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So what?

Posted by: PPTAweb

Growing inequities - so what?

Today was spent in Tauranga, participating in the NZARE (NZ Association for Research in Education) conference (well listening anyway).

Professor Robert Tierney was the opening keynote speaker "Growing inequities: how do we contribute" was the title of his address.


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)


 

Associate education minister and trainee space cadet, Hon Heather Roy,  has stumbled on the shambles that passes for an education policy in England and is advocating it here. Now anyone who has had the sad experience of teaching in a state school in England knows that it is not a system to emulate. Basically, the English system runs for the benefit of the elite private schools Eton and Harrow etc (though they call them public) and state schools are treated as either whipping boys or political footballs or both.