'Value-Added' Formulas Strain Collaboration

The rapidly changing debate on how to account for student achievement in teacher evaluations is putting teacher-district relationships to the test across the country.

More than half the states now require districts to take student achievement into account when evaluating a teacher's performance. In most cases, that's calculated through a so-called value-added model that attempts to account for a teacher's role in a student's growth over the course of a year, via test scores and other performance measures. Most of the push for value-added evaluation systems has come only in the past few years, driven in part by the federal Race to the Top grants, which gave extra weight to states that included achievement-based teacher evaluations in their applications, and by the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants, which so far have supported experiments in 175 districts in 33 states using student achievement in teacher performance-pay plans.

"Some of the fear and worries we're seeing now, not just from unions but across the board, are because we've seen an enormous amount of change and uncertainty in a short amount of time," said Christopher A. Thorn, the associate director of the University of Wisconsin's Value-Added Research Center and its director for data quality and systems innovation. Moreover, he said, "Budget pressures have actually stressed districts and pushed people to do these things. Forget about paying teachers. That's a minor part of the reforms we see in districts; they're changing who they hire, they're changing their leadership systems, they're changing professional development. They are changing everything in the system."

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Freedom School children march against budget cuts

We received this yesterday from the Children's Defense Fund, and wanted to share it with our readers. Civic engagement to improve the lives of students is at the heart of what we care about.

Nearly 400 children participating in eight Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools sites in Central Ohio held a “teach-in” and marched to the Statehouse to highlight the dangers from proposed federal budget cuts to education. The children, ages 5-18, joined thousands of others from 151 Freedom Schools locations in 87 cities and 27 states as part of a “National Day of Social Action.”

The Freedom Schools college “servant leaders” who teach and mentor the children enrolled in these summer schools hosted the “teach-in” for community leaders, policymakers, advocates, and parents to discuss possible federal budget cuts that pose a huge threat to education and great harm to children. Some proposals, like the Ryan budget passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in April, would roll back education funding to 2008 levels, cut Pell grants by as much as $126 billion (more than $800 per grant), and slash $770 billion from health care funding that protects one in three children – while giving $4.2 trillion in tax breaks to millionaires, billionaires and big corporations. And such cuts would come on top of the state and local cuts that have already hurt public education.

During the event held at Broad Street United Methodist Church, college servant leaders and children shared stories about how education has shaped their lives and led participants to write letters to their federal lawmakers urging them to protect children from education budget cuts and invest in children to strengthen the nation’s economic future.

Lamar Graham, 25, of Columbus, is a servant leader intern at Urban Resurrection CDC's Freedom School. Graham was in foster care for eight years and said he was placed with “too many families to count,” but that the experiences gave him an “inner strength to better not only my life, but others’.” He is a graduate of Wilberforce University and Columbus State Community College. Graham said, "I never would have been able to go to college without Pell grants. Pell grants saved me from taking out many student loans. If you cut educational funding, it's like the foundation: if there is no foundation, the house can't stand."

For more information on the CDF Freedom Schools program visit www.freedomschools.org