Dear Colleagues,
Many of us might be scratching our heads around the recent series in the Plain Dealer around the wonders of value-added. Education expert Diane Ravitch calls it like it is in the short post below. Or follow her at: http://dianeravitch.net/2013/06/17/ohio-teachers-subjected-to-junk-science-ratings/
Fraternally,
Ari Klein
CHTU President
Now it is teachers in Ohio that have been rated by a secret value-added formula.
Teachers in affluent schools were twice as likely to score well as those in low-income schools.
Here is the key language:
“The details of how the scores are calculated aren’t public. The Ohio Department of Education will pay a North Carolina-based company, SAS Institute Inc., $2.3 million this year to do value-added calculations for teachers and schools. The company has released some information on its value-added model but declined to release key details about how Ohio teachers’ value-added scores are calculated.
“The Education Department doesn’t have a copy of the full model and data rules either.
“The department’s top research official, Matt Cohen, acknowledged that he can’t explain the details of exactly how Ohio’s value-added model works. He said that’s not a problem.”
Think of it. The person at the Ohio Department of Education in charge of the ratings doesn’t understand how the model works. He says it is not a problem.
Well, it is a problem for excellent teachers who were told they were “least effective.”
These models,based on standardized tests, are inaccurate and unstable.
Do not trust the ratings. They are garbage. No high-performing nation is rating teachers this way. It is mean-spirited, mechanistic, and meaningless.