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9486 in the collection
Dallas schools teacher ratings sometimes off mark
Teachers appeal scores, including for classes never taught.
By Kent Fischer
Seth Johnson teaches Spanish at Madison High School. Yet when he received a district report that rated his performance, he was surprised to see his rating dragged down by two classes of low-scoring French students – classes he didn't teach, and couldn't have because he doesn't speak French.
"They put my name on a class that I never taught," Mr. Johnson said. He filed a complaint with the district this week.
As the Dallas public schools promote a complex teacher rating system as an impartial way to award bonuses and identify bad teachers, records and interviews indicate that the calculations are not infallible.
In all, 116 teachers challenged the accuracy of their "Classroom Effectiveness Index" reports this year. The CEIs are numerical ratings given to teachers based on gains their students made on classroom and state exams.
The district ruled against 26 of the teachers. Mr. Johnson was one of 74 who had their scores recalculated after their complaints were upheld; others are pending.
The outcomes of the remaining 16 were not reflected in records provided to The Dallas Morning News.
But how many CEIs contain errors beyond those 74?
A variety of errors
Dallas Independent School District officials say they don't know because they're not looking.
District researchers instead rely on teachers and principals to spot errors and seek corrections.
"We only know about the corrections we receive," said Dr. Robert Mendro, head of DISD's Office of Program Evaluation, which calculates the scores. "If a school or a teacher is uninterested in making a correction, then we won't find out about it."
About 6,600 teachers, who teach primarily academic courses, are included in the rating system.
The appeals came from 42 schools, meaning that Dr. Mendro's department heard nothing from teachers at 181 campuses.
The teachers who filed complaints pointed out a range of errors, from students assigned to the wrong teachers to entire faculties receiving incorrect scores.
Here's a sampling:
•A coding mistake on a national standardized test last year resulted in 17 teachers at Barbara Jordan Elementary School getting incorrect CEIs.
•At William M. Anderson Elementary School, 14 teachers should have received a CEI but didn't. They were not listed as "teachers of record" in the district's database of student grades. The same thing happened to 16 other teachers, at Blair, Burleson, Hall, Rhodes, Marsalis and Anne Frank elementary schools.
•Four teachers at Highland Meadows Elementary received incorrect CEIs because their classes were wrongly coded in the district's student database.
•Teachers sometimes receive CEIs for courses they don't teach, like Mr. Johnson at Madison High or the Carter High history teacher who got a CEI for a reading class that she didn't teach.
For more than a decade, DISD researchers have used a dense statistical analysis to rate teachers And for more than a decade, those ratings were largely ignored by teachers and administrators because low scores brought few consequences.
But that began to change last year, when the district used CEI scores to help determine which teachers should be removed from low-performing high schools.
Then this fall, DISD started offering experienced teachers $6,000 bonuses to work at struggling schools and made an above-average CEI a qualifying factor.
Started to matter
In November, CEIs became a hot topic when the district's board of trustees approved a new, $22 million teacher bonus program based almost entirely on CEIs.
But even then, the debate was focused largely on the lengthy, complex statistical methods used to calculate the ratings. There was no public discussion about the accuracy of the data underlying the calculations.
In response to a reporter's question this week, Dr. Mendro said the accuracy of that data "is a question that concerns us deeply at the moment."
Dr. Mendro said most errors flagged this year had only slight impacts on the recalculated scores.
In a few cases, teachers saw large gains after the errors were fixed, but most scores nudged up or down only a point or two, he said.
Clerical mistakes
Many of the errors appear to have arisen from clerical mistakes.
Townview teacher David Lewis got a CEI that was based on a social studies class he didn't teach. So did three other Townview teachers in the school's law magnet program, he said.
"How well or how poorly those kids did had nothing to do with me," Mr. Lewis said.
The database on which the CEI calculations are made begins as school-level information – student test scores, attendance forms, teacher assignments.
It's all entered into databases by clerks, teachers and administrators.
Mistakes can be made, including incorrect coding, transposing of numbers , and failure to update records when kids leave or teachers move.
"Obviously, some schools mess it up," Dr. Mendro said. "We are as concerned as anyone that we get this right."
Aimee Bolender, president of the teachers group Alliance-AFT, which opposes almost any use of CEIs, was terser: "Garbage in, garbage out," she said.
Dale Kaiser, president of the NEA-Dallas teachers group, said he's not surprised that most schools haven't reported problems with the scores.
"Most teachers haven't even been trained in how to read a CEI or to know what on their CEI is supposed to be correct," he said. "Most teachers didn't even know that they could challenge their CEIs."
DISD has allowed teachers to challenge the scores for years, but now that the CEIs will have more consequences, the two teacher groups plan to encourage members to question every aspect of the scores. Both predicted that the number of challenges will jump next year.
"We're going to make sure that teachers know how to file an appeal, what the deadline is and what needs to be checked," Mr. Kaiser said. "[Challenges] are going to come like a flood, like an avalanche next year."
In the meantime, Conrad High science teacher David Boyd lives with an abysmal CEI that he blames on a central office administrator. He said somebody at the central office used the wrong answer key to grade a district-mandated end-of-semester exam that his students took last year.
Mr. Boyd said the district corrected the scoring for student grade reports, but the fix never showed up on his CEI. In the end, Mr. Boyd's low CEI meant he had to attend two workshops this year on how to be a better teacher.
"Look, I don't know a CEI from Yankee Doodle," Mr. Boyd said, "but if you're going to grade my performance on faulty information, I have a problem with that."
WHAT IS CEI?
A CEI, or Classroom Effectiveness Index, is a calculation that researchers contend measures the impact teachers have on their students' achievement during the time they have them in class. The district churns student achievement data through a series of statistical formulas that are supposed to remove from the calculation the impact outside factors such as gender, family income and race have on learning. The result is a number, 1 through 100, that purports to measure teacher effectiveness.
Teachers can challenge the accuracy of their CEIs by filing a "Request for Adjustment" form with the district. So far this year, 116 teachers have filed complaints, according to records provided to The Dallas Morning News. Some excerpts:
— Kent Fischer
Dallas Morning News
2008-02-25
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/022308dnmetdisdcei.3a5f9fe.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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