TEXAS AFT LEGISLATIVE HOTLINE--MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009
(copyright 2009 Texas AFT)
 
* U.S. House to Vote on Education Funding for 2010 This Week
* Study Finds Flaws in "Value-Added" Methodology 
 
U.S. House Vote Ahead on Education Budget for Next School Year: The federal education budget for fiscal year 2010 is likely to come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives later this week. Judging by committee action on Friday, the House will reject any proposals to cut base funding for Title I aid to the economically disadvantaged and for special-education students receiving services under IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). The only question is whether we'll see any increase in base funding for these programs.
 
A couple of factors make it harder to secure an increase for fiscal 2010 in particular. First, the 2009 budget bill only passed a few months ago, belatedly, and it already included a significant bump upward in funding for both Title I and IDEA. Second, the huge boost in education funding for Title I and IDEA under the February stimulus bill, even though temporary, makes it harder to push through any further increase, at least for the fiscal year just ahead.
 
Even so, funding for some programs would go up in fiscal 2010 under the budget proposal to be voted on this week. For instance, Pell Grants for college students would get roughly 4 percent more funding.
 
And some increases would be much bigger. Funding for grants to states to experiment with various forms of incentive pay for teachers would more than triple, to $446 million. Funding for charter schools would increase 19 percent, to $256 million.
 
In each of the latter two cases, the money could be well or badly spent, depending on what form those state experiments with incentives and state policies on the quality of charter schools might take. What's certain is that the Obama administration has embraced incentive pay and charter schools as vehicles for education "reform," and the administration under this proposal would expand the use of both. (Note: These amounts are in addition to the much larger, one-time appropriation in the stimulus bill of $5 billion to the U.S. Secretary of Education for competitive grants he can issue to reward states for "innovation.") 

As the funding bill for education heads for the House floor later in the week, we expect to hear of any amendments that will be offered, and we will keep you up to date on what is at stake.
 
"Value-Added" Methodology: A new study by a Princeton University economist has bad news for the boosters of  "value-added" methods for determining the contribution of individual classroom teachers to student learning. Economist Jesse Rothstein's analysis suggests that these methods are not only very inexact but also may be downright misleading. A key issue exposed in Rothstein's study is bias in the assignment of students to teachers' classrooms. Value-added calculations assume that students' assignments are random, but that's not the reality. Rothstein also found that only a third of the teachers supposedly shown to be highly effective based on cumulative effects over two years had been deemed so after year one.

Such high levels of uncertainty about measuring the year-to-year effectiveness of a particular teacher should give responsible policy-makers pause before they latch onto the "value-added" vogue for high-stakes employment decisions. It would seem that the conclusion of a highly regarded Rand study five years ago still stands: "The current research base is insufficient to support the use of VAM (value-added methodologies) for high-stakes decisions." Rothstein's study can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~jrothst/workingpapers/rothstein_VAM.pdf.