Feedback Loop: Florida’s Teacher Formula Only As Good As Its Assumptions

This article is right on target in its analysis.  Statistics do great to track macro-trends but breaking it down to an individual student and teacher is very tricky and inherently unfair.  When I taught ESOL, I had a student who broke their glasses about a month before the FCAT.  Her mother did not have the money to buy her a new pair.  She suffered from headaches, naturally, and missed a lot of school.  She did not do well on the FCAT, even though she was a bright student and had made a lot of progress.  So should I have been penalized?  I had a small number of students in reading in various grade levels but only 5 in that year who were taking the test.  That means each individual student would have made a greater impact on my “value-added” scores.  Should I have been rated “developing” or “needs support”  because this student’s mother (a single, working mother with another special needs child in addition to my student) was too poor to buy her daughter glasses?  Now I am teaching art, which will be even more unfair.  I teach in a Title One middle school, currently a “D” rated school and 50% of my evaluation/merit pay will be based on how the students rostered to my name do in reading??!!