Quick Thoughts on the Screwed-Up DC IMPACT Ratings
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 26, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareUsually big edu-news doesn't break during Christmas week. But, on Monday, DC Public Schools officials announced some troubling news concerning their acclaimed IMPACT teacher evaluation program. As theWashington Post's savvy Nick Anderson reported, "Faulty calculations of the 'value' that D.C. teachers added to student achievement in the last school year resulted in erroneous performance evaluations for 44 teachers, including one who was fired because of a low rating."
In response, Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, said, "IMPACT needs to be reevaluated. The idea of attaching test scores to a teacher's evaluation -- that idea needs to be junked." DCPS chief of human capital Jason Kamras said, "We take these kind of things extremely seriously. Any mistake is unacceptable to us."
First, here's a bit on what DCPS had to say. In an e-mail, Kamras wrote, "We (DCPS) made no mistakes. Our vendor, Mathematica, incorrectly calculated the value-added scores" due to "a programming error." He said the teachers involved constitute "about 1% of the [DCPS] teacher force," with 22 of the flawed ratings too high and 22 too low. Kamras said, "We are holding harmless anyone who should have had a lower rating [and] we are moving up anyone who should have had a higher rating. Those folks will get all the benefits they're entitled to." He said "only 1 person was erroneously fired" and "we've already offered" to reinstate them.
As we head into 2014, with lots of states and districts rolling out or amping up new teacher evaluation
In the hope that we might work towards a more fruitful and less vicious discussion of education policy in 2014 than we suffered through this past year, here are eight resolutions we might all do well to heed:8. Let's resolve to stop assuming that anyone...
