If it’s not valid, reliability doesn’t matter so much! More on VAM-ing & SGP-ing Teacher Dismissal

This post includes a few more preliminary musings regarding the use of value-added measures and student growth percentiles for teacher evaluation, specifically for making high-stakes decisions, and especially in those cases where new statutes and regulations mandate rigid use/heavy emphasis on these measures, as I discussed in the previous post. ======== The recent release of

The Toxic Trifecta, Bad Measurement & Evolving Teacher Evaluation Policies

This post contains my preliminary thoughts in development for a forthcoming article dealing with the intersection between statistical and measurement issues in teacher evaluation and teachers’ constitutional rights where those measures are used for making high stakes decisions. The Toxic Trifecta in Current Legislative Models for Teacher Evaluation A relatively consistent legislative framework for teacher

Real Reform versus Fake Reformy Distractions: More Implications from NJ & MA for CT!

Recently, I responded to an absurd and downright disturbing Op-Ed by a Connecticut education reform organization that claimed that Connecticut needed to move quickly to adopt teacher evaluation/tenure reforms and expand charter schooling because a) Connecticut has a larger achievement gap and lower outcomes for low income students than Massachusetts or New Jersey and b)

Follow up on Reformy Logic in Connecticut

A few days ago, I responded to an utterly silly CT Ed Reform op-ed which argued that poverty doesn’t really matter so much, nor does funding (by omission), and that Massachusetts and New Jersey do better than Connecticut on behalf low income kids because they’ve adopted accountability and teacher evaluation reforms in the past few

Friday Thoughts: Is there really a point to advocating both standardization and choice?

I’ve long been perplexed that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute frames as its top two policy priorities: Implementing the Common Core Advancing Choice Their new web site layout makes this more obvious. More recently, a report released by the Council on Foreign Relations (referred to largely as the Rice-Klein report in the media and on

The Principal’s Dilemma

This is a bit of tangential post for this blog, but it’s a topic a few of us have been tweeting about and discussing for the past day or so. In a series of recent blog posts and in a forthcoming article I have discussed the potential problems with using bad, versus entirely inappropriate measures

Baseless Reformy Thoughts from Connecticut (& How this year’s reforms improved decades of past performance!?)

This utterly absurd post appeared yesterday on the CT Ed Reform blog: http://ctedreform.org/blog/2012/04/poverty-is-not-to-blame-ct%E2%80%99s-low-income-students-rank-48th-in-the-nation-while-ma%E2%80%99s-rank-2nd/ Essentially, the argument goes: CT’s achievement gap is worse than achievement gaps in states like Massachusetts and New Jersey and in particular, CT’s low income students perform less well than low income students in those states. Massachusetts has recently adopted reforms to