Fields MathEd Book Club discussion

I would love to get people's take on the bias loop that is created when academic performance/quality is measured and gamed. It seems like the not-so-recent phenomenons of grade inflation and ineffective accountability measures have been pretty unyielding to system efforts of mitigating them.

It seems we are coming full-circle on the charter school issue in the United States, with a much stronger resistance to a lot of the metrics-based education reform that was initiated or promoted during the Obama administration
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/art...




From the article:

Considering the program’s failures — and all the time and money wasted, and the suffering visited upon hard-working educators — the report’s recommendations are surprisingly weak. It even allows for the possibility that trying again or for longer might produce a better result, as if there were no cost to subjecting real, live people to years of experimentation with potentially adverse consequences. So I’ll compensate for the omission by offering some recommendations of my own.

1. Value-added models (and the related “student growth percentile” models) are statistically weak and should not be used for high-stakes decisions such the promotion or firing of teachers.

2. Keeping assessment formulas secret is an awful idea, because it prevents experts from seeing their flaws before they do damage.

3. Parent surveys are biased and should not be used for high-stakes decisions.

4. Principal observations can help teachers get better, but can’t identify bad ones. They shouldn’t be used for high-stakes decisions.

5. Big data simply isn’t capable yet of providing a “scientific audit” of the teaching profession. It might never be.

Commentary on BoingBoing:
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/27/wor...

Some other interesting articles along this topic.... what does the data *actually* say?

Paradoxes of Increasing Teacher Pay
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/p...

Why Cutting Costs is Expensive: How $9/Hour Software Engineers Cost Boeing Billions
https://medium.com/javascript-scene/w...