Hess-tify! � The Quick and the Ed

Hess-tify! � The Quick and the Ed

Hess-tify!

by Kevin Carey

While I’ve enjoyed Rick Hess’s belated entry into the edu-blogosphere, many of his posts still read more like op-eds than true bloggish give-and-take. That changed today with his brutal takedown of Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas’s attack on the DCPS IMPACT teacher evaluation system. Soon after the high-profile announcement that 165 DCPS teachers were being fired based on IMPACT scores, Pallas argued that the value-added test score component of IMPACT was “idiotic.” The problem, as Hess notes, is that Pallas has no idea how IMPACT’s value-added measures actually work and