World News Korner

Small "typo" costs one teacher their job and others their bonuses.

Courtesy of Politico:

A single missing suffix among thousands of lines of programming code led a public school teacher in Washington, D.C., to be erroneously fired for incompetence, three teachers to miss out on $15,000 bonuses and 40 others to receive inaccurate job evaluations.

The miscalculation has raised alarms about the increasing reliance nationwide on complex “value-added” formulas that use student test scores to attempt to quantify precisely how much value teachers have added to their students’ academic performance. Those value-added metrics often carry high stakes: Teachers’ employment, pay and even their professional licenses can depend on them.

The Obama administration has used financial and policy levers, including Race to the Top grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, to nudge more states to rate teachers in part based on value-added formulas or other measures of student achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has credited D.C.’s strong recent gains on national standardized tests in part to the district’s tough teacher evaluation policy, which was launched by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. But teachers have complained that the results fluctuate wildly from year to year — and can be affected by human error, like the missing suffix in the programming code for D.C. schools.

“You can’t simply take a bunch of data, apply an algorithm and use whatever pops out of a black box to judge teachers, students and our schools,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said this week. The AFT and its affiliates have signed off on contracts that use value-added measures as a significant portion of teacher evaluations — including in D.C. — but Weingarten called the trend “very troubling” nonetheless.

The problem in D.C. stemmed from “a very small typo” inserted into complex programming code during an upgrade earlier this year, said Barbara Devaney, chief operating officer of Mathematica Policy Research, the private firm that holds the contract to calculate value-added scores for the district.

God I am SO tired of this teacher evaluation crap!

The conservatives have been trying to break the public school system for decades and it seems that they have almost achieved their goal.

Public education is the backbone of our democracy and our progress as a nation, and as Americans we should be defending it at every opportunity.

Oh an by the way that Michelle Rhee woman is a fraud, just read what research professor on education Diane Ravitch had to say about her and her methods.

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