Valueless? Florida releases data on how much value teachers add to their students
Previous Posts
- Michael Thurmond won't run for state school chief. Enough challenges in DeKalb, including delaying school board redistricting
February 24, 2014 - Redshirting kindergartners: Bench them for a year or put them in the game and the class?
February 24, 2014 - Georgia broadens access to Advanced Placement classes. Needs to improve minority performance.
February 23, 2014
The anger of Florida teachers over a court decision releasing their annual performance scores to the public and press illustrates the deepening uneasiness of evaluating a workforce that, while massive, features many specialty areas for which there are no test scores and where the real impact may take years to assess.
Florida is not posting the teacher data on its website; it is releasing scores upon request after being sued by the Florida Times-Union newspaper in Jacksonville. Florida adopted a model similar to Georgia’s to evaluate its teachers. The complex method attempts to predict how a student should have fared on the annual Florida exams and figure out the value a teacher added to the student's learning.
This value added measure or VAM entails looking at student test scores -- scores count for half of a teacher’s annual evaluation – along with principals’ observations and grades on classroom management and lesson planning.
The raw score is not easy for parents to decipher. For example, the average teacher VAM at one school profiled by the Florida Times-Union was 0.163661012.
National teacher groups condemned both the evaluation protocol in Florida and the court