Schools Matter: Judge Refuses to Stop Unfair and Unreliable Value Added System

Schools Matter: Judge Refuses to Stop Unfair and Unreliable Value Added System:

Judge Refuses to Stop Unfair and Unreliable Value Added System

 Not in the bolded section of this news story, the federal judge notes that the teachers have a strong case against the unreliable nature of the the Tennessee VAM system known as TVAAS.  He just refuses to do anything about it.

....TVAAS is a complex algorithm that aims to isolate the impact of individual teachers on their students’ learning, as measured by state tests. One of the nation’s first “value-added” formulas, it has inspired similar efforts in other states.

TVAAS scores have been calculated since the 1990s but started being used to help determine ratings, bonuses and tenure status only since 2011, when Tennessee overhauled its teacher evaluation law.

Under state law, TVAAS scores make up 35 percent of teachers’ ratings, with the rest based on in-person observations and “achievement measures,” which can include graduation rates, students’ AP or IB exam scores, or school-wide TVAAS scores.

The two teachers who filed the lawsuit, Lisa Trout and Mark Taylor, had strong ratings from classroom observations but TVAAS scores that were too low to make them eligible for bonuses from Knox County Schools. The district gives bonuses of up to $2,000 a year to teachers with strong ratings. Trout and Taylor charged that those scores should be discounted because only some of their students took the end-of-course exams used to Schools Matter: Judge Refuses to Stop Unfair and Unreliable Value Added System: