This past week, the Florida Board of Education adopted rules establishing, based just on the VAM data, defining what “Highly
Effective, Effective, Needs Improvement/Developing, and Unsatisfactory” should mean. If this model set out in the rule had been applied to the aggregate historical VAM data, the distribution of teachers would have been
as below at a 95%confidence interval. This model identifies 16.6% of 46,996 teachers as highly effective. This encompasses almost every teacher who performs better than would be expected at a 95% confidence level. It will be interesting to contract this with how many teachers the districts identify as highly effective. Just as interesting of course is that almost 30% of teachers are identified as not effective, with 14 % of these being completely unsatisfactory. Contrast this with Pasco finding no teachers to be unsatisfactory. I mention Pasco, not because they were that different from any other district, but because we have linked to the Pasco data in an earlier blog post.