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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's not that no one cares about teachers and principals coasting. It's that there aren't a lot of better options. The trade off for better teachers and more farms students isn't a huge draw and private school require you to pay taxes and pay out of pocket. Some of the mid level schools are nice, but often have run down houses or aren't close to jobs. For any complaint about a high achieving school, administrators in FCPS will tell parents that they have it fine and there are other schools with higher needs. The only way there would be more pressure is if more magnet schools were created like ATS. That might push some other schools to work a little harder to keep their children. But generally the population is increasing in Fairfax, so if one child leaves, they are soon replaced with another child.[/quote]

So, then we probably need to quit it with the whole high test scores = better teachers thing huh? Maybe tell every politician this.[/quote]

I think this is really the big point. The past 20 years, it's been test score, test score, test score. People have gone to prison for screwing with testing because the incentives were there. But in reality, it seems as though test scores really don't matter. Growth does. Engagement does. But those are expensive, difficult things to measure. So, what do we do when the system is baked in one way but it doesn't actually serve students?[/quote]

Growth is not that hard to measure. Just measure it from year to year or measure it from the beginning of the year to the end.
Engagement can be done through a survey.[/quote]

The tricky part about growth is that it slows. So, schools who have a lot of kids who are doing well are not going to grow as quickly as kids who are way behind.

To judge engagement, surveys isn't going to cut it. You actually need to see teachers teach, you need to see their lesson plans, and you basically have to do what OP said she had to do when she worked in a Title I school. I don't see that going over well, fwiw.[/quote]

There are schools that successfully measure both grown and achievement. In fact, some of the websites out there already do that. Wasn't that a big argument at the federal level that DeVos acted as if she didn't even understand the question?

The principal is supposed to be judging the engagement already, no? Does the principal not turn in anything on this already?[/quote]

Ed researcher here: growth is difficult to measure, though there are competing models for doing it. In my view, we should measure growth but not assume it's telling the full story.  The problem is once there's a number, people tend to reify it as truth--or at least that the error is evenly distributed rather than systematically distorted.   Some challenges  1) kids are growing all the time at different rates from different experiences and none of these thing are randomly assigned to school or to class/teacher, 2)There are substantial ceiling effects in most educational measures used so low-performing kids have much more room to grow, whereas high performing kids hit a ceiling.  Raising the ceiling on a measure is challenging and creates more error throughout making the overall measure less reliable.3) Similarly, there's a regression toward the mean in all measures as just part of statistics, so below average will regress up to the mean and above average will regress down to the mean 3) Some of the most valuable growth in education is in small amounts across dispersed areas that suddenly coalesce into growth--some of this age-related, some of this just the dynamics of skill development.  So a teacher who laid the groundwork for growth could have little evidence of it and then the teacher who happened to be there when things all came together would get credit.

Youg children's engagement is not best measured by a simple survey but rather observational reports (e.g. via things like CLASS assessment at the early grade level) but those are labor intensive.

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