What You Don’t Know About TPM and Why You Should Demand a Growth Measure
Recently, TEA has removed TPM from use as one component in school accountability ratings. Many superintendents are upset because they felt TPM gave them credit for improvement on TAKS with students who had not yet cleared the passing hurdle. I understand this sentiment. Before TPM, there was absolutely no component of the accountability system that recognized any improvements in student achievement.
For one superintendent’s perspective, read the following letter to TEA:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XldiWf9-8lIjAvd95VMv5EVKrckknBfVPs-P790xA64/edit?hl=en&pli=1#
The problem, whoever, is that TPM is NOT a growth measure and did NOT accurately assess student growth. Rather, TPM was a statistical prediction of where a student might score in the future based on past performance. I am a researcher and statistician and do this type of work for a living as an education consultant. I have run such models before. Having done such work in the pass, I can tell you that predicting future performance is