VIDEO: Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, and Value Added Measures

Value added measures sound fair, but they are not. In this video Prof. Daniel Willingham describes six problems (some conceptual, some statistical) with evaluating teachers by comparing student achievement in the fall and in the spring.

The good, the bad and the uncertainty

Following up on our earlier piece, of experts warning of the dangerous of using student test results to evaluate teachers, Greg at Plunderbund brings into view the notion that HB153 also calls for the use of test results to evaluate principals. This brings forth the uncomfortable connundrum of having a faulty grading system grade principals as "unsatisfatory" and then having those very same "unsatisfactory" principals be responsible for evaluating teachers. As Greg notes, with a bit of math

Crunch the numbers with these components in place and we end up with 797 head principals and 412 assistant principals being categorized as “unsatisfactory” who will be assigned the responsibility for evaluating an estimated 22,000 teachers. Now, we don’t know the evaluation category of all of those teachers, but put yourself in the place of one of those professionals who is expected to take advice from an “unsatisfactory” leader. Wouldn’t you be a bit skeptical?

It's time that lawmakers start to get the sense that education is a team sport, not one of individual competition.