What a horror show. This is what will destroy us.
Anyone who ever talks about “value-added” models in eduction is not a friend of education.
This is a convenient formula for measuring the effectiveness of a teacher.
Click the photo to read about what happened to Stacey Isaacson:
Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”
You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town.
Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.
Sometimes numbers lie. Go figure.