Apple’s anti-union tactics in Atlanta were illegal, US officials say

You're conflating things together and missing the plot. I was comparing the teacher evaluations given by teacher unions to the evaluations of teachers based on student improvement over time on standardized tests. You, on the other hand, changed the subject slightly, which is fine, but then you use the phrase "grades given by unionized teachers", which makes no sense. All the studies you cited talk GPAs in general. Whether the teachers doing the grading are unionized or not is not mentioned or relevant. If you're going to have a discussion, you should take care to use more careful language. It looks like you're trying to be deceiving in order to prop up teacher's unions.

I clicked on your first study and it doesn't even do any analysis on GPA as a predictor of future success relative to other standardized tests. In fact, it assumes this as true and then tries to explain why. It also looks like a low-quality paper published at conference without peer review.

I clicked on your second link. It's not peer reviewed. It only examines data from one university. It has a very small sample size. It has zero citations. It reaches conclusions that are contrary to existing literature. It does not look like it should be taken seriously.

I decided at this point to stop wasting my time. If your first two citations are so weak, I don't have much confidence in the others.

> I was comparing the teacher evaluations given by teacher unions to the evaluations of teachers based on student improvement over time on standardized tests.

Wait. You were comparing the evaluations of teachers based on how teacher unions ranked them, compared to the evaluation of teachers based on the standardized test scores for their students?

How is that at all useful?

Why are teacher unions ranking teachers? How does that affect anything? How are standardized tests - which aren't designed as a measure of teacher effectiveness - at all relevant, and not full of noise?

We know methods like VAM (Value-Added Models) are extremely easy to misuse - so easy the American Statistical Association points how how it's difficult to apply them to ranking teacher effectiveness (see https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/POL-ASAVAM-Statement.p... ). Why should I believe this book you cite - which seems to be written by a journalist and not a statistician - does a good job of it?

> then you use the phrase "grades given by unionized teachers", which makes no sense.

That's because I didn't understand what your argument was. The usual argument is "teachers unions mean teachers are bad at their jobs so we can't trust their judgement and GPA. Instead, we need to look to standardized tests." That's the argument I thought you were making.

> it doesn't even do any analysis on GPA as a predictor of future success relative to other standardized tests

No, it doesn't. It does give the citation: Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009 . But https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400831463... is behind a paywall.

If you want to argue that the summary of the citation I gave is a poor interpretation of the research, then go ahead. But then I can say that your summary of the book you read is also wrong.

A book which I also cannot read.

And which does not appear to be peer reviewed.

> It's not peer reviewed. It only examines data from one university.

Thing is, the second link also gives citations to other research.

] If standardized testing is not as reliable a measure of student success, as proposed by the researchers previously cited ... Hodara and Lewis (2017) concluded that HSGPA was a better predictor of college performance than standardized exam scores, especially for students who enter college within a year of completing high school.

These are not meant to be read in a vacuum, but as an indication that the certainty you state is far from established.

> The measure of teacher performance was based on student improvement over time on standardized tests.

Except 1) those tests weren't designed for that purpose, and 2) they are a worse measure of student preparedness than GPAs, and 3) they only test those topics which are easy to test in a standardized setting.

And as I pointed out, the statistic methods used to find these patterns, like VAM, are intrinsically difficult, and easy to misinterpret.

> Then why not lead with that citation and not the very weak conference paper that you chose to lead with?

Because it was more informative than the citation you presented, which was a non-peer-reviewed book that I couldn't easily read by a journalist whose results as you presented are contrary to my (limited) understanding of the topic.

> I'd probably start with this book

Since you think peer review is important, why do you point to non-peer-reviewed sources?

Just looking at the authors shows that I expect them to have a pro-standardized testing viewpoint. All three of them work/have worked for a standardized testing company.

Sean P. "Jack" Buckley is an Institute Fellow and works with AIR on several projects in the areas of applied statistics, social sciences, and education policy. He is also President and Chief Scientist for Imbellus, a California-based assessment company ... he helped lead the redesign of the SAT at the College Board

Lynn Letukas is an associate research scientist at the College Board

Ben Wildavsky is/was a senior fellow and executive director of the College Board Policy Center.

This is right, but the national guard are often used as well. I alluded to these points in a comment below before noticing that you posted this first.

I would caveat it to say they are used to break illegal strikes, which I think is an important distinction. Their job is to uphold the law, regardless of the side that labor is aligned.

> Except 1) those tests weren't designed for that purpose

I don't know if that's true. And even if it were, why would they need to be designed for that purpose to be successfully and correctly used for that purpose? In fact, at one time the federal government required this data to be provided by schools. However, the teacher's unions lobbied hard, and the 2015 "Every Student Succeeds Act" barred the government from requiring this data: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/essa-loosens-reins-on...

"But the teachers’ unions see an opening to change policies their members have broadly rejected. They are also far more powerful among state legislatures than in Congress."

"The American Federation of Teachers plans to bring its political clout to bear on the issue, too."

On the other hand, strong research exist to show that SGPs are a valid and useful measurement: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.9.2593

"The main lesson of this study is that value-added models which control for a student’s prior-year test scores provide unbiased forecasts of teachers’ causal impacts on student achievement. Because the dispersion in teacher effects is substantial, this result implies that improvements in teacher quality can raise students’ test scores significantly."

And the follow-up study: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633

"This paper has shown that the same VA measures are also an informative proxy for teachers’ long-term impacts."

> 2) they are a worse measure of student preparedness than GPAs

GPAs are highly subjective, and more importantly, harder to compare across schools and even across classes. By using standardized scores, for instance, one could track successfully that a teacher's performance remains consistent as he or she moves across schools. Remember, this was about measuring teacher performance, not student performance. That said, if GPAs really were better for teacher evaluation, there is nothing stopping you from measuring student GPA improvement instead of student standardized test score improvement, so I'm not sure what you're really arguing against at this point.

> 3) they only test those topics which are easy to test in a standardized setting.

Many important topics taught in secondary school are well-understood and amenable to standardized testing, including: math, reading comprehension, grammar, some aspects of science and history, etc.

> Since you think peer review is important, why do you point to non-peer-reviewed sources?

These books cite peer-reviewed sources and are a great starting point before digging further.

> Just looking at the authors shows that I expect them to have a pro-standardized testing viewpoint.

Everyone is biased. The NEA spends millions convincing people to drop standardized tests through their advocacy group, FairTest, which serves as one of their front organizations. Much of education academia is biased against standardized testing. Biases are everywhere, and were fairly obviously present in your sources that I checked. At some point, you have to pick a bias you trust more, and I trust the bias that says standardized tests are useful over the bias that says they should be entirely done away with.