Gates Foundation cooks data to support its pre-determined conclusions on teacher evals

[Hannah Bell]

In a wowser of a technical review, Rothstein finds that The Gates Foundation study on teachers' value-added performance "is an unprecedented opportunity to learn about what makes an effective teacher. However, there are troubling indications that the Project's conclusions were predetermined." This, of course, comes as no surprise to teachers across the land, but it's good to have a respected scholar, somebody with no horse in the race, say it. Rothstein finds:

In fact, the preliminary MET results contain important warning signs about the use of value-added scores for high-stakes teacher evaluations. These warnings, however, are not heeded in the preliminary report, which interprets all of the results as support for the use of value-added models in teacher evaluation.

The results presented in the report do not support the conclusions drawn from them. This is especially troubling because the Gates Foundation has widely circulated a stand-alone policy brief (with the same title as the research report) that omits the full analysis, so even careful readers will be unaware of the weak evidentiary basis for its conclusions.5

Rothstein characterizes the Gates report conclusions as "shockingly weak" and points to how the part they released to the press hid this weakness.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/01/gates-foundation-cooks-data-for-media.html