The Pigeonhole

Been following stories and tweets about the name and shame approach of the Los Angeles Times’ article, “Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?” (August 14th).

It led me to some interesting and valuable research including the IES report Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains:

Our results are largely driven by findings from the literature and new analyses that more than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under the control of the teacher. Thus, multiple years of performance data are required to reliably detect a teacher's true long-run performance signal from the student-level noise. In addition, our reported sample requirements likely understate those that would be required for an ongoing performance measurement system, because our analysis ignores other realistic sources of variability, such as the nonrandom sorting of students to classrooms and schools (Schochet & Chiang, 2010, p.35)

And Dianne Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  

The whole value added concept sounds simple and is feeding into almost every education debate including national standards, league tables and quality teaching. It isn't simple - and the damage caused by such as the LA Times article may be irreparable.

"And if the practice of publishing teachers’ names alongside faulty measures of “value” catches on, who in their right mind is going to want to become a teacher?" (Sabrina, 16 August 2010)

Check out  Scandalize Their Names August 16, 2010, by Sabrina on the Failing Schools blog