“High-impact” teacher definition blurred.
The proud announcement came from Lake County schools in the form of a press release: The state had named 96 teachers here for having a “high impact” on student learning.
It went on around Central Florida, where 1,359 from among 43,050 teachers in eight counties were named “high impact.” Whoo-hoo! Pop the cork! But what does that really mean, and what does it say about teachers around Central Florida who don’t make the cut?
A little snuffling through bureaucratic labyrinths shows that the designation is awarded by calculations that don’t sit well with teacher unions and many parents.
It’s just another illustration of how dreadfully misguided the culture of the Florida Department of Education has become. Leave it to folks in the education field to convert a simple calculation into meaningless drivel and to explain it in a deliberately obtuse way. Here’s the story: Asked how one becomes recognized as a teacher who has the greatest ability to help students learn, the state education department’s press secretary sent a link to “Rule 6A-5.0411,” which lays out the requirements to be considered “high impact.”
This is 3½ pages of singlespaced tiny type that starts with the definitions of words used in the requirements and moves on to stupefying specifications. In the end, it’s a wonder that any county has any teachers in that category, let alone an average of 3.4 percent.
A smart Sentinel editor with years of experience, upon first reading only the definitions in the rule, admitted in bewilderment that he had never seen or used the word “covariate.”
As in: “Covariate adjustment model: A covariate adjustment model is a statistical model that controls for the influence of one or more of the covariates.” Right-o. Now we’re all clear. Just don’t let any students covariate in the bathroom during recess.
The definitions go on: “Expected score: An expected score generated by a value-added model for a statewide, standardized assessment is based on the student’s prior statewide, standardized assessment score history and measured characteristics, as well as how other students in the state actually performed on the assessment. For each individual student, the expected score is the sum across all covariates of the value of the covariate multiplied by that covariate’s contribution to student learning as estimated by the covariate adjustment model.”
That’s the easy stuff. The next pages explain how the teacher’s score is calculated. In the interest of reader safety, we’ll leave those out.
Boiled down, this tortured formula measures three years’ worth of test results in English for grades 4-10, math for grades 4-8
No wonder few people want to get into teaching these days. It has been hijacked by evil geniuses determined to make everything impossible to understand so nobody can hold them accountable.
and algebra in grades 8-9. Then it persecutes those numbers in a painful attempt to figure out how much the teacher contributed to the students’ success or failure. It’s everything that opponents of paying teachers based on student test scores hate — except that all the covariating makes it useless, even for that pointless purpose. It’s just babble.
No wonder few people want to get into the field of teaching these days. It has been hijacked by evil geniuses determined to make everything impossible to understand so nobody can hold them accountable. Using what famous Chicago columnist Mike Royko back in 1974 dubbed “educatorese,” school officials continue to befuddle parents and teachers with incomprehensible goals and “accomplishments.” As far as they’re concerned, your role is to cheer when the district announces its “high impact” teachers. Break out the firecrackers, too.
In the Central Florida area of Lake, Marion, Orange, Osceola, Polk, Seminole, Sumter and Volusia counties, the number of “high-impact” teachers varies from the bottom of the achievement list at 3.1 percent for Marion, Orange and Lake to the top with 4.97 percent for Sumter. Seriously — a variance of less than 2 percentage points, which is pretty much how test-score curves play out on standard tests.
The stunner is that some poor soul tied to a desk in Tallahassee continues to refine this formula so everyone knows which teachers are best at teaching to the test. Educators would be better off to put that abused statistician to work covariating in a cafeteria when the fourth grade comes for lunch.