District Administration - January 2011 - (Page 50)

What’s the Value in Value-Added? random events, such as student illness or a neighborhood crisis, which are outside a teacher’s control. “It’s not a perfect, unfailing measure,” explains Daniel McCaffrey of RAND Corp., and author of several studies on value-added assessment. “It should be pooled with other information and the judgment of people who know what’s going on in a classroom.” The federal government will only award its Race to the Top grant to states that permit using student achievement data to evaluate teachers, even while experts continue to debate whether student test scores can be used legitimately for that purpose. Meanwhile, journalists have been accused of adding fuel to the controversy by publishing value-added rankings of individual teachers. The Los Angeles Times did so last summer, sparking outrage from the teachers’ union. Then, last October, the New York City Department of Education’s teachers union filed an injunction to keep the district from releasing 12,000 value-added ratings to the press. Understanding “Value-Added” To measure a teacher’s effectiveness, valueadded models find the difference between students’ expected and actual test score growth, considering that students learn at different rates. The first value-added model, designed in 1982 by University of Tennessee statistician William Sanders, calculated students’ expected growth using their previous standardized test scores. Other methods, like the one used in New York City, also consider student characteristics such as poverty level, English proficiency and class size. The fewer students in a calculation, the more likely a teacher’s value-added score is due to chance events, such as having a class with an unusually disruptive or helpful student, researchers say. As a result, a teacher’s score can fluctuate widely from year to year. For this reason, researchers typically recommend that scores be averaged over several years. Economist Sean Corcoran of New York University, who studied value-added systems in the New York City Department 50 January 2011 A teacher, standing, from Burbank Middle School in the Houston Independent School District, is among the district’s top-awarded teachers in the ASPIRE (Accelerating Student Progress Increasing Results & Expectations) program for success in improving student progress. of Education and the Houston Independent School District, thinks value-added measures can be useful to schools, but not as part of a teacher’s formal evaluation, in part because of their yearly fluctuation. “At best, they can tell you who the consistently high and low performers are,” Corcoran says. “But for the vast majority of teachers, you learn almost nothing from them.” Certain student characteristics also Ineffective Evaluation Advocates and critics of value-added measures tend to agree on one point: traditional teacher evaluation is seriously flawed. “Most teachers, even in their first or second year, are being told they’re doing a fantastic job,” says Timothy Daly, president of The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a national nonprofit. In 2009, the organization released a study that revealed that only 1 percent of “We have a lot of evidence that what most improves student achievement is teachers working together.” —Linda Darling-Hammond, professor in the School of Education, Stanford University influence teachers’ ratings, says Corcoran. For example, teachers of gifted students tend to have lower ratings because highachieving kids test high on standardized tests and, thus, make smaller gains. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist, supports the use of valueadded measures for formal evaluation, although he agrees that they don’t discriminate among most teachers who fall in the middle range. But being able to identify the most and least effective teachers on an objective measure like their value-added ratings is valuable information that is difficult to get any other way, he says. Hanushek adds that research, including his own, has found that good teaching can wipe out achievement deficits of low-income students. Eliminating the worst teachers would have a similar effect, he notes. Replacing the bottom 6 to 10 percent with average teachers would be enough to make U.S. students the leader in math and science. teachers in 12 cities, including Chicago and Denver, received unsatisfactory ratings. Teachers should be evaluated instead through ongoing classroom observations with measurable criteria, TNTP argued in an October report, Teacher Evaluation 2.0. For example, administrators should ask, “Did students’ work indicate that they met the lesson objectives?” Measurable evidence of student learning, including value-added data if available, must be the primary basis on which teachers are judged, Daly insists. Linda Darling-Hammond, education professor at Stanford University, agrees that many districts evaluate teachers on criteria that are irrelevant to student learning: Is the class quiet? Are the bulletin boards neat? But she rejects value-added scores as too variable from year-to-year to provide useful feedback. In her October report for the Center for American Progress, she advocated for a national evaluation system that would rate teachers on practices District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - January 2011

District Administration - January 2011
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Conversations
Crisis Response
Going Mobile
Online Edge
Professional Opinion
K12 Guide to Audio/Visual Solutions
Product Focus
What’s the Value in Value-Added?
The Politicization of Bullying
Holding On to Parent Voices
Tough New Issues Refocus Health Education
New Products
Books

District Administration - January 2011