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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Answer Sheet - Were some D.C. teachers fired based on flawed calculations?

The Answer Sheet - Were some D.C. teachers fired based on flawed calculations?

Were some D.C. teachers fired based on flawed calculations?

My guest is Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He writes the Sociological Eye on Education blog for The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media. Pallas has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, and Northwestern University, and served as a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education.
In this post, Pallas goes into detail about why he believes the D.C. Public Schools botched the calculation of value-added scores for some of the teachers who were among the 241 fired last week by Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

By Aaron Pallas
We live in an age of accountability and transparency – and yet some school districts seem not to be playing by the rules. I recently wroteabout the lack of accountability in the way districts report how they calculate teacher “value-added” measures that are used for medium-stakes and high-stakes personnel decisions (such as granting teachers