MDE assessment expert published in April Kappan

 

Phi Delta Kappan, the monthly magazine for the international professional association Phi Delta Kappa, published in April 2010 an insightful article by Dr. Joseph Martineau, Director of the Office of Assessment and Accountability for the Michigan Department of Education. In his article, “The Validity of Value-Added Models: An Allegory”, Dr. Martineau uses an ingenious allegory to help illustrate the use of student data in educator evaluations.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Value-added models have become popular fixes for various accountability schemes aimed at measuring teacher effectiveness. Value-added models may resolve some of the issues in accountability models, but they bring their own set of challenges to the table.

Unfortunately, political and emotional considerations sometimes keep us from examining value-added models carefully. To make it easier to scrutinize them objectively, I present an allegory that places them in a non-educational context.

AN ALLEGORY
A foster parent was charged with chronic delinquency of a foster child who had lived with her for more than a year. She felt the charges weren’t fair, but the law held her accountable for actions of any child in her custody for at least a year.
The foster parent pled for mercy; she had entered foster parenting to help troubled children rise above their troubles. But the law was the law, and she was fined. She gave up foster parenting.

Legislators heard of this outrage and rewrote the law to instead hold foster parents accountable for changes in foster children’s behavior. After all, a foster parent cannot be held responsible for all the parenting that occurred before the child came to the foster parent.

Both rewards and sanctions were prescribed for changes in foster children’s behavior. This new direction would surely protect effective foster parents from fines for taking on difficult tasks, and it would encourage more people to take on the challenge.

The executive branch contracted with a respected evaluator to develop a scale for measuring behavior and an elaborate statistical model to evaluate the effects caused by foster parent. A year passed, and the results of the first evaluation of foster-parent effectiveness were published. …

Download the full article from Kappan ($4.95 for non subscribers) or contact our office for a copy.