New “student growth” data the state expects to release this week is part of a significant change in how Georgia grades its schools and teachers.
Designed to show how much students at each school learn in a year, regardless of how much they knew at the start of the year, it’s part of a larger shift away from grading schools almost entirely on pass/fail rates on tests. Some thought that approach was unfair to schools with high percentages of students from low-income families, learning English or in special education programs.
This data is still based on standardized tests. But Georgia policymakers are basically saying “Don’t worry only about whether kids passed the test. Look at how much progress they made from last year too.”
"If you focus just on achievement you miss a lot of important learning that's happening in our schools," said Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education policy and research director Dana Rickman.
Growth data is already part of the College and Career Ready Performance Index, Georgia's system for rating schools and districts. Starting this school year, students' academic growth will also begin to count for half of educators' job evaluations, a cause for concern among some educators.
Georgia is one of about 40 states using students' academic growth as a factor in rating schools, though how growth is calculated and how much weight it's given varies by state. And Georgia is one of about 20 states using students' academic growth as the major factor in evaluating teachers. In its successful application for $400 million in federal Race to the Top grant funds, Georgia promised to develop a new teacher evaluation system that included student growth.
The educator- and school-level measure is based on a “student growth percentile,” a statistical measure of progress determined by comparing a student’s standardized test scores from one year with those of students who started out with similar scores in the past. The better a student performs relative to his or her academic peers, the higher his or her growth percentile.
In theory, low-performing students who don’t actually pass the state test can still show high growth; high-achieving students can, too.
“It’s about growth,” Georgia Department of Education Associate Superintendent Cindy Saxon said. “Not ‘did they hit this magic number.’ ”
Many educators say it’s useful to look at students’ academic growth as one measure of a school’s performance. Parents and teachers can also use the information to tell how much progress individual students are making — but it won’t change the tests students need to pass to graduate or move from grade to grade.
But using the measure to judge individual teachers and principals — and make decisions about hiring, firing and pay — is more controversial.
The evaluation system Georgia schools must start using this year bases half of a teacher’s job evaluation on a principal or other administrator watching him or her teach. The rest is based on students’ academic growth. For teachers of subjects covered by state tests — about a third of teachers statewide — that means the student growth percentile data. For other teachers, it means district-designed measures.
Policymakers say the new system will do a better job of identifying great teachers as well as teachers who are struggling.
“I think what you’re trying to do is get them effective … and if you can’t make it work, then those people are no longer employed,” said state Sen. Fran Millar, R-Dunwoody.
But many experts and educators worry that the statistical model of student growth that Georgia adopted may not be a fair way to measure how effective a teacher is because it doesn’t account for factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student disability or poverty.
"On its face, it's inappropriate to assert that the growth percentile measure is a measure of teacher or even classroom-level effect" on student growth, said Rutgers University Professor Bruce Baker.
Educators worry too that Georgia’s new evaluation system puts too much emphasis on a measure based on standardized tests.
“On the one hand, folks may say ‘well, this is setting an even bar for everybody,’ ” said Tim Callahan, a spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators. “But I do think that it’s avoiding and ignoring critical information and background.”
But Damian Betebenner, the statistician who designed the student growth model and was hired by Georgia to help implement it, says it can be used as one piece of evidence to grade teachers, even if it doesn't directly measure their performance.
“You may have a teacher that’s in a classroom and the kids aren’t growing,” Betebenner said. “We’re not saying that you’re necessarily a bad teacher, but it’s just not working here.”
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