Assessment Taskforce

Sorry for the late notice but I had been trying to find the location for today's Assessment Taskforce meeting.

The meeting is today, Feb. 21st from 4-6 p.m. at JSCEE in room #2278.  The public can come and view the meeting but "the limitation is the size of the room."  If you go and are turned away for space, let me know and we can work on that.

Here's a list of members and meeting minutes (there has been one meeting so far).   The group includes several Garfield reps including the testing coordinator at Garfield, a student and the principal.  There are four parents in the group (although some of the schools' staff may also be parents). 

The facilitator comes from a Kirkland company, Performance Dimensions Group, "the art and science of human performance."  I am waiting for information on how this cost is being paid.

Agenda for today's meeting.   Looks good especially since they have Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond from Stanford coming to present.  If you don't know, she is a powerhouse education researcher (and had been one on Obama's shortlist for Ed Secretary and she would have been fantastic). 

Also to note about assessments is a Scrap the Map forum including Diane Ravitch (via Skype) next Thursday, the 28th at 6:30 p.m. at UW in the Physics&Astronomy bldg, room A102.  RSVP on Facebook.

Want proof of assessments gone wild?  Read this account of a public school teacher in NYC who teaches gifted students.  Pretty crazy town.  

For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news. Her score on the Teacher Data Report, the New York City Department of Education’s effort to isolate a teacher’s contribution to her students’ performance on New York State’s math and English Language Arts (ELA) tests in grades four through eight, said that 32 percent of seventh-grade math teachers and 0 percent of eighth-grade math teachers scored below her.
Using a statistical technique called value-added modeling, the Teacher Data Reports compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not.

Carolyn Abbott was, in one respect, a victim of her own success. After a year in her classroom, her seventh-grade students scored at the 98th percentile of New York City students on the 2009 state test. As eighth-graders, they were predicted to score at the 97th percentile on the 2010 state test. However, their actual performance was at the 89th percentile of students across the city. That shortfall—the difference between the 97th percentile and the 89th percentile—placed Abbott near the very bottom of the 1,300 eighth-grade mathematics teachers in New York City.

How do her students perform on the content that she actually does teach? This year, the 64 eighth-graders at Anderson she teaches are divided into two groups, an honors section and a regular section. All but one of the students in the honors section took the Regents Integrated Algebra exam in January; the other student and most of the regular-section students will take the exam in June. All of the January test-takers passed with flying colors, and more than one-third achieved a perfect score of 100 on the exam.

In mid-February, the courts authorized the public release of the Teacher Data Reports, and they were published in print and online by major media outlets in New York City. “It was humiliating,” Abbott said. “To be published online, and stay there forever—it felt like an invasion of privacy.” She was terrified about the possible backlash from parents.