If you truly care about education ….

This book is divided into four parts. Part one is an introduction chapter. Part two include five source chapters, each devoted to one accountability system in reasonable detail. The focus is on how coherence is achieved between daily classroom activities and accountability system. Two of the five systems are from countries other than the United States, one from Australia and the other from the Great Britain. This seems to show that while different countries may have different educational systems, the need of such coherence is shared. Part three have ten commentary chapters. They either evaluate the five systems in Part two or address some other important issues on how to establish the coherence. Contributors are either authors of the source chapters or experts in the educational assessment field. Diverse perspectives are reflected in those commentary chapters. Part four is a summary chapter, talking about the appropriate degree of coherence.

 

Evaluation of teacher performance is usually done with the use of ratings made by students, peers, and principals or supervisors, and at times, selfratings made by the teachers themselves. The trouble with this practice is that it is obviously subjective, and vulnerable to what Glass and Martinez call the “politics of teacher evaluation,” as well as to professional incapacities of the raters. The value-added analysis (VAA) model is one attempt to make evaluation objective and evidenced-based. However, the VAA model–especially that of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS) developed by Dr. William Sanders–appears flawed essentially because it posits the untenable assumption that the gain score of students (value added) is attributable only and only to the teacher(s), ignoring other significant explanators of student achievement like IQ and socio-economic status. Further, the use of the gain score (value-added) as a dependent variable appears hobbled with the validity threat called “statistical regression,” as well as the problem of isolating the conflated effects of two or more teachers. The proposed variance partitioning analysis (VPA) model seeks to partition the total variance of the dependent variable (post-test student achievement) into various portions representing: first, the effects attributable to the set of teacher factors; second, effects attributable to the set of control variables the most important of which are IQ of the student, his pretest score on that particular dependent variable, and some measures of his socio-economic status; and third, the unexplained effects/variance. It is not difficult to see that when the second and third quanta of variance are partitioned out of the total variance of the dependent variable, what remains is that attributable to the teacher. Two measures of teacher effect are hereby proposed: the proportional teacher effect and the direct teacher effect.  

Web Sites: Testing and Assessment

The following are updated at least weekly or monthly

The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) works to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing and  to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is  fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial.   http://www.Fairtest.org/

Susan Ohanian’s  huge and useful collection of stuff, news stories, commentary, http://susanohanian.org/

Critical and dependable independent analyses of research and policy documents, http://nochildleft.com

Rethinking Schools, an independent, progressive quarterly periodical : www.rethinkingschools.org

Harvard Civil Rights Project: http://www.law.harvard.edu/civilrights/

Education Policy Research Unit, (EPRU ) Arizona State Univ. Independent analyses of research and policy documents in areas such as student performance standards, assessment, and curriculum. EPRU disseminates its reports, analyses and other documents to policy makers, educators

and the public.    http://www.educationanalysis.org/

Applied Research Center: Progressive, dependable, focus on race and public policy including testing http://www.arc.org

NCLBgrassroots.org, a website tracking news articles from every state on the No Child Left Behind Act and monitoring how communities are faring under the law.

http://nclbgrassroots.org/

National Council  of Teachers of English

http://www.ncte.org

Designs for Change is a educational research and reform organization. Mission is to serve as a catalyst for major improvements in the public schools serving the 50 largest cities in the country, with emphasis on Chicago.

http://www.designsforchange.org/

National Education Association’s (NEA) updates on the national  lawsuit, also a useful tool for sending letters to Bush and Congress  

http://www.nea.org/lawsuit/index.html

The Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform, Inc. has a web site that’s updated weekly. Their work isn’t national in scope, but includes a weekly newsletter and archives of F-TREND, Florida Test Reform Email News Digest, now in its third volume. http://www.fcar.info/

http://www.RougeForum.org/, includes articles on public policy from a left perspective including testing. Also Rich Gibson’s Education Page For Democratic Society has extensive resources on California ‘s  tests, the Michigan MEAP, and testing in general

   http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/

Assembled by hberlak@yahoo.com   5-05

 

Nebraska is proving that assessment begins locally AND can produce a state assessment system:  STARS (School Based Teacher Led Assessment Reporting System). Certainly one of the most promising things around, check it out here:

http://www.nde.state.ne.us/stars/index.html  

No Child Left

Volume III, Number 5, May, 2005

This month’s issue offers three articles and a cartoon

at http://m1e.net/c?40065049-ef9OvLk5XXBdY%40970214-nG3KElwaST9Bs

Encourage colleagues to subscribe for free at http://m1e.net/c?40065049-Ge/fbl3siP1JY%40970215-rW0u6CvWED0is

1. The Annual Testing Myth

http://m1e.net/c?40065049-X7VdOHqkX9ZQU%40970216-Mp34dxRhrfPLc

By Jamie McKenzie

Many of the ideas and strategies embedded in NCLB/Helter-Skelter are just plain foolish. Beyond foolish. They are untested, unvalidated  and potentially damaging. Annual testing ranks high on the list of foolish, untested NCLB ideas. In this article, McKenzie offers eight reasons the imposition of annual testing by the FEDs is a bad idea.

2. No Gas Pump Left Behind (Reproduced below in full.)

http://m1e.net/c?40065049-vMWBgtOwl/gxs%40970217-/WAWHtOvysSso

By Jamie McKenzie

In this parody, Jamie McKenzie lampoons the NCLB/Helter-Skelter experience by describing the FEDs’ new program to elevate gas prices at every gas pump across the land.

3. The World Bank’s Possibly Chilling Agenda

http://m1e.net/c?40065049-4fZf5wmlIbnNw%40970218-LR/5lEpPcEwD2 By Lois Weiner

The rhetorical premise of NCLB, that the federal government will finally hold public schools throughout the nation accountable for their failure to educate poor and working class Hispanic and African American students, has been shown by many authors to mask its key purpose: to create a privatized system of public education that has a narrow, vocationalized curriculum enforced through use of standardized tests. In this article, Weiner looks at World Bank strategies to narrow educational agendas in poor countries.

4. The May Cartoon – “Throwing a Few Bones”

http://m1e.net/c?40065049-cjtwpxHXaeXsE%40970219-U1mIxAtmFC/HI

Faced with a revolt against the absurdly inflexible rules and regulations invented to accompany NCLB/Helter-Skelter, the new Ed Secretary has been smiling and throwing bones but making no changes worth writing home about.

Patronizing?

Autocratic?

Overbearing?

Smooth talk now substitutes for substance and honest listening. We have a Secretary who never worked in a school. How did that happen?