The Flawed Assumptions and Intentions of Florida’s Education Accountability System
It’s not certain where the most recent work of the Shanker Institute’s Matt DiCarlo will take the debate on Florida’ education accountability system. DiCarlo weighed in on Florida Senate president Don Gaetz comment (here and here) that Florida’s entire education accountability system was “in danger of imploding.” DiCarlo asserts that Gaetz’ assumptions that a correlation should exist between school grades and teacher evaluation is misguided:
…..in summary: Florida’s schools grades are heavily driven by students’ absolute performance levels, while its teacher evaluation ratings are designed to be independent of those levels. Again, both are matters of degree, and there are other reasons to expect to find some level of concentration of “lower-performing” teachers in schools with lower absolute performance scores (e.g., recruitment/retention issues).
That said, Florida’s school and teacher rating systems are, by design, measuring different things. If
