Educator sees the value in 'value-added' approach to evaluating teachers -- latimes.com:
"When Terry Grier was hired to run San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- 'value-added' -- sounded innocuous enough. But this number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
It was novel because rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all teachers a passing grade."
"When Terry Grier was hired to run San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- 'value-added' -- sounded innocuous enough. But this number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
It was novel because rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all teachers a passing grade."
