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Arthur H. Camins's avatar

Back in 2008 I went to a seminar on VAAS in Ohio. It was a worshipful cheerleading event for Sanders and his profit-making enterprise with SAS. It was immediately clear that the proprietary hidden formulas were all smoke and mirrors based on fairy dust and a way to blame teachers for everything that is wrong with how we fund schools and refuse to address poverty. Being that it was 2008, I escaped and went door-knocking for Obama and his first presidential run. Little did I know that he would become a cheerleader for VAM, consequential testing, and charter schools. Zombies never die!

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Sean Mann's avatar

I love your point about the burden of proof being on the people who implemented the current practices. The same argument applies in criminal justice. Where heavily punitive measures have huge amounts of evidence that they increase recidivism and cost lots of money without making people safer, but it's how things have been done so the onus is on someone proposing a different model to somehow test it and prove it functional before getting rid of the current practice which never had strong evidence behind it.

Also, the book Weapons of Math Destruction gave several examples of these opaque teacher evaluation models and how poorly they perform.

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