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Sunday, March 24, 2013

Jersey Jazzman: How ONE Question on ONE Test Can Cost You Your Job

Jersey Jazzman: How ONE Question on ONE Test Can Cost You Your Job:


How ONE Question on ONE Test Can Cost You Your Job

Last week, I pointed out a big math failure in the proposed New Jersey teacher evaluation system, AchieveNJ:
Slide 14 (annotations mine):



Slide 20:

 OK, wait a minute...

Slide 14 says my students' Student Growth Percentiles, or SGPs, will be calculated on a scale of 1 to 99. We've already established that my evaluation will use the Median SGP for my class, even though that is potentially a hugely distorted metric (see NJDOE Math Fail #1 for more). But Slide 20 has an example where a teacher gets a "raw score" of 2.0 for their mSGP.

How in the hell did the NJDOE calculate this number?
The more I looked at this, the more absurd it seemed. If NJDOE is going convert a number