My Christmas gift to you: a value-added story idea.
If you go into a typical fourth-grade class—especially a high-poverty one—on test day in March, you might find a kid who arrived at the school in January, one who arrived in February, and one who arrived three days before. You’ll find several kids who receive most of their reading instruction from a pullout teacher, and others who do so in math. There will be students who spend large part of their day in a special ed room, and some in ESL. The class might have spent a large chunk of the fall with a student teacher. A couple of kids might have been swapped from the class across the hall because they had trouble getting along with their classmates.
So how much credit, or blame, for these kids’ scores on the test should be attributed to the classroom teacher?
