations: The Worth of Value Added"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Miami-Dade<\/a>

CHARLES TRAINOR JR. \/ Miami Herald<\/p>

Miami-Dade high school advanced calculus teacher Orlando Sarduy writes out the formula that will grade and help determine the pay of Florida teachers.<\/p><\/div>\n

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.<\/em><\/p>\n

The new term of art within the educational conversation about how we sort the good teachers from the bad is \u201cvalue added.\u201d<\/p>\n

We stole the phrase from economics. But in the educational context, it brings to mind the great George Orwell quote: \u201cThe slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n

We now throw this term around a lot. \u00a0The mathematical formulas designed to identify the effect an individual teacher is having on an individual student are called \u201cvalue-added\u201d models. \u00a0Administrators, researchers and policy-makers speak of the \u201cvalue added\u201d by a particular teacher — the difference in a student\u2019s learning between excellent, good and poor teachers.<\/p>\n

And, Orwell was right. \u00a0It sure is making us foolish.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The whole notion of a teacher \u201cadding value\u201d harkens back to a practice that I thought disappeared: The assembly-line, factory model of teaching.<\/p>\n

We used to share an idea that children pass through schools, (which, not coincidentally, look like factories and even share the same warning bells), various things are done to these children in sequence and they emerge as fully-formed, thinking adults.<\/p>\n

Such thinking was eventually rejected when we realized that children are not cheeseburgers or Buicks.<\/p>\n

They aren\u2019t all they same; they aren\u2019t products being turned out. Their education and development is the result of a much more complex system than an assembly line.<\/p>\n

But this notion that each teacher adds a particular amount of value, quantifiable through simple standardized test scores, is a bygone simplistic view.<\/p>\n

Education is an interaction — not just between an individual teacher and a student — but between a student and his or her class, his or her school and even his or her neighborhood. It\u2019s an interaction difficult to reduce to a single statistic measured by a standardized exam.<\/p>\n

I am not saying that we should throw up our hands and declare that we cannot measure teacher effectiveness. \u00a0I am saying that we have to think carefully about what teacher effectiveness means before we start to measure it.<\/p>\n

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