{"id":16606,"date":"2013-02-08T13:48:15","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T18:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=16606"},"modified":"2013-02-08T13:58:42","modified_gmt":"2013-02-08T18:58:42","slug":"how-a-c-rated-school-can-be-full-of-effective-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/02\/08\/how-a-c-rated-school-can-be-full-of-effective-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"How A C-Rated School Can Be Full of Effective Teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Florida Senate<\/p>

Florida Senate President Don Gaetz wondered how low-rated schools could be full of teachers earned positive evaluations.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last month Senate president Don Gaetz raised eyebrows when he questioned the accuracy of Florida’s new teacher evaluations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The evaluations are based on a complex statistical formula which weighs Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores<\/a> and other factors to calculate how much a teacher influences student learning. The evaluations will eventually contribute to how much a teacher is paid<\/a>, despite complaints the results have large margins of error and can change significantly from year to year.<\/p>\n

“How can you have a C or D ranked school in which 85 percent, or 90 or 95 percent of the teachers are classified as effective or highly effective?” Gaetz told the Associated Press<\/a>. “It seems to me that those two data points have to have some relationship to each other.”<\/p>\n

It’s a question the Tampa Bay Times<\/em> also looked at on Sunday, asking how Pinellas County schools earning the state’s highest report card grades could have relatively low school-wide teacher evaluation scores?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

According to the state’s numbers, Tarpon Springs High, a solid A school, received one of the lowest scores in Pinellas. The score indicates teachers caused students to perform 28 percent worse than like students across Florida.<\/p>\n

Palm Harbor University High, ranked the top Pinellas high school by FCAT, was middle-of-the-pack under VAM, although students did make gains. Pinellas Park came out on top.<\/p>\n

A minus-0.28 VAM score put well-regarded Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle below several C and D schools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both school grades<\/a> and teacher evaluations rely heavily on FCAT scores, right?<\/p>\n

Yes, but they use those scores differently, Matthew Di Carlo writes over at The Shanker Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

School grades mostly measure absolute performance — how much kids know and how high they score on the test. Evaluations control for how well a student scored the previous year, though, and are more a measure of student progress.<\/p>\n

The evaluations are intended to determine whether students met, exceeded or fell short of expectations, based on the statistical model projections.<\/p>\n

If school grades and teacher evaluation scores matched, Di Carlo argues, it could be a sign of a flaw in Florida’s system:<\/p>\n

Florida\u2019s schools grades are heavily driven<\/em> by students\u2019 absolute performance levels, while its teacher evaluation ratings are designed to be independent<\/em> of those levels. Again, both are matters of degree, and there are other reasons <\/a>to expect to find some level of concentration of \u201clower-performing\u201d teachers in schools with lower absolute performance scores (e.g., recruitment\/retention issues).<\/p>\n

That said, Florida\u2019s school and teacher rating systems are, by design, measuring different things. If anything, an extremely strong relationship between the grades and evaluation ratings might be seen as a red flag that the latter are biased.\u00a0At the very least, validating one by assuming it must match up with the other is, to put it gently, inappropriate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Di Carlo goes into great depth about how the two systems work, so check out The Shanker blog for more.<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s also important to remember that some school district evaluations were more forgiving —\u00a0<\/a> intentionally <\/a>— as they phased in the requirement<\/a>. Fewer teachers are expected to earn top ratings in future years.<\/p>\n

School officials expect lawmakers might revisit the teacher evaluation law<\/a> during the legislative session beginning March 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month Senate president Don Gaetz raised eyebrows when he questioned the accuracy of Florida’s new teacher evaluations. The evaluations are based on a complex statistical formula which weighs Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores and other factors to calculate how much a teacher influences student learning. The evaluations will eventually contribute to how much a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":16611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[1007,1106,795,1119],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16625,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606\/revisions\/16625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}