Skip to main content

Home/ ADMS707/ Group items tagged Scores

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
REL N

Accountability Lost : Education Next - 0 views

educationnext.org/accountability-lost

ADMS707 Niemeyer Boards accountability

shared by REL N on 17 Feb 11 - Cached
    • REL N
      REL N on 17 Feb 11
       
      Tried to identify confounding variables to increase the likelihood that any changes in voting behavior were due to school performance
  • incumbent school board members won a larger share of the total vote in a precinct when test scores in that precinct improved. We estimate that improvement from the 25th to the 75th percentile of test-score change—that is, moving from a loss of 4 percentile points to a gain of 3.8 percentile points between 1999 and 2000—produced on average an increase of 3 percentage points in an incumbent’s vote share. If precinct test scores dropped from the 75th to the 25th percentile of test-score change, the associated 3-percentage-point decrease in an incumbent’s vote share could substantially erode an incumbent’s margin of victory.
  • percentile scores had increased in the year preceding the election, incumbents won 81 percent of the time in competitive elections; in districts where scores had declined, incumbents won only 69 percent of the time.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • significant relationship with precinct test scores and the absence of a relationship with district scores suggests that voters were more concerned with school performance within their immediate neighborhood than across the district.
  • all indications of a relationship between school performance and an incumbent school board member’s vote share vanished after the passage of NCLB in 2002.
  • None of these approaches yielded clear evidence of a link between school performance and voter behavior in school board elections.
  • the overwhelming weight of the evidence indicated that school board members were not being judged on improvement or weakening in school test scores.
  • School performance as measured by test scores may have helped determine which candidates sought reelection and which faced a challenger.
  • assess the relationship between test-score trends and incumbents’ decisions to run for reelection, and then to estimate the effect of test-score trends on the probability that an incumbent who runs faces an opponent.
  • incumbents may bow out in anticipation of being held accountable for poor test-score performance by schools in their district.
  • drop from the 75th to the 25th percentile of test-score change, our results lead us to expect that incumbents will be 13 percentage points less likely to run for reelection. In fact, 76 percent of incumbents sought reelection in districts with improving test scores; in districts with falling scores, only 66 percent did.
  • we failed to find any indication that incumbents in 2002 and 2004 based their decisions about running for reelection on student learning trends.
  • In these years, only 30 and 34 percent of articles, respectively, touched on test scores. The decline in media attention leads us to suspect that concerns about student learning trends probably did not stand at the forefront of voters’ or candidates’ thinking in the 2002 and 2004 elections.
  • “The PACT needs to be seen for what it is: a vehicle for politicians to say that they are tough on education (and educators). This may make for good politics, but it makes for bad educational policy.”
  • Reacting to the rising criticisms directed toward PACT, voters may have grown disenchanted with the state’s accountability system and removed test-score performance from among the criteria on which they evaluated school board candidates.
  • if most schools appeared to be average or better, parents may not have been prompted to hold incumbents accountable for poor school performance. Incumbents and potential challengers may also have become less responsive to scores when the testing regimen began to give nearly every school a passing mark.
  • School board elections give the public the leverage to improve their schools. If voters do not cast out incumbents when local school performance is poor, they forfeit that opportunity. As debate continues over components of NCLB, policymakers should consider whether it is realistic to assume voters will in fact use the polls to drive school improvement.
  • Neither the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) nor the states impose direct sanctions on members of school boards that oversee large numbers of underperforming schools.
  • According to a 2002 national survey, student achievement ranks second only to financial concerns as school board members’ highest priority.
  • the basic purpose of all school board activities is to facilitate the day-to-day functioning of schools.
  • analyzed test-score data and election results from 499 races over three election cycles in South Carolina to study whether voters punish and reward incumbent school board members on the basis of changes in student learning, as measured by standardized tests, in district schools
  • impact of school performance on incumbents’ decisions to seek reelection and potential challengers’ decisions to join the race.
  • All but 4 of the state’s 46 counties hold nonpartisan school board elections. Approximately 80 percent of school board members receive some compensation, either a salary, per diem payments, or reimbursement for their expenses. Over 90 percent of South Carolina’s 85 school boards have between 5 and 9 members, while the largest board has 11. And, as is common practice in other states, nearly 9 out of 10 South Carolina school districts hold board elections during the general election in November.
  • the most important difference between South Carolina and most other states when it comes to local school politics is the role played by the state’s teachers unions, which are among the weakest in the country.
  • South Carolina school boards are unlikely to be beholden to the unions, which should make the boards more responsive to the broader public.
  • examine whether voters are more concerned with student performance districtwide or in their local neighborhood, we computed two measures of average school performance to include in our analysis.
  • separate the effect of school performance from the effects of other factors that could reasonably influence an incumbent school board member’s vote share
  • REL N on 17 Feb 11
     
    Details about research on the impact school performance has on how people vote for school board members. The authors conclude "If voters do not cast out incumbents when local school performance is poor, they forfeit that opportunity. As debate continues over components of NCLB, policymakers should consider whether it is realistic to assume voters will in fact use the polls to drive school improvement."
Phil Riddle

Researchers fault L.A. Times methods in analysis of Calif. Teachers - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2011020703929.html

Value-Added Metrics Test Scores Teacher Evaluation

shared by Phil Riddle on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Phil Riddle on 13 Feb 11
     
    Researchers at the University of Colorado have raised some concerns about the methods used by the economics team hired by the L.A. Times to apply a value-added metric to teachers' test scores. The central debate is over which variables to control for when running a value-added analysis.
REL N

Rhee faces renewed scrutiny over depiction of students' progress when she taught - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2011021007240.html

ADMS707 Niemeyer Test Scores Rhee

shared by REL N on 16 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • REL N on 16 Feb 11
     
    The principal for whom Rhee worked said that there was "clear evidence of actual, knowing falsehood" in statements Rhee made about the magnitude of improvement in test scores for her students. Frederick Hess, who was not involved with that school or its faculty said : "There's simply no way with these data to say anything, good or bad, about Rhee's teaching performance,"
  • REL N on 16 Feb 11
     
    The principal for whom Rhee worked said Rhee's statements about the magnitude of improvement in test scores for her students were "clear evidence of actual, knowing falsehood." Frederick Hess, who was not involved with the faculty or school responded "There's simply no way with these data to say anything, good or bad, about Rhee's teaching performance,"
Phil Riddle

Most New York Students Are Not College Ready - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08regents.html

College Preparedness Standardized Exams

shared by Phil Riddle on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Phil Riddle on 13 Feb 11
     
    In New York, students are deemed "college ready" when they score at or above a certain level on the high school Regents Exams (their version of the SOL's). I took a quick look at the high school biology exam from 2001(I admit-not a scientific analysis at all), and apparently fact memorization is what you need to be successful in college.
Linda Clinton

Getting Teacher Assessment Right: What Policymakers Can Learn From Research | National ... - 1 views

nepc.colorado.edu/...tting-teacher-assessment-right

teacher evaluation adms707

shared by Linda Clinton on 25 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Linda Clinton on 25 Jan 11
     
    "Given the experience to date with an overwhelming focus on student achievement scores as a basis for high-stakes decisions, policymakers would do well to pause and carefully examine the issues that make teacher assessment so complex before implementing an assessment plan. To facilitate such examination, this brief reviews credible research exploring: the feasibility of combining formative assessment (a basis for professional growth) and summative assessment (a basis for high-stakes decisions like dismissal); the various tools that might be used to gather evidence of teacher effectiveness; and the various stakeholders who might play a role in a teacher assessment system. It also offers a brief overview of successful exemplars."
  • Linda Clinton on 25 Jan 11
     
    Teacher evaluation is a big topic of our upcoming negotiations. What concerns me most is that some administrators don't complete the triennial evaluations now; how are they going to complete annual evaluations on all staff? So many questions...
Tara McDaniel

Ex-D.C. schools chief '100%' behind test scores probe - 1 views

www.usatoday.com/...1-03-31-rhee-test-scores_N.htm

adms707 education

shared by Tara McDaniel on 03 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Tara McDaniel on 03 Apr 11
     
    Former District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee says she is "100% supportive" of a broader investigation into standardized test scores in the school district she used to oversee
REL N

Why America's teachers are enraged - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

ADMS707 Niemeyer Teacher-evaluation reform states politics

shared by REL N on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Right-to-work states do not have higher scores than states with strong unions. Actually, the states with the highest performance on national tests are Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire, where teachers belong to unions that bargain collectively for their members.
  • One must wonder how it is possible to talk of improving schools while cutting funding, demoralizing teachers, cutting scholarships to college, and increasing class sizes.
  • REL N on 24 Feb 11
     
    If everyone agrees that teachers are important... why do they think that demoralizing them will improve students' experience and performance in school?
REL N

Michelle Rhee: Education reform huckster - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...michelle_rhee_lyons

ADMS707 Niemeyer rhee

shared by REL N on 07 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math. Improvements have been less great but still substantial for black 4th and 8th graders in reading and for black 12th graders in both math and reading."
  • it should be stipulated that nobody's yet found a means or motive for cheating on NAEP surveys.
  • An exposé by USA Today reveals that scores of high-performing Washington schools displayed "extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • [a]mong the 96 schools that were then flagged for wrong-to-right erasures were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out so-called TEAM awards." A
REL N

Jeb Bush Finds New Role as Education Adviser - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27bush.html

ADMS707 Niemeyer Broad & Gates

shared by REL N on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • One out of five state school superintendents have joined a group that his national foundation created, Chiefs for Change, to rally behind a common agenda.
  • Mr. Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. The nonprofit group received contributions of $2.9 million in 2009, from the foundations of Bill Gates and Eli Broad, among others, and for-profit education technology companies.
  • By eighth grade, Florida students begin to lose their advantage on the NAEP, and by 12th grade, they fall behind national averages.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Skeptics point out that other changes could explain the improvements in test scores. In 2002, voters passed one of the nation’s most ambitious class-size reduction plans, over the objections of Mr. Bush. School financing, including for reading coaches, also rose.
  • REL N on 27 Apr 11
     
    Gerard Robinson (the Secretary of Education in Virginia) joined Chiefs for Change... along with a number of other governors from the south. Oh, yes and Chris Christy.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20▼ items per page