New Mexico’s Teacher Evaluation Lawsuit: Day Three
As per my last post about the second day in court in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was purposefully ambiguous about one of the two articles written in The Santa Fe New Mexican regarding my testimony. The first article titled, “Experts differ on test-based evaluations at NM hearing,” I felt fairly captured the events of the second day in court, but the second article titled, “Professor’s testimony: Teacher eval system ‘not ready for prime time,” did not. But that is about all that I said, being purposefully ambiguous for two reasons that I can now (more or less) share.
The first reason was that the author of this article (in my opinion) unfairly captured my four hours of testimony, by primarily positioning me as an “expert witness” who did not know really anything about the New Mexico teacher evaluation model. Just to be clear, during my testimony I explained that I had not analyzed the actual data from New Mexico. I also argued (but this was unfortunately not highlighted in this particular article), that I could not find anything about the New Mexico model’s output (e.g., indicators of reliability or consistency in terms of teachers’ rankings over time, indicators of validity as per, for example, whether the state’s value-added output correlated, or not, with the other “multiple measures” used in New Mexico’s teacher evaluation system), pretty much anywhere given my efforts.
I testified that this, in and of itself, was problematic, given much of what should have beenNew Mexico’s Teacher Evaluation Lawsuit: Day Three | VAMboozled!: