Education. The 'Value-Added Debate'...

[YvonneCa]

...here:

http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/value-added-and-favoritism/

Excerpt...

"The reality is that value-added measures simply create new opportunities to manipulate teacher evaluations through favoritism. In fact, it might even be easier to get a teacher fired by making sure the teacher has a weak value-added scorecard. Because value-added estimates are sensitive to non-random assignment of students, principals can easily manipulate the distributions of disruptive students, students with special needs, students with weak prior growth and other factors, which, if not fully accounted for by the VA model will bias teacher ratings. And some factors – like disruptive students, or those who simply don’t give a $#*! won’t (and can’t) be addressed in the VA models. That is, a clever principal can use the VA non-random assignment bias to create a statistical illusion that a teacher is a bad teacher."

[soleiri]

1. K&R

[YvonneCa]

2. Thanks ! n/t

[knitter4democracy]

3. Duh. I'm so glad someone finally spelled it out.

The principal did that to my calc teacher in high school. He was trying to get him to retire, so he kept giving him the worst students, the lowest-level learners who didn't care anymore, and the kids who'd push Rapid Randy's buttons. He ended up becoming a counselor and was amazing (and cost the district more, I'm sure a massive perk), but it was sad to see them try to wear him down those last few years.

[YvonneCa]

4. That's why I posted it. Something similar happened...

...in my district. It's wrong. People just don't realize how it's already being used. Thanks for your comment.