A Retired Massachusetts Principal on her Teachers’ “Value-Added”
A retired Massachusetts principal, named Linda Murdock, posted a post on her blog titled “Murdock’s EduCorner” about her experiences, as a principal, with “value-added,” or more specifically in her state the use of Student Growth Percentile (SGP) scores to estimate said “value-added.” It’s certainly worth reading as one thing I continue to find is that which we continue to find in the research on value-added models (VAMs) is also being realized by practitioners in the schools being required to use value-added output such as these. In this case, for example, while Murdock does not discuss the technical terms we use in the research (e.g., reliability, validity, and bias), she discusses these in pragmatic, real terms (e.g., year-to-year fluctuations, lack of relationship of SGP scores and other indicators of teacher effectiveness, and the extent to which certain sets of students can hinder teachers’ demonstrated growth or value-added, respectively). Hence, do give her post a read here, and also pasted in full below. Do also pay special attention to the bulleted sections in which she discusses these and other issues on a case-by-case basis.
Murdock writes:
At the end of the last school year, I was chatting with two excellent teachers, and our conversation turned to the new state-mandated teacher evaluation system and its use of student “growth scores” (“Student Growth Percentiles” or “SGPs” in Massachusetts) to measure a teacher’s “impact on student learning.”
“Guess we didn’t have much of an impact this year,” said one teacher.
The other teacher added, “It makes you feel about this high,” showing a tiny space between her thumb and forefinger.
Throughout the school, comments were similar — indicating that a major “impact” of the A Retired Massachusetts Principal on her Teachers’ “Value-Added” | VAMboozled!:
