The recent release of Teacher Data Reports (TDR) in New York City made the problems with evaluations based on tests scores visible for many people. The idea of evaluating teachers based on how well their students do is a simple…
Blog Archives
How Can Infrastructures Affect Teachers & Systemic Improvement?
A recent discussion between David K. Cohen of the University of Michigan and the Fordham Institute’s Chris Tessone used the term infrastructure. Cohen, in an earlier post on ShankarBlog (from the American Federation of Teachers’ Shankar Institute), argued that individual…
Are All Teacher-Student Linkages Created Equal?
Across the nation educators and their technologists have been working to implement what is a seemingly simple information systems enhancement: linking the records for teachers with the records for students. This should seem to involve a matt of linking two…
Balanced Report About One of the Nation’s Most Important Teacher Evaluation Systems
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Susan Headden of Education Sector has written an excellent and balanced report on the DC Public Schools’ controversial IMPACT system that is used to evaluate teachers and instrumental in the dismissal of hundreds that were rated…
Value Added Models – Equity and Exceptional-ism or Evaluation?
Anyone in education who has been introduced to the term value-added modeling likely is aware of how difficult a topic it is when it has been applied to measuring teachers. I was at the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) bi-annual…
Posted in Value-added models
Value-Added Models from 20,000 Feet
What are Value-added models (VAMs)? They are a kind of statistical model that has been used to evaluate the performance of teachers. VAMs have been developing since the 1990 and have been seen as an alternative to the achievement model…
Posted in Value-added models
