As we move through year two of the Race to the Top initiative, we will be considering the adoption of a new system or program of teacher evaluation. The Appraisal Review Committee (ARC), which is managing this work, will develop a pilot evaluation program written as an Administration-Union Letter of Understanding. The governor’s budget, HB 153, which is now law, mandates the onerous teacher evaluation provisions of SB 5. It includes the requirement to count student performance measures including individual teacher value added scores as 50% of a teacher’s evaluation. The remaining 50% is to be based on teacher professionalism as determined by an evaluator.
So the question becomes: Will we be able to develop a model evaluation that is constructive, non-punitive, and that our members will vote to accept? Then, the bigger question: Given the OhioState Board of Education model evaluation with its excessive mandates, will we be forced into a system we find unacceptable?
The article referenced below describes a kind of a worst-case real-life scenario and also raises some important questions about value added.
Fraternally,
Tom Schmida, President
In Washington, D.C., one of the first cities to use value-added ratings to fire teachers, Ward 8, one of its poorest, has only 5 percent of the teachers defined as effective under the new IMPACT evaluation system, but more than a quarter of the ineffective ones, writes Sarah Garland in The Hechinger Report. Ward 3, with some of the city's more affluent neighborhoods, has nearly a quarter of the best teachers and only 8 percent of the worst. Garland says the discrepancy underscores an ongoing debate around value-added test scores: Are the best, most experienced teachers concentrated in the wealthiest schools? Or does the statistical model ignore the possibility that it's more difficult to teach a room full of impoverished children? Some argue that value-added models needn't control for demographic factors like poverty, race, English-learner or special-education status, as long as at least three years' worth of data are included in the formula. Others assert that not only individual poverty, but the concentration of disadvantaged students in a classroom should be taken into account; only a handful of value-added models do this. In D.C.'s case, IMPACT uses a year of data and incorporates the poverty status of individual students in an effort to protect against biasing the ratings.
Read more: http://hechingerreport.org/content/should-value-added-teacher-ratings-be-adjusted-for-poverty_6899/