Minor Glitch Leads To Major Criticism Of Michelle Rhee's Signature Initiative
Posted: 12/23/2013 8:17 pm EST
The evaluations of 44 Washington public school teachers -- out of 4,000 -- were compromised by an outside contractor, an email from a D.C. official to the city's teachers union reveals.
The union is slamming the school system for the mistake and raising broader questions about the system.
D.C. Public Schools' chief of human capital, Jason Kamras, wrote to Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, on Friday. In the email, which the school system provided to The Huffington Post, he told her of two errors in the evaluation of teachers for the 2012-13 school year.
First, Kamras wrote, the policy on appropriate weighting of administrator and master educator observations of teachers under the evaluation formula, known as IMPACT, was "not clearly communicated." IMPACT scores can affect teachers' bonuses and job security. So the District has recalculated all observation scores that might have been affected by that miscommunication, according to Kamras.
Second, he wrote, the outside contractor, Mathematica Policy Research, "found a small technical error" that affected some teachers' Individual Value-Added scores. Those scores have been recalculated as well. Kamras assured Davis that teachers who would have had a lower IVA score as a result "will be held harmless."
The teachers unions, both local and national, are calling attention to the errors,