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Saturday, October 8, 2011

More Detail on the Problems of Rating Ed Schools by Teachers’ Students’ Outcomes « School Finance 101

More Detail on the Problems of Rating Ed Schools by Teachers’ Students’ Outcomes « School Finance 101:

More Detail on the Problems of Rating Ed Schools by Teachers’ Students’ Outcomes

In my previous post, I explained that the new push to rate schools of education by the student outcome gains of teachers who graduated from certain education schools is a problematic endeavor… one unlikely to yield particularly useful information, and one that may potentially create the wrong incentives for education schools. To reiterate, I laid out 3 reasons (and there are likely many more) why this approach is so problematic. Here, I divide them out a bit more – 4 ways.

  1. parsing out individual teacher’s academic backgrounds – that is if teachers hold credentials and degrees from may institutions, which institution is primarily responsible for their effectiveness?
  2. the teacher workforce in most states includes a mix of teachers from a multitude of within and out-of-state institutions, public and private, with many of those institutions having only a handful of teachers in some