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)

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