Measure Schools on Student Growth
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Measure Schools on Student Growth
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Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#2A simple pencil mark on the door frame usually works best.
My adult kids love to look back to see how tall they were when they were 10 years old.
Instead of measuring schools how about we pay teachers more and demand decent education.
All this measuring! Measuring, measuring, measuring.
What a waste of time and money.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#3Unfortunately gaming the system is still a temptation.
By rewarding growth, schools are incentivized to prevent earlier grades from doing too well.
One student with potential pushing the overall performance higher than that school might like for that year might be purposefully stunted in order to allow room for growth in later years, robbing them of getting as far in life as they would have.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#4Problem is most states assessments can't measure growth and "growth measures" are numerically nonsense.
Growth measures do exist, but they require adaptive tests.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#5Problem is most states assessments can't measure growth and "growth measures" are numerically nonsense. Growth measures do exist, but they require adaptive tests.
Strong claim! Can you elaborate?
Also, the SBAC test administered in California, Washington, and many others is now adaptive, but still schools are measured based on point-in-time aggregates.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#6Unfortunately gaming the system is still a temptation. By rewarding growth, schools are incentivized to prevent earlier grades from doing too well. One student with potential pushing the overall performance higher than that school might like for that year might be purposefully stunted in order to allow room for growth in later years, robbing them of getting as far in life as they would have.
I agree gaming the system is always a temptation with accountability systems.
I’m not sure it would work like how you are proposing, since purposely stunting a student would penalize the school exactly as much as they would “gain” as the student catches back up.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#7A simple pencil mark on the door frame usually works best. My adult kids love to look back to see how tall they were when they were 10 years old. Instead of measuring schools how about we pay teachers more and demand decent education. All this measuring! Measuring, measuring, measuring. What a waste of time and money.
> demand decent education
Yes, but with 125k schools in the US and 3.5 million teachers, how do you determine which of them are providing a decent education?
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#8Unfortunately gaming the system is still a temptation. By rewarding growth, schools are incentivized to prevent earlier grades from doing too well. One student with potential pushing the overall performance higher than that school might like for that year might be purposefully stunted in order to allow room for growth in later years, robbing them of getting as far in life as they would have.
Since state standardized tests are now adaptive, there is no reason to have the student who comes in knowing everything at their grade level to appear stagnant in testing. They can test beyond their grade level. That would incentivize schools to do something for those students instead of to ignore them.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#9Problem is most states assessments can't measure growth and "growth measures" are numerically nonsense. Growth measures do exist, but they require adaptive tests.
Strong claim! Can you elaborate? Also, the SBAC test administered in California, Washington, and many others is now adaptive, but still schools are measured based on point-in-time aggregates.
I can elaborate a little bit but not a lot since that would be essay-length. I can simplify and explain roughly.
The short story is that most states assessments are designed almost as binary measures, to see if students are above or below a cutoff threshold set by Common Core State Standards. They're designed to measure schools, and in particular, to flag failing schools where kids aren't meeting standards.
They're very good at that, actually.
However, that's almost meaningless as a measure for kids well above or below standards, or unaligned to standards.
"Growth" is almost meaningless here. If I know one number is less than three and another less than four, I can't subtract them.
It's more mathematically fancy, but that's the jist. It gets even worse since measures constructs are highly multidimensional and different dimensions are measured each year. It's like subtracting apples from oranges.
It also encourages the wrong behavior. For kids behind, I'll get the best "growth" by discussing on grade level material and leaving gaps for what kids failed to learn before. I'll also do well to ignore my students who are ahead. Indeed, students who did week last year will inevitably hurt my "growth."
As a footnote, I would not call this a strong claim. Talk to a psychometrician and you'll see it's common knowledge.
If adaptive tests move beyond those few states, the problem goes away.
Re: Measure Schools on Student Growth
#10Teacher’s unions and their enablers who are politically aligned to them reject all forms of measurement and accountability. Even this alternative one of growth instead of snapshots will be attacked on flimsy grounds.