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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Valueless? Florida releases data on how much value teachers... | Get Schooled | www.ajc.com

Valueless? Florida releases data on how much value teachers... | Get Schooled | www.ajc.com:



Valueless? Florida releases data on how much value teachers add to their students 



 

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