Merit Pay Stirs Controversy in Houston Schools
In a contentious meeting last Thursday, Houston’s school board stepped out on to a cutting edge that few if any large urban districts have dared tread: using student test scores as the basis to fire teachers.
The new policy, passed in a 7-0 vote with two members absent but almost 1,000 angry teachers in attendance, represented the culmination of years of trial-and-error attempts in the state’s largest school district to connect test scores to pay and job security. The Houston Independent School District already uses the data to dole out some $40 million annually in teacher bonuses ...
Comments (1)
rjvg50
This policy is driven by an untested hypothesis - that is HISD has an algorithm for measuring progress by student. The bare fact that they cannot share what this algorithm is or how it has demonstrated efficacy on existing data. A scatter plot with a least square fit on old data (as one example) would either show that the method works "well enough" or it would show that this is null hypothesis WRT "the data".
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. BTW my automobile is "data driven" whether I am sober or "blowing a 0.20" on a breath-a-lyser. I get different results from the same DATA though.