A Few Words on Janus

I’ve always thought the free speech aspect of the Janus case was purely nonsense. Eugene Volokh argued that Abood was wrongly decided in granting that free speech objection in the first place, observing that “compelled subsidy of others’ speech happens all the time”.   How many state-  or CDC-funded ads do we have to sit through, watching people smoke through their breathing tubes?  Or the various “join the military” ads?

I’m not a big fan of unions,although teachers unions come in for a lot of undeserved criticism. But my dislike of unions is professional–totally unrelated to the bizarro conservative hate-on which, I guess, has to do with the unions shoveling millions of easily collected dollars straight into Democrat coffers.

Still, I’m amazed, as always, at the utter cluelessness of the post-Janus gloating–which, typically, focuses almost exclusively on teacher employment, as if there’s no other public employee. I don’t think anyone’s focused on Janus’s impact on cops, for example–unsurprising, really, since the GOP likes cops and doesn’t want to fuss them.

But I’ll go with the flow and talk teachers, since that’s what I know.

First, left or right,  anyone who thinks education reform’s failure has anything to do with unions is kidding themselves. As I’ve written many times, education reform got everything it wanted for sixteen years–and as a result support for charters has plummeted,  support for unions and tenure has increased, and the ESSA deliberately and specifically targeted all the reform “advances” and ripped them into shreds.

So whatever changes Janus brings, I’d bet against Bill Bennett and Fordham Foundation.

We are in the middle of a teacher shortage, so good luck with cutting salaries, raising credential cut scores, or ending tenure. And has often been noted, the recent teacher walkouts have been in weak union states: Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky. Colorado’s governor refused to sign a law that would fire striking teachers.

You know how conservatives and others say look, we don’t hate teachers, we just hate unions. Well, specific union objectives, unlike their political spending, are pretty much in line with what teachers want. In a scarce labor market, killing unions won’t make it any easier to push teachers around.

I’m likewise unconvinced that the billions of dollars the unions send to the Dems has anything to do with Democrat political success. Lordy, did you all learn nothing from Trump? Dave Brat? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

So sure, Janus will lead to less money for unions. But dream on if you think Dems are crippled or the public will suddenly sign on for teacher merit pay.

Moreover, the idea that “millions of public employees” are being forced–yea, forced!–into paying to receive union-negotiated salaries just strikes me as bogus. I don’t like my dollars going to progressive causes, and as an immigration restrictionist, I get really annoyed at union shills wailing about family separations or the travel ban. But when Republican-leaning public employees growl about unions, they are, like me, unhappy about the waste of dollars sent to left-leaning organizations. How many public workers are actively opposed to the fundamentals of public employment? I’m skeptical. If  millions of public employees were outraged by job protections and pensions, conservatives wouldn’t have had to wait so long for the odd ball public employee to hang their case on. It took them years to find Friedrichs and then Janus out on the fringes to make the case.

But why should unions be required to negotiate contracts and protect employees who don’t pay for their services? The Supreme Court waved off the “free rider” problem, but who’s to say there will be paying riders? What’s stopping all teachers from saving hundreds of dollars a year, if the unions will work the contracts no matter what?

Considering that the state laws requiring unions to represent non-members have just been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the unions have a logical next step.

Unions should refuse to work for free. They won’t  provide any service to non-members.

Some services can be easily split between members and non-members. Job protections and other benefits, for example, are easily managed. Non-members who oppose job protections can just live with a greater risk of termination, while members can still ask for union representation.

But contract and salary negotiations apply to all employees, members or not. So unions should refuse to engage in these activities for any salary schedule that has less than 100% membership. Neither members nor non-members will get new salary schedules until someone else steps up to that task–and that someone else will want to be paid.

I can envision many ways out of the chaos that ensues, but certain truths seem obvious. Salary negotiation for millions of teachers, firefighters, police officers, DMV workers, prison guards and the rest is a labor (heh) intensive task. Right now, public employees pay for that task through their union representation. If unions refuse to do this, then how will public employees get raises? Fond fantasies aside, at some point the government is going to have to figure out how to replace that service.

While conservatives dream of a world in which government employees negotiate their salaries individually, absorbing the cost at a unit level, their dreams probably don’t include the onslaught of lawsuits that would follow in a world where local government officials decided salaries on merit. That’s why most charter and private schools use salary schedules, despite their ostensible freedom from these one-size-fits-all charts.

If unions just flatly ended all contract negotiations, the pressure for a Janus-fix would be immediate, particularly for teachers and cops. But wait! unions say–at least, this is what I think they should say. We’re not here to be obstructionist.  We’ll offer membership “tiers”.

Tier 1: Contract and salary negotiations only. Price: a couple hundred at most.
Tier 2: Tier 1 plus performance issues representation. Price: five hundred at most.
Tier 3: Tier 2 plus the cool bennies, political spending, other perks. Price: one thousand at most.

All employees on a given salary schedule must be at least a Tier 1 union member. No 100% membership, no contract and salary negotiations.

Some districts might not be able to get 100% membership. They could then contract to bring the union in for salary negotiations. Still other district employees might decide to do without unions entirely. Maybe they’ll figure out another means of negotiating salaries. Or maybe they’ll realize that union salaries are higher than non-union salaries for a reason.

Unions should not put the cost of their contract negotiations solely on their members. They should demand compensation for the services they perform that benefit all employees. If the employees don’t pay, then no union negotiations.

At the same time, unions could stop charging so much money, accept that they can’t use all teachers’ dues as a piggy bank for their political spending, and be more focused on offering services that all members can benefit from.

Those states with laws requiring unions to represent non-members are welcome to take them to court. However, I like to think that the same conservative jurists who hate unions also think it reasonable that unions get paid if they provide a service.

I’d be shocked, although pleased, if unions took this approach–with adjustments, of course, because I have no idea how much unions costs in other parts of the country, much less all of their many activities.  If they don’t, though, I’m ending my membership entirely. I’ve always refused to do the paperwork for agency fees–too much work for too little money. But I’ve paid nine years of union dues that went to political goals I not only don’t share but actively opposed. That’s enough to cover my next six years to retirement.

 

 

Teaching Oddness #2: Teach More, Get Paid More

Today, the topic is a teaching oddness I have taken regular advantage of. Like many teaching oddnesses, it exists primarily at the high school level.

High schools determine staffing requirements based on the number of sections the district gives them. The administrators divide the sections by the contractual class load—very often five, for six-period days. In our school, it’s three. (Yes, we teach three 90 minute classes and one 90 minute prep, and then we start all over again mid-year.)

So suppose our school has 192 sections and divides it by 3, meaning they need 64 full-time staffers, but they only have 62 teachers, so six sections are unassigned. Three of the extra sections are math, two English, one history.

Rather than hire extra teachers, the administrators just hand out the extra sections and we get paid for the extra work Some teachers don’t get paid very much more (this article actually shocked me). Others get paid on a schedule like this, stolen at random from an Irving, TX district:

But every school I’ve worked at, the extra teaching duty pay schedule denominator is reduced by one. Teaching an extra class in a 6-period schedule results in a 1/5 pay boost. Teaching an extra class in a 7-period schedule results in a 1/6 pay boost. Teaching an extra class in a 4-block schedule results in a 1/3 pay boost. That’s what my principal told me, anyway, the first time I accepted the duty. I’ve never actually reviewed my paycheck on that point.

So I’ve been getting 33% over my usual pay for the past year, and for the upcoming semester. I’m in a high-paying district, and I have seven years experience, and a metric ton of education, putting me all the way over to the right column on step and column scale—and then there’s the Master’s bump. In addition, from what I understand, this does wonders for pension calculations. I’m doing my best to save most of it.

I’ve mentioned before that teachers can’t do overtime. In this we are like typical “professionals”, as in “non-hourly workers”. Our decisions on how and what to teach were our own, as were the hours we put into these tasks. We can do as much or as little as we like to deliver the class. As I wrote in Teaching and Intellectual Property (a topic that shall return), we get paid to deliver the class, not to create curriculum.

However, the delivery itself is beautifully quantifiable. We teach n classes a day for d dollars a day. So teachers have an excellent case: If we teach n+1 classes a day, the additional class will be paid d⁄n dollars. Left at issue is the actual dollar value of d , and the method of counting n.

In my district, n = classes in a standard schedule, while d = yearly salary. This is sublimely generous, and reflective of the fact that teachers in my area are hard to find and pretty expensive.

In other districts, n = periods in a standard day, while d = yearly salary. Still very generous, the only difference being that the “prep” period is counted as work time, I think. So instead of a 20% boost on a 6 period day, you get a 16+% boost.

In the horrifying district linked in at first, I’m assuming teachers are easily found and cheap. The fixed price suggests the district uses a different d, perhaps calculating the average cost of class delivery for all teachers. So these teachers get paid the same amount for the extra work, or perhaps the contractual per-diem hourly rate. Ick. (sez Ed, snootily.)

But in all cases, the teacher gets paid directly for the additional work. Cue the cries of “This isn’t how professionals operate.”

So I was a professional out in the world once, even working for corporations. And when professionals are handed additional work, it used to come with several implicit assurances:

1. This will result in more money and an improved title somewhere down the line.
2. This will result in an improved resume that leads to more money and an improved title at another company if option 1 doesn’t come true.
3. This won’t result in anything other than more work. Be grateful for the job.
   

Back in my day, 1 and 2 held court; I’ve heard things have been different in my world since the dot com bubble crashed, in 2002 (I was still partially in, and rates definitely took a huge hit). Anecdotally, I don’t see many people, even in tech, comfortably in the driver’s seat these days. They’re happy to have a good job. That’s for college educated tech workers; in today’s world Amazon makes temp factory workers sign non-compete agreements for 6 months simply because they can. (it’s the immigration, stupid). That is, these days quite a bit of extra work is handed out without additional payment but merely the assurance that doing the work will save one’s job, for the time being.

Typically, Republicans point to the perks of government employment–such as the awful practice of getting paid for doing more work—as unions extracting unearned value for their workers.

But look at the list again, and realize that none of these in-lieu-of-pay offerings hold for teachers. We don’t want a promotion. We can pretty much teach whatever classes we have credentials for, so the resume add-ons don’t help much, and we can’t be fired for refusing to work extra hours for free because our employer is the government, baby, and it can’t deprive us of our property right in a job without a good cause, and working for free isn’t that cause. (Private employers can, apparently.)

Remember, too, that schools have to provide a properly credentialed teacher in every class and it becomes clear that in tight job markets, teachers have the upper hand when negotiating for “extra duty”. The district has a need, and teachers are in an outstanding position to make them pay full price for that need. In slack job markets, of course, not so much.

So when we are handed a certain form of more work, we are immediately paid more money in proportion to the demands made on our time. Cool beans. And definitely odd, I think, in the private sector.

Two observations arise out of this oddness.

First, reformers like Bill Gates or Fordham Foundation like to push the idea of giving teachers bigger classes–like, say, 4 or 5 more students per class, for more money.

These conversations never seemed reality-based, since they always begin with the premise that teachers have 20-22 students per class. I have three classes of 35 right now, and one class I literally call “tiny” at 20. But in any event, it’s become very popular to advocate changing base pay to a form of “merit” pay by giving teachers bigger classes.

Is it clear, once again, that reformers demonstrate bizarre ignorance of the actual logistics of staffing a school?

They’re calling for increased class size—in an age when parents unequivocally support smaller class sizes, data be damned—and a contractual change giving some teachers more money for taking more kids. Unions will oppose them tooth and nail for anything approaching merit pay, they’ll never get it anyway, and all to get “good” high school and middle school teachers about 20 more students a day, in a standard 6-period day. Elementary school teachers, just the 4 or 5.

Meanwhile, right now, on the books in most districts, exists a means of giving each “excellent” middle or high school teacher 25 to 35 more students, as well as a lot more money, without upsetting parents and increasing class sizes. No negotiations needed, no formalization of procedure–it’s there already. I am reasonably certain that principals already use “extra duty” as a way of rewarding high quality teachers interested in the money.

So are they ignorant? Probably. Would reformers start promoting “extra duty for excellence” if they had some small inkling of how staffing actually works? Probably not, since their goal, really, isn’t rewarding teachers but breaking contracts. But in any event, the next time a reformer pushes the idea, have this essay at the ready.

(Note: In the comments, Brett Gillan points out another problem with paying teacher by classload so obvious I could kick myself for not thinking of it. Namely, student load is not constant. I often end up with much smaller classes; students transfer to alternative school, go to a different district school, move, and so on. The higher the poverty level of the school, the more the variance.)

Second observation—well, on second thought (thanks to Roger Sweeney), I’m going to make this second thought a second post.

Why Merit Pay and Value Added Assessment Won’t Work, Part I

The year I taught Algebra I, I did a lot of data collection, some of which I discussed in an earlier post. Since I’ve been away from that school for a while, I thought it’d be a good time to finish the discussion.

I’m not a super stats person. I’m not even a mathematician. To the extent I know math, it’s applied math, with the application being “high school math problems”. This is not meant to be a statistically sound analysis, comparing Treatment A to Treatment B. But it does reveal some interesting big picture information.

This data wasn’t just sitting around. A genuine DBA could have probably whipped up the report in a few hours. I know enough SQL to get what I want, but not enough to get it quickly. I had to run reports for both years, figure out how to get the right fields, link tables, blah blah blah. I’m more comfortable with Excel than SQL, so I dumped both years to Excel files and then linked them with student id. Unfortunately, the state data did not include the subject name of each test. So I could get 2010 and 2011 math scores, but it took me a while to figure out how to get the 2010 test taken—and that was a big deal, because some of the kids whose transcripts said algebra had, in fact, taken the pre-algebra (general math) test. Not that I’m bitter, or anything.

Teachers can’t get this data easily. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the data for my current school, or if it’s even possible. I don’t know what my kids’ incoming scores are, and I still haven’t figured out how my kids did on their graduation tests.

So the data you’re about to see is not something teachers or the general public generally has access to.

At last school, in the 2010-11 school year, four teachers taught algebra to all but 25 of over 400 students. I had the previous year’s test scores for about 75% of the kids, 90% of whom had taken algebra the year before, the other 10% or so having taken pre-algebra. This is a slightly modified version of my original graph; I put in translations of the scores and percentages.

You should definitely read the original post to see all the issues, but the main takeaway is this: Teacher 4 has a noticeably stronger population than the other three teachers, with over 40% of her class having scored Basic or Higher the year before, usually in Algebra. I’m Teacher 3, with by far the lowest average incoming scores.

The graph includes students for who I had 2010 school year math scores in any subject. Each teacher has from 8-12 pre-algebra student scores included in their averages. Some pre-algebra kids are very strong; they just hadn’t been put in algebra as 8th graders due to an oversight. Most are extremely weak. Teachers are assessed on the growth of kids repeating algebra as well as the kids who are taking it for the first time. Again, 80% of the kids in our classes had taken algebra once. 10-20% had taken it twice (our sophomores and juniors).

Remember that at the time of these counts, I had 125 students. Two of the other teachers (T1 and T4) had just under 100, the third (T2) had 85 or so. The kids not in the counts didn’t have 2010 test scores. Our state reports student growth for those with previous years’ scores and ignores the rest. The reports imply, however, that the growth is for all students. Thanks, reports! In my case, three or four of my strongest students were missing 2010 scores, but the bulk of my students without scores were below average.

So how’d we do?

I limited the main comparison to the 230 students who took algebra for both years and had scores for both years and had one of 4 teachers.

Here are the pre-algebra and algebra intervention growth–pre-algebra is not part of the above scores, but the algebra intervention is a sub-group. These are tiny groups, but illustrative:

The individual teacher category gains/slides/pushes are above; here they are in total:

(Arrrggh, I just realized I left off the years. Vertical is 2010, horizontal is 2011.)

Of the 230 students who took algebra two years in a row, the point gain/loss categories went like this:

Score change > + 50 points	57
Score change > -20 points	27
-20 points < score change < + 50 points	146

Why the Slice and Dice?

As I wrote in the original post, Teacher 1 and I were positive that Teacher 4 had much stronger student population than we did—and the data supports that belief. Consequently I suspected that no matter how I sliced the data, Teacher 4 would have the best numbers. But I wanted a much better idea of how I’d done, based on the student population.

Because one unshakeable fact kept niggling at me: our school had a tremendous year in 2010-2011, based largely on our algebra scores. We knew this all throughout the year—benchmark tests, graduation tests—and our end of year tests confirmed it, giving us a huge boost in the metrics that principals and districts cared about. And I’d taught far more algebra students than any other teacher. Yet my numbers based on the district report looked mediocre or worse. I wanted to square that circle.

The district reports the data on the right. We were never given average score increase. A kid who had a big bump in average score was irrelevant if he or she didn’t change categories, while a kid who increases 5 points from the top of one category to the bottom of another was a big win. All that matters were category bumps. From this perspective, my scores look terrible.

I wanted to know about the data on the left. For example Teacher 1 had far better “gain” category numbers than I did. But we had the same mean improvement overall, of 5%, with comparable increases in each category. Broken down further, Teacher 4’s spectacular numbers are accompanied by a huge standard deviation—she improved some kids a lot. The other three teachers might not have had as dramatic a percentage increase, but the kids moved up more consistently. In three cases, the average score declined, but was accompanied by a big increase in standard deviation, suggesting many of the kids in that category improved a bit, while a few had huge drops. Teacher 2 and I had much tighter achievement numbers—I may have moved my students less far, but I moved a lot of them a little bit. None of this is to argue for one teacher’s superiority over another.

Of course, once I broke the data down by initial ability, group size became relevant but I don’t have the overall numbers for each teacher, each category, to calculate the confidence interval or a good sample size. I like 10. Eleven of the 18 categories hit that mark.

How many kids have scores for both years?

The 2011 scores for our school show that just over 400 students took the algebra test. My fall 2010 graph above show 307 students with 2010 scores (in any subject) who began the year. Kick in another 25 for the teacher I didn’t include and we had about 330 kids with 2010 scores. My results show 230 kids with algebra scores for both years, and the missing teacher had 18, making 248. Another 19 kids had pre-algebra scores for the first year, although the state’s reports wouldn’t have cared about that. So 257 of the kids had scores for both years, or about 63% of the students tested.

Notice that I had the biggest fall off in student count. I think five of my kids were expelled before the tests, another four or so left to alternative campuses. I remember that two went back to Mexico; one moved to his grandparents’ in Iowa. Three of my intervention students were so disruptive during the tests that they were ejected, so their test results were not scored (the next year our school had a better method of dealing with disruptive students). Many of the rest finished the year and took the tests, but they left the district over the summer (not sure if they are included in the state reports, but I couldn’t get their data). I think I had the biggest fall-off over the year in the actual student counts; I went from 125 to 95 by year-end.

What about the teachers?

Teacher 1: TFA, early-mid 20s, Asian, first year teacher. Had a first class honors masters degree in Economics from one of the top ten universities in Europe. She did her two, then left teaching and is now doing analytics for a fashion firm in a city where “fashion firm” is a big deal. She was the best TFAer I’ve met, and an excellent new teacher.

Teacher 2: About 60. White. A 20-year teacher who started in English, took time off to be a mom, then came back and got a supplemental math credential. She is only qualified to teach algebra. She is the prototype for the Teacher A I described in my last post, an algebra specialist widely regarded as one of the finest teachers in the district, a regard I find completely warranted.

Teacher 3: Me. 48 at the time, white. Second career, second year teacher, English major originally but a 15-year techie. Went to one of the top-rated ed schools in the country.

Teacher 4: Asian, mid-late 30s. Math degree from a solid local university, teaches both advanced math and algebra. She became the department head the next year. The reason her classes are top-loaded with good students: the parents request her. Very much the favorite of administration and district officials.

And so, a Title I school, predominantly Hispanic population (my classes were 80% Hispanic), teachers that run the full gamut of desirability—second career techie from a good ed school, experienced pro math major, experienced pro without demonstrated higher math ability, top-tier recent college grad.

Where was the improvement? Case 1: Educational Policy Objectives

So what is “improvement”? Well, there’s a bunch of different answers. There’s “significant” improvement as researchers would define it. Can’t answer that with this data. But then, that’s not really the point. Our entire educational policy is premised on proficiency. So what improvement does it take to reach “proficiency”, or at least to change categories entirely?

Some context: In our state, fifty points is usually enough to move a student from the bottom of one category to the bottom of another. So a student who was at the tip top of Below Basic could increase 51 points and make it to the bottom of Proficient, which would be a bump of two categories. An increase of 50 points is, roughly, a 17% increase. Getting from the bottom of Far Below Basic to Below Basic requires an increase of 70%, but since the kids were all taking Algebra for the second time, the boost needed to get them from FBB to BB was a more reasonable 15-20%. To get from the top of the Far Below Basic category to Proficient—the goal that we are supposed to aim for—would require a 32% improvement. Improving from top of Basic to bottom of Advanced requires a 23% improvement.

Given that context, only two of the teachers in one category each moved the needle enough to even think about those kind of gains—and both categories had 6-8 students. Looking at categories with at least ten students, none of the teachers had average gains that would achieve our educational policy goals. In fact, from that perspective, the teachers are all doing roughly the same.

I looked up our state reports. Our total population scoring Proficient or Advanced increased 1%.

Then there’s this chart again:

32 students moved from “not proficient” to “proficient/advanced”. 9 students moved from “proficient” to “advanced”. I’ll throw them in. 18% of our students were improved to the extent that, officially, 100% are supposed to achieve.

So educational policy-wise, not so good.

Where was the improvement? Case 2: Absolute Improvement

How about at the individual level? The chart helps with that, too:

Only 18 students were “double gainers” moving up two categories, instead of 1. Twelve of those students belonged to Teacher 4; 4 belonged to Teachers 1 , while Teacher 2 and I only had 1 (although I had two more that just missed by under 3 points). Teachers 1, 2, and 3 had one “double slider” each, who dropped two categories.

(I interviewed all the teachers on the double gainers; in all cases, the gains were unique to the students. The teachers all shrugged—who knew why this student improved? It wasn’t some brilliant aha moment unique to that teacher’s methods, nor was it due to the teacher’s inspiring belief and/or enthusiasm. Two of the three echoed my own opinion: the students’ cognitive abilities had just developed over the past year. Or maybe for some reason they’d blown off the test the year before. I taught two of the three “double sliders”—one was mine, one I taught the following year in geometry, so I had the opportunity to ask them about their scores. Both said “Oh, yeah, I totally blew off the test.” )

So a quarter of the students had gains sufficient to move from the middle of one category to the middle of another. The largest improvement was 170 points, with about 10 students seeing >100 point improvement. The largest decline was 169 points, with 2 students seeing over 100 point decline. Another oddity: only one of these two students was a “double slider”. The other two “double sliders” had less than 100 point declines. My double slider had a 60 point decline; my largest point decline was 89 points, but only dropped one category.

However, the primary takeaway from our data is that 63% of the students forced to take algebra twice were, score-wise if not category-wise, a “push”. They dropped or gained slightly, may have moved from the bottom of one category to the middle of the same, or maybe from the top of one category to the bottom of another.

One might argue that we wasted a year of their lives.

State reports say our average algebra score from 2010 to 2011 nudged up half a point.

So it’s hard to find evidence that we made much of a difference to student achievement as a whole.

I know this is a long post, so I’ll remind the reader that all of the students in my study have already taken algebra once. Chew on that for a while, will you?

Where was the improvement? Case 3: Achievement Gap

I had found no answer to my conundrum in my above numbers, although I had found some comfort. Broken down by category, it’s clear I’m in the hunt. But the breakdown doesn’t explain how we had such a stupendous year.

But when I thought of comparing our state scores from year to year, I got a hint. The other way that schools can achieve educational policy objectives is by closing the achievement gap.

All of this data comes from the state reports for our school, and since I don’t want to discuss who I am on this blog, I can’t provide links. You’ll have to take my word for it—but then, this entire post is based on data that no one else has, so I guess the whole post involves taking my word for it.

2010-11 Change

Overall	+	0.5
Whites	–	7.2
Hispanics	+	4
EcDis Hisp	–	1
ELL	+	7

Wow. Whites dropped by seven points, Hispanics overall increased by 4, and non-native speakers (almost entirely Hispanic and economically disadvantaged), increased by 7 points.

So clearly, when our administrator was talking about our great year, she was talking about our cleverness in depressing white scores whilst boosting Hispanics.

Don’t read too much into the decline. For example, I personally booted 12 students, most of them white, out of my algebra classes because they’d scored advanced or proficient in algebra the previous year. Why on earth would they be taking the subject again? No other teacher did this, but I know that these students told their friends that they could get out of repeating Algebra I simply by demanding to be put in geometry. So it’s quite possible that much of the loss is due to fewer white advanced or proficient students taking algebra in the first place.

So who was teaching Hispanics and English Language Learners? While I can’t run reports anymore, I did have my original file of 2010 scores. So this data is incoming students with 2010 scores, not the final 2011 students. Also, in the file I had, the ED and ELL overlap was 100%, and I didn’t care about white or black EDs for this count. Disadvantaged non-ELL Asians in algebra is a tiny number (hell, even with ELL). So I kept ED out of it.

	Hisp	ELL
t1	30	21
t2	32	38
t3	48	37
t4	39	12

Well, now. While Teacher 4 has a hefty number of Hispanics, very few of them are poor or ELLs. Teacher 2 seems to have Asian ELLs in addition to Hispanic ELLs. I have a whole bunch of Hispanics, most of them poor and ELL.

So I had the most mediocre numbers, but we had a great year for Hispanic and ELL scores, and I had the most Hispanic and ELL students. So maybe I was inadvertently responsible for depressing white scores by booting all those kids to geometry, but I had to have something to do with raising scores.

Or did I? Matthew DiCarlo is always warning against confusing comparing year to year scores, which are a cross-section of data at a point in time, with comparing student progress at two different points in time. In fact, he would probably say that I don’t have a conundrum, that it’s quite possible for me to have been a crappy teacher who had minimal impact on student achievement compared point to point, while the school’s “cross-section” data, which doesn’t compare students directly, could have some other reason for the dramatic changes.

Fair enough. In that case, we didn’t have a great year, right? It was just random happenstance.

This essay is long enough. So I’ll leave any one interested to explain why this data shows that merit pay and value added scores are pointless. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to it, as I’ve got grades to do.