Method to Grade Teachers Provokes Battles

[groovedaddy]

How good is one teacher compared with another?

A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.

The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.

People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.

Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

[mediaman007]

1. Try this:

So far governmental types (Federal and State) have chosen to use testing data to evaluate teachers. On the surface its sounds good, but to people who work with data, the testing data is pretty flimsy. After all, all students are not the same.

My solution (and I hate to give it away, because I think it has merit) is to give each class a difficulty value or Class Value Factor (CVF):

Students that range between 40 percentile and 75 percentile are worth 1.0 students.
Students that lie between 25 and 40 might be worth 1.2 students.
Students that lie lower than 25 and greater than 75 should be worth 1.5 students.

Add in factors for single parent families, divorced parents, Free and Reduced Lunch, Special Education and students that are transient to get a class value.

A "base" class can be worth the number of students in the classroom. Then these new CVF's should give some teachers a class value of 35 to 50 students or more!

Once the class value (sum of student points) has been determined, a percentile can be calculated to get a CVF of "class value divided by base value (number of students)."

I suggest that we take the mean scores for a classroom and multiply by the CVF to get a product that in some way shows the true measure of teacher effectiveness.


Does it sound goofy? No more than considering every student to be the same and every teacher to be judged on those students.

I say, agree to being evaluated, but don't accept their math. Instead its an opening to demonstrate the multiple factors that enter a classroom's production.

[groovedaddy]

2. I also think your idea has merit. Keep running with it. n.t

[YvonneCa]

3. Thank you for posting ...

...this.

[Reader Rabbit]

4. This idea sounds interesting!

You should write an op-ed or LTTE for your local newspaper, and see if they will print it!

[mzteris]

5. but if you're evaluating each student on their own -

and no, I'm not talking just "test scores" (or even test scores for that matter...) but an individual child's progress. So no matter where that child starts FROM, or what their issues may be, you look at how well that child progresses in that classroom. That method would automatically incorporate a child's "issues". Although I do see some merit in some type of "weight" being assigned to kids with IEP's or 504's.

Oh - and FWIW - I think people make a huge error in automatically assuming "free & reduced" lunch kids have problems and that middle-class/rich kids do not. Especially these days with the increased number of former middle class now on free lunch. And assigning value based on single or divorced parents? This isn't 1950 anymore - the MAJORITY of kids in the classroom have single, divorced, remarried, never-married, multiple-married families - wth should that even be considered as a factor?

[Hannah Bell]

6. yes. because unstable home lives have an effect on kids. having more kids with unstable homes

doesn't mean it has less of an effect.