VAMs: Stupid Economist’s Tricks
The formula to the left will allow you to calculate your Value Added Score. Please don't forget to show your work.I am not an economist. I had one intro to economics course in college. Everything I have learned about economics since then has come from reading Paul Krugman in the New York Times. I consider it a good month economically if my checkbook balances and my 401k doesn't tank.
But I am thinking of economists today because I just read a review byKrugman of a new book called Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World, by Jeff Madrick. The book is a chronicle of all the wrong headed advice mainstream economists have been dishing out since before the debacle of 2008 and up until now.
Here is a brief restatement of what the economists got wrong.
1. Failed, despite all the warning signs, to predict the 2008 recession, and, in fact, argued that it could not happen.
2. Failed to agree on a response to the recession once it did happen
3. Opposed the stimulus package and raising the minimum wage as government interference in the free-market which would, according to these economists, right itself. How is that going?
How could economists get things so wrong? Well mainly, according to Madrick and Krugman, because of a slavish belief in the free market’s ability to manage itself, along with a faith based love of mathematical models that are elegant on paper, but have no connection to the realities of the real world.
Interestingly, while economists were not busy destroying the economy for all of us except the 1%,, they have busied themselves with attempts to apply their cockamamie “models” to teacher evaluation schemes. The movement toward value-added measurements has been led by, you guessed it, economists. People such as Stanford’s Erik Hanushek, Harvard’s and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Thomas Kane, Harvard’s Raj Chetty and Columbia’s Jonah Rockoff.
Madrick apparently does not mention Value-Added Measures (VAMs) of teacher accountability as one of the “seven bad ideas”, but it is at the top of Russ on Reading: VAMs: Stupid Economist’s Tricks:
