D.C. Teacher Fired All Because of a Typo

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.care2.com/causes/d-c-teacher-fired-all-because-of-a-typo.html

In a nightmare scenario reminiscent of a Kafka novel, a public school teacher in Washington D.C. was fired, three teachers missed out on bonuses, and 40 others received inaccurate job evaluations, all because of a single missing suffix amongst a sea of programming.

How could this happen?

“Value-Added“ Teacher Evaluations

Blame the “value-added” method of evaluating teachers, and in particular, Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, who in 2009 announced a radical plan to rate teachers’ effectiveness on a numerical scale, then fire the worst and give the best huge pay hikes. (On a side note, not only has the system proven ineffective, but Rhee’s tenure was marred by allegations of cheating as scores at some schools shot up, only to plummet after more stringent security measures were put in place.)

Since that time, the idea of using a numerical scale to evaluate teachers has been spreading nationwide.

FULL story at link.

[truedelphi]

1. Yet another wonderful miracle of modern day computerized

Reality.

Our employment evaluations, our medical situation, all depending on 1's and 0's and what not. With so many people using these records deferring to the wisdom of the computer information.

Hmm, I have to wonder if our beloved NSA is using a similar Programming scenario.

Certain score means you are still walking around, free to post on the internets.

Certain other score means you get renditioned.

And one wrong keystroke, and anyone in the nation could be caught up in the dragnet.

[Shandris]

7. How right you are.

One of my myriads of jobs when I was younger was database repair. I had a particular database somewhere in the central US -- a billing database for a moderate-sized company with over 3,500 individual clients based on a proprietary, rather non-robust implementation of non-standard SQL -- that started doing all manner of obnoxious things like triple and quadrupling clients bills, arbitrarily making clients disappear from the database, things of that nature. The customers were positively irate and the national owner of this company was about to shut them down for gross incompetence.

In the end, the problem was simple: a power outage had corrupted a single field of entry data. From that moment on, every new client they had entered into the database was being duplicated as both a positive and negative Primary ID...and the program hadn't been instructed to ignore Primary Keys below 0. So as the duplicate problems began arising -- with no visible evidence of it actually happening because the program's code only made clients with Primary Keys above 0 show up when a listing of clients was asked for! -- they began deleting and re-entering the customers in an attempt to 'clean' the database.

By the time I got ahold of it, they had numbered from 0 to -37000. All because of a small power failure and an almost laughable line of overlooked code. It took three solid weeks, 8 hours per day, to fix that database and -endless- amounts of cold calls to already irate customers threatening legal action.

And the NSA wants to do this with -no paper trail-, no verification, to store in perpetuity. *boggle*

[sulphurdunn]

2. If you're a teacher,

before getting all lathered about this, remember than these problems will cease to be a concern with the implantation of the new, programmable, Pearson Standardized Test Chip (PSTC) into the brains of our students and the Pearson Highly Effective Teacher Chip (PHETC: like the sound of hacking a loogie) into ours. But there's more: You still have time to load up on Pearson stock before you are turned into an Edu-Zombie, so not only will you be guaranteed a highly effective teacher evaluation, but you'll also be rich. Where's the down side in that?

[YOHABLO]

3. I really really dislike that Michelle Rhee .. god she's a beeeach!

[rickford66]

4. What was the typo?

I gave it a quick read and thought I'd know what happened. Did they format percentages to only two digits? Did they use integers instead of real numbers? Anyone know?

[msanthrope]

5. Politico???? Really???? Interesting info if you go to the source of your OP--

In all, the error affected 44 teachers in D.C. — about 10 percent of those who receive value-added scores based on their students’ standardized tests. Half were rated higher than they should have been and half were rated lower, Kamras said.

(Also on POLITICO: Full education policy coverage)

The teacher who was fired for an “ineffective” rating in fact should have been ranked “minimally effective,” Kamras said. Three other teachers who scored effective were, in fact, “highly effective” by the district’s scale and deserved bonuses of $15,000 apiece.

Kamras said the district has already reached out to the teacher who was mistakenly fired with a job offer and the promise of salary payments retroactive to the start of the school year. He said the bonuses for the three highly effective teachers will be distributed immediately.

Kamras said he didn’t know if any of the teachers whose ratings were inflated by the Mathematica error received bonuses they didn’t deserve. Even if they did, he said the district will not ask them to repay the money. No one’s evaluation will be lowered as a result of the new calculations, he said.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/small-typo-casts-big-doubt-on-teacher-evaluations-education-101517.html#ixzz2pXoIUsgW

I generally do not rely on Politico as a news source, since they tend to be conservative.

[Recursion]

6. Either some teachers are better in measurable ways than others, or not

If so, then measure it and act accordingly.

If not, then we can't say it matters who teaches our kids.