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Breaking News: D.C. Teacher Evaluation Scores Flawed

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
29

Last Friday, officials at the central office of the District of Columbia Public Schools quietly released the news that the teacher ratings on its highly touted IMPACT system contained errors. It was not clear how many teachers were affected. If you want to bury a policy disaster, the best time to announce it is on a Friday before a long holiday, on the assumption it will be ignored and forgotten.

Researchers have warned for the past three years that grading teachers by the test scores of their students is error-ridden, inaccurate, and unstable. Earlier this year, the distinguished psychometrician Edward Haertel of Stanford warned in a major lecture that value-added scores should not be used as a fixed percentage when evaluating teachers and should have multiple safeguards to avoid error. Did anyone at the U,S. Department of Education or anywhere else take heed? Of course not.

As Valerie Strauss notes in the linked article, this inherently flawed and demoralizing process has been widely accepted (it is a major element of Race to the Top; in addition, states that want waivers from the impossible mandates of NCLB must agree to adopt this procedure, no matter how ill-conceived it is.)

Strauss writes:

“Testing experts have long warned that using test scores to evaluate teachers is a bad idea, and that these formulas are subject to error, but such evaluation has become a central part of modern school reform. In the District, the evaluation of adults in the school system by test scores included everybody in a school building; until this year, that even included custodians. In some places around the country, teachers received evaluations based on test scores of students they never had. (It sounds incredible but it’s true.)”

Only a few weeks ago, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley wrote on her blog that the ratings on the D.C. IMPACT system made no sense.

Now the company that created the rating system has acknowledged the errors.

Let’s see if some enterprising journalist digs into this fiasco.

Categories District of Columbia, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Why a D.C. Charter School Teacher Resigned

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2013 //
29

Caleb Rossiter resigned as a math teacher at Friendship Public Charter School in D.C.

He wrote an open letter to the Board of Trustees of the school explaining why.

Here is a selection from his brutally frank letter.

“I recently resigned from a position as a ninth grade Algebra 1 teacher at Technology Preparatory because of unremitting pressure from the administration to alter failing grades and the return to my classroom of two students whose actions threatened the safety of other students. These issues are related to a fundamental question about Tech Prep’s mission: can it successfully implement a college preparatory, let alone a STEM, curriculum for the ninth grade when a significant minority of that grade has math skills that are below the third grade level or consistently exhibits disruptive behaviors that keep both this minority and their peers from achieving?

“There appear to be strong institutional pressures on administrators to achieve high enrollment figures, pass rates, and scores on grade-level standardized tests. These pressures flow down to the classroom, where they collide with the reality of severe academic and behavioral deficits, creating the sort of situations that led to my resignation.

“The administration pressured me to raise failing grades for the first quarter to grades that students had not earned. I was told by a supervisor that my intention to report 30 percent of my students as having earned a failing grade — due to low rates of doing class work and homework, which led to poor performance on assessments – “cannot be.” I was told that this would be “bad for the school” because it would have to be reported to the Public Charter School Board as evidence that students “were not on track to graduate” and that it also would be “bad for me.” I was asked to raise grades, or to change the weighting of the different categories of grades listed in my syllabus that had been sent to parents so that the grades would rise.

“The pressure was not successful with me, but I know that it was with teachers of these same students in other courses who had similar provisional failure rates. This casts into doubt for me all the grades reported for the ninth grade. When the second quarter started, the supervisor met with me and continued to press me to raise grades, including suggesting that failing students who completed one homework assignment in a week of five of them be given credit for all of them…..”

Read the rest of the post.

Categories Charter Schools, District of Columbia

VAMBOOZLED: D.C. IMPACT Evaluation System Makes No Sense

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2013 //
33

A reader who teaches in the District of Columbia wrote to ask my advice. He couldn’t understand his evaluation based on the District’s complex IMPACT evaluation system. I sent it to a teacher evaluation expert, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley. She wrote a post trying to make sense of the evaluation report.

Read it here.

Categories District of Columbia, Teacher Evaluations

No, the District of Columbia Is Not a National Model

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2013 //
22

Despite its recent gains on the 2013 NAEP, the District of Columbia is not a national model.

It remains the lowest performing urban district in the nation.

Its policy of test-and-punish-and-fire have produced a startlingly high attrition rate among teachers.

Churn is not good for schools or for children or for building a culture of collaboration.

Few of the principals hired by Rhee remain in the system.

The real story in D.C.: Thanks to Mayor Vincent Gray, D.C. started universal pre-K, and it is showing benefits in the early grades. A writer in the Washington Post called Gray’s work “a staggering achievement.”

As for the rest of the story, read this article that I wrote for Talking Points Memo.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would want to copy a system built on striking fear into the hearts of teachers and principals.

No successful corporation–large or small– operates in that manner. The best of our nation’s business companies boast of how they carefully select new hires, support them, and pamper them with perks to make them happy in their work.

Success in schooling grows from collaboration, love of learning, experienced teachers and principals, equitable and adequate funding, and leadership that holds itself accountable for its decisions.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle

Don’t Be VAMboozled! Review Finds DC Impact Study Is Full of Holes

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2013 //
6

Some weeks back, the media reported that the District of Columbia’s infamous teacher evaluation program–known as IMPACT–was successful, based on a paper by researchers Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff. The takeaway allegedly was that VAM (value-added measurement) works and that DC is right to judge teacher quality by student test scores.

But Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, one of the pre-eminent national experts on VAM, says “not so fast. Don’t believe the hype.”

In this post, she dissects the DC research and says it was never peer-reviewed and is deeply flawed.

She identifies many errors, but this one is the most egregious:

“Teacher Performance:” Probably the largest fatal flaw, or the study’s most major limitation was that only 17% of the teachers included in this study (i.e., teachers of reading and mathematics in grades 4 through 8) were actually evaluated under the IMPACT system for their “teacher performance,” or for that which they contributed to the system’s most valued indicator: student achievement. Rather, 83% of the teachers did not have student test scores available to determine if they were indeed effective (or not) using individual value-added scores. It is implied throughout the paper, as well as the media reports covering this study post release, that “teacher performance” was what was investigated when in fact for four out of five DC teachers their “performance” was evaluated only as per what they were observed doing or self-reported doing all the while. These teachers were evaluated on their “performance” using almost exclusively (except for the 5% school-level value-added indicator) the same subjective measures integral to many traditional evaluation systems as well as student achievement/growth on teacher-developed and administrator-approvedclassroom-based tests, instead.

Thus, it is wrong to say that the paper vindicates IMPACT or its reliance on VAM when more than four of every five teachers in the study did not have value-added scores available.

Categories District of Columbia, Teacher Evaluations
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