Charter schools, VAM data could create a new market for top teachers

Once again, more information that the quality of teachers matters, this study was based on Florida student and teacher data. Teachers hired during recession periods appeared to be somewhat more effective boosting students’ math scores than those teachers hired in more secure times, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of…

Source: The Little-Known Statistician Who Taught Us to Measure Teachers – The New York Times Very Interesting article on the man who created the Value Added Model for evaluating teachers. To fairly evaluate teachers, Mr. Sanders argued, the state needed to calculate an expected growth trajectory for each student in each subject, based on past…

A few inquiries have been received asking why we are only identifying the top teachers, not also the worst performing.  As Bill Gates has observed in an editorial, we tend to agree that  a public shaming of the worst teachers is not the best way to use teacher performance data. The information we are sharing…

Well, good news, we finally received from the Florida DOE the 2017 list of High Impact Teachers. There are some teachers who are high impact and whose names were redacted by the DOE before we were given the list, so you might not find yourself on the list even if you received a letter. We…

However, Gary Phillips, a vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research (and former acting commissioner of NCES), explained Wednesday in a media call about the release that the standards still varied greatly— by up to three or four grade levels. “The rigor of the grade 4 [proficiency] standards in the highest…

Teacher quality, as measured by the ability to move students from wherever they start to a higher level, hopefully proficiency and above, continues to be of upmost importance. This is even more true in Florida, now that we have a majority of students in the state, not attending the public school that they are zoned…