There is a dizzying amount of stuff in HB 7069, the controversial education policy bill that will soon be on Governor Scott’s desk. So a harried teacher, parent or school board member can be forgiven for missing the bit of the bill shown above – the part that would eliminate the requirement that VAM (the value-added measurement) be used in evaluations of reading and math teachers in elementary and middle schools.
The idea behind VAM is simple and honorable. A teacher should be evaluated in part on the progress that her or his students make. The students of “strong teachers” should learn more than the students of “weak teachers”. So take the standardized test scores that students of Teacher A achieve at the end of the year and compare those to the scores that the same students earned on the corresponding exams the year before. And VOOM! you know how well Teacher A performed.
But while the idea was simple and honorable, in execution there were many complications after the VAM requirement was signed into law in 2011.
Teachers had many concerns. Students from impoverished backgrounds might not be able to learn well through no fault of the teacher. Students at the high end of the distribution could max out the tests in consecutive years, and that could actually reflect poorly on the teacher as well. Most teachers don’t teach grade 4-8 reading or math, and so they avoided the VAM requirement, resulting in what a high school science teacher recently told me was a “two-tier system”.
Parents’ groups resented the fact that their children carried the responsibility for the evaluation of their teachers on their young backs.
Since 2011, the VAM requirement has perhaps been the single greatest source of frustration for Florida’s teachers. And now, depending on whether Governor Scott signs HB 7069 or not, the requirement may be revoked.
Bridge to Tomorrow 