The VAM-pire Strikes Back
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In the 2011-2012 School year, Florida introduced one of the worst of its many bad ideas for education: VAM. VAM stands for Value Added Measure. It is a statistical formula that knows your students’ past scores, predicts what their future scores will be, and then rates students based on how much “growth” they showed.
Here’s a really quick run-down of obvious problems with VAM. How can an algorithm predict students’ future scores? Is it psychic? How can it attribute all the growth or lack of growth in students to the teacher? Maybe a student’s pet just died. Or a parent. Or maybe their parents just went through a divorce. Maybe they haven’t divorced yet, but are heading for it. (I lived this scenario. Gosh, it had an effect on my school performance. Who would have thunk?) Not to mention that tests were designed to test kids, not to evaluate teachers, so VAM is using test scores for things they aren’t designed for. Also, if VAM is taken seriously, it means teachers are focusing ever more on the tests. Which narrows the curriculum. Which means students lose out on the education they could be receiving.
I decided to look back over my VAM-themed comics this past week when I found out that I’d received a “1” (unsatisfactory) VAM score for last school year. Of course, last year was the year we were switching from the FSA (Florida Standards Assessment) test to the new FAST (Florida Assessment of Student Thinking) test, which means VAM was somehow supposed to predict improvement from one test to a completely different test with no corrolation.
I amuse the heck out of myself sometimes. I’m sorry I’m ignored by the people who could actually do anything about this stupidity. However, I decided I’d post the strips anyway. They still say things that need to be said, and they skewer the ridiculousness of VAM in a very satisfying way…
The first strip comes from a Halloween series where I did parodies of horror movie posters tied to the way school is based on fear… Note I drew the shark’s mouth to look like the actual VAM formula!
Interestingly, the other VAM strips I’ve drawn were also for Halloween. I have to give credit to my son, Christopher, for noticing the fact VAM lends itself toward using a certain creature of the night as the villain in this series…
Tonight I checked to see all my VAM scores through the years, just to see what they were. Interestingly, the district had taken last years’ scores away. I wonder if they finally wised up. A dream come true indeed…