Evaluating Teachers - It's Not Rocket Science...Right?

Think Again - Welcome to the VAM Performance Formula 

- Naked Conch - Posted by Matt Gardi -  September 23, 2012

I'm all for accountability.  I also believe there are ways to evaluate almost anyone's performance.  But in the development of a teacher evaluation formula, the wizards at the State Department of Education have illustrated without a doubt why it is critical that they themselves need to be evaluated.  Psychologically evaluated.  They are straight out certifiable.  I'm not exactly sure if we can Baker Act an entire State Department, but I think it is time to try.

It might prove easier than trying to understand the formula they came up with to evaluate teacher performance.
 In doing so, the Department once again proves that they constitute a colossal waste of money, that takes money directly away from the classrooms and wastes it on ignorant...uhhhh excuse me, ingenious frivolity.

What am I talking about?  The Florida Value Added Model, or VAM, a formula devised to calculate our teachers' merit pay.  A small portion of the mathematical formula that they have come up with is shown in the image above, but you can enjoy the full monty of mathematical largess right here.

While it's almost impossible to do something as simple as to fire an incompetent teacher, we are now being asked to consume immense resources to attempt to hold our performing teachers to a standard that no one in their right mind could understand or apply to the reality of classroom instruction.  But clearly, having developed the formula by conferring with a "committee" and by consulting national "experts," how could anyone doubt our Tallahassee wizards?

Folks remember this.  No one can argue that this Country is one of the greatest in the history of mankind.  Somehow, we manage to develop into such a Country while belabored with the rudimentary education kids received throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Kids from one room school houses in Kansas who went home to work on the farm, and from inner city schools filled with the tired, poor, huddled masses of immigrant children somehow went on to create the most industrialized society in history.  They put men on the moon, had the greatest medical advances, developed advanced transportation systems and infrastructure, and with the help of Al Gore even invented the Internet.

Why is it that now, we need a bunch of useless bobos at the State and Federal levels to try to do the job that teachers have been doing for centuries, that of educating children?  Instead of saddling Principals with mounds of bureaucratic paperwork, and handcuffing Teachers with useless cookie cutter regulation, all the while forcing them to teach for tests...let's let them do their job and educate our kids.

For a nice write up of how advanced mathematicians were even baffled by our State Department of Education's merit pay formula please see here.  

To see my favorite portions of the formula, you can scan through the few pages below.  I think this part starts with the component of the formula that deals with what happens when a kid throws up during the FCAT exam.  I am pretty sure that the limit of teacher patience approaching zero is a partial derivative of the range the vomit is spewed onto a subset of adjoining students...but math was never my foray.