<p>Using PSAT scores as value-added measures for teachers. Educators say there is data on this (I can’t find it, and they won’t share). It seems to me that these tests were designed for another purpose. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Thanks.</p>
<p>Seems like an odd measure.</p>
<p>This is all I could turn up that references the PSAT as such: <a href=“http://www.education.umd.edu/EDMS/MARCES/conference/value_added/Braun’s%20Value-Added%20Presentation.pdf[/url]”>http://www.education.umd.edu/EDMS/MARCES/conference/value_added/Braun’s%20Value-Added%20Presentation.pdf</a></p>
<p>It’s from 2004, so the scores are just V+M.</p>
<p>Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland has used the PSAT data for years in part to help identify students whose classroom performance doesn’t accurately represent their potential. [Strategic</a> Plan - Montgomery County Public Schools](<a href=“http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/about/strategicplan/annualreport/2010/goal1/m3dp2.aspx]Strategic”>Strategic Plan - Montgomery County Public Schools | Montgomery County Public Schools | Rockville, MD) Any standardized exam would do for this purpose, but since Maryland doesn’t require an annual exam the way some other states do (for example most high schools in Iowa administer the ITED each year), MCPS uses 9th and 10th grade PSAT results. At Happykid’s old HS the principal told me that every single year the PSAT exams would pick up a number of honors/AP ready students who had somehow escaped notice despite the continual dragnet that every staff member participated in.</p>
<p>Billymc, thanks and that was the only thing that I could find, too, but it uses PSAT as a predictor of AP test scores. I am asking about using 10th grade PSAT and 11th grade PSAT scores (and the growth in these scores) as a measure of VAM for 10th grade teachers.
happymom, that sounds like a reasonable use of the PSAT. I am surprised that it is available to 9th graders, though.</p>
<p>This week we had a state representative propose a bill that would penalize state K-12 public schools if a former student enrolled in a college remedial math or English course at a public college or university in our state. </p>
<p>The colleges and universities were suppose to calculate the cost of all public school students taking remedial classes, including building operations, faculty salaries and benefits. Those amounts would be deducted from state appropriations to the high schools attended by students who didn’t arrive prepared for college-level work. High schools would be accountable for their graduates for two years.</p>
<p>However, no one else testified for the bill and the rep has sensed that it would not make it through the process, so it won’t be proceeding.</p>
<p>I always thought that underfunding the worst schools would be best. I mean, the less money they have, the more they’ll improve, right? Right?</p>
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<p>Obviously, since everyone knows that money is the devil.</p>
<p>Sorry, not an educator here… what is VAM?</p>
<p>I would hate to see D’s 10th grade teachers get much credit at all toward her PSAT scores (which are excellent). She had great SAT scores as a middle schooler through one of the academic talent searches, and I don’t know why the teacher of that one last year before they take the test should get the majority of the credit (or the blame) for scores.</p>
<p>Be interesting if they took EVERY teacher the kid since the start of middle school and gave them some credit if the kid did well, though. Sort of like royalties :D</p>
<p>MCPS has been playing around with which grades take the real PSAT and which grades take a pseudo-PSAT offered by one of the test-prep companies for several years now. If memory serves, when Happykid was in 9th grade, the 9th graders got the real one, the 10th graders got the fake one, and the 11th graders (of course) got the real one, but by the time she was in 12th grade the 9th graders got the fake one and the 10th graders got the real one.</p>
<p>Rumor has is that the whole thing started when enough pushy middle class parents in some high schools insisted that their 9th and 10th graders get to practice the exam before 11th grade that the schedule for all students that day became hopelessly messed up. It sure makes life easier for the school administration to tell the 12th graders to stay home one morning a year and to trap all the other students firmly in classrooms during the testing period!</p>
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Why stop at middle school? Elementary school is a big foundation, too. Maybe the parents can start getting kickbacks. After all, aren’t they more responsible than one teacher of one year?</p>
<p>And, for the opposite, parents will have to pay a stupid tax if their children score below the median. Oh, think of the national debt we could pay off!</p>
<p>Haha, and yet… I hope this doesn’t happen.</p>
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My school offers it to 9th graders, requires it for 10th graders, and offers it to 11th graders that want to try for National Merit. So I took it 10th and 11th.</p>
<p>“This week we had a state representative propose a bill that would penalize state K-12 public schools if a former student enrolled in a college remedial math or English course at a public college or university in our state.”</p>
<p>And I suppose this rep. knows a whole bunch of fully qualified, yet unemployed, math teachers? I would have been delighted if Happykid hadn’t needed two semesters of “remedial” math at her community college after four years at her “Newsweek 100” high school! However, even that school can’t scrape up enough truly competent math teachers because they just plain aren’t out there.</p>
<p>*This week we had a state representative propose a bill that would penalize state K-12 public schools if a former student enrolled in a college remedial math or English course at a public college or university in our state. </p>
<p>*</p>
<p>LOL…hey, it probably would work. I’ve seen how K-12 schools will do whatever it takes to make sure they don’t lose funding. So if they thought they would lose funding for their students who had to take sub 100 math or English classes, they would improve.</p>
<p>Or, at least, these schools should be required to offer some kind of summer school to these kids so that they won’t have to take sub 100 courses. </p>
<p>Of course, if the high school exit exams were any good, the exams would have been catching the deficiencies a lot earlier. </p>
<p>That said, the public univerisities could just stop accepting kids who need sub 100 courses…and tell those students that they need to go to a CC first to get up to speed.</p>
<p>intparent, see the powerpoint that Billymc posted to see a formula for VAM. Basically, the idea is that the difference between the expected gain in test score and the actual gain the following year is the “value added” by that teacher. A teacher whose students make a year and a half worth of progress in one year has positive VAM, and a teacher whose students only make a half year worth of progress has negative VAM. This is all the rage in measuring teacher effectiveness. It has been controversial in LAUSD where the VAM of teachers was actually published by a newspaper! It is actually easier to measure it in elementary schools where students have one teacher all day, or have one teacher for reading and another for math. The question becomes how to measure it in high school, when of course all kids are “contaminated” by other teachers but also the kids don’t even get state tests every year. Some districts are considering pay for performance models where VAM would be one measure used for this; other districts are considering layoffs based on merit rather than seniority, so a model would be needed for this. Many districts have just a basic “satisfactory-unsatisfactory” evaluation scale for teachers and parents are demanding that this be improved so that meaningful teacher evaluation can take place.</p>
<p>Interesting… I still wouldn’t want it used as a measure. For example… if D’s CR PSAT score goes up this year, will it be because of her English teacher? Or maybe because of the extracurricular Latin class she is taking that is expanding her vocabulary (a class that the English teacher has nothing to do with)? Or… maybe because of the additional classics and poetry reading she has undertaken on her own to improve her Quiz Bowl knowledge?</p>
<p>And if it goes down, is it because the teacher was ineffective? Or because she had a horrible head cold the day she took the test?</p>
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These are all good points. At my high school, the model was generally that if a student showed more than a year’s worth of improvement on the FCAT (that dreaded Florida standardized test) the student would receive a 100 exam grade in his/her English class for that semester. It was more of an incentive for the student, not the teacher. And let me tell you, that 100 was a grade saver (when a 99 just wouldn’t do, literally).</p>
<p>However, it wasn’t a good method. Woo, I can answer a CR-esque test well… does that mean I know all about the literature we’ve been going over in class? Does that make me a good academic writer? I was glad for the 100, but, speaking from a detached standpoint, making the students take the real exam (and not the screwed up standardized test) would be better.</p>
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Smart move. Us Latin students score an average of 666 (NERO CAESAR) on CR, as opposed to the national average of 501. 60% of English vocabulary is derived from Latin, after all. </p>
<p>Lingua mortua sola lingua bona est.</p>
<p>My issue with this is that the PSAT, though “coachable” to some extent, is primarily designed as an aptitude test - many might disagree, I realize, but its original intent was to measure aptitude, which supposedly predicted college success. (I agree that Latin knowledge may help; on the other hand, it is possible that there is “selection bias” regarding who takes Latin in the first place.) However, there is some talk about using 10th to 11th grade PSAT improvement in a VAM formula and I am returning to the question of whether anyone had ever heard of this or knows where I could find out.
Sensible people would not use VAM as the only measure of teacher effectiveness - just one measure among several. However, meaningful teacher evaluation is something that is essential for moving education forward, in my opinion. The conundrum becomes exactly how to do it.</p>