...called a “growth model” because it tracks the progress of students as they move from grade to grade rather than comparing, say, this year’s fourth graders with last year’s, the traditional approach.
How could they not be doing that? I swear to God it's a wonder anyone in this country learns to breathe much less read. Fuck Shakespeare, come the revolution the first people up against the wall need to be the education establishment.
Concerned that the traditional way amounted to an apples-to-oranges comparison, schools in more than two dozen states have turned to growth models. Now a movement is mounting to amend the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which is up for reauthorization this year, to allow such alternative assessments of student progress.
Many urban educators contend that growth models are a fairer measure because they recognize that poor and minority students often start out behind, and thus have more to learn to reach state standards. At the same time, many school officials in affluent suburbs favor growth models because they evaluate students at all levels rather than focusing on lifting those at the bottom, thereby helping to justify instruction costs to parents and school boards at a time of shrinking budgets.
Adding growth models as a way to satisfy federal requirements to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” could make it easier for some schools to avoid penalties because they would receive credit for students who improve performance but still fall below proficiency levels. It could also increase pressure on high-performing schools that sail above state standards to prove that their students are continuing to advance.
Oh, here's why:
But as growth models become more widespread, some teachers and parents have complained that they are hard to understand and place too much focus on test scores. Teachers’ unions, even while supporting the concept, have protested the use of growth models for performance reviews and merit pay.
“It’s detrimental for education,” said Aimee Bolender, president of the Alliance-AFT, which represents 9,000 teachers and other staff members in the Dallas schools. “It is pulling apart teams of teachers and it doesn’t look at why test scores are low. From the very beginning, we viewed it as a slippery slope that did not do anything valuable to improve the educational environment in the schools.”
Ms. Bolender’s union is fighting a decision by the Dallas school district to remove about 30 teachers from five middle and high schools this summer after not enough of their students passed the state tests, and too many failed to show adequate progress on growth models. Ms. Bolender said that many teachers question the reliability of the growth model data, calling it “voodoo math” because “you have to be a Ph.D. in statistics to even comprehend it.”
I really like the "voodoo math" quote. Hey people, just because something is complicated doesn't mean it's "voodoo". Is the space shuttle "voodoo engineering"? How about Hoover Dam? I guarantee that there are some damn complicated equations behind those. What about the human genome project, is that "voodoo science"? The fact that a teacher can even talk this way is just terrifying.
“When you look at achievement, every single wealthy suburb has high test scores,” noted Theodore Hershberg, a professor of public policy and history at the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s a terrible way to measure the performance of a school or an individual teacher because what you’re really looking at is family background or family income.”
In the high-performing Ardsley schools, where more than 87 percent of the students passed state reading tests this spring, district officials have long mined scores on their own, compiling a thick data book for review and coining the saying: “In God we trust, everybody else bring data.”
But this year, they employed a more sophisticated growth model, which showed, for instance, that seventh-grade special education students had benefited from learning in regular classes. So this fall the district will expand the mainstreaming to the elementary and high schools. “This gives us the ability to measure whether a program has any teeth or is all fluff,” said Richard Maurer, the superintendent.
source: NY Times
Education
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