Dear Michelle Rhee: About that teacher evaluation study [View all]

[proud2BlibKansan]

Dear Michelle Rhee, former D.C. schools chancellor and current leader of StudentsFirst:

I just wanted to dash off a quick note about that commentary you wrote in Education Week about the big value-added teacher evaluation study that made headlines this month.

The study, titled “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood,” was conducted by two Harvard University researchers and one from Columbia. (Not shabby credentials; it’s no wonder the New York Times made such a big deal of the study as an exclusive and then you decided to write about it.) The researchers claimed in their study that teachers with a high value-added score make a huge difference in the adult lives of their former students. You lauded the conclusions and said they support your own belief in test-based school reform. What I wanted you to know is that they actually don’t.

I read the nearly 100 pages of the report (it’s taken me a few weeks) and looked at all the graphs and charts. I confess that I didn’t really understand all of it; a lot of that technical stuff is over my head. But I took in enough to realize that your interpretation of the study doesn’t square with the facts, and I wonder if you were misled by the authors’ own confusing executive summary (which I went back to read after finishing the study just to see what the researchers themselves thought was most important).

What Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia did was to study the school records of 2.5 million students in a major urban district over 20 years and also got income tax records from the Internal Revenue Service to inspect. (Who knew the IRS was so friendly? Incidentally, Diane Ravitch guessed the district was New York City, but I am digressing.)

more . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/dear-michelle-rhee-about-that-teacher-evaluation-study/2012/01/20/gIQA0iVSGQ_blog.html?wprss=answer-sheet