Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

PPB: Value-added, value subtracted. Children are not strawberries.

PPB: Value-added, value subtracted. Children are not strawberries.:

Value-added, value subtracted. Children are not strawberries.

Part 1--

Before I finish another post I'm struggling with, I wanted to share this article by Bill Turque of the Washington Post- 'Creative and motivating".....and fired! It's a personal story of a teacher, Sarah Wysocki, who had been positively reviewed by her principal but later fired under D.C.'s new teacher evaluation system.
Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn’t grow as predicted. Her undoing was “value-added,” a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher’s direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.
When her students fell short, the low value-added trumped her positives in the classroom. Under the D.C. teacher evaluation system, called IMPACT , the measurement counted for 50 percent of