July 31, 2017

One way schools rig results

Morgan Polikoff, FutureEd - We have known for quite a while that schools engage in all manner of tricks to improve their performance under accountability systems. These behaviors range from the innocuous—teaching the content in state standards—to the likely harmful—outright cheating.

A new study last week provided more evidence of the unintended consequences of another gaming behavior—reassigning teachers based on perceived effectiveness. Researchers Jason A. Grissom, Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb analyzed data from a large urban district and found that administrators moved the most effective teachers to the tested grades (3-6) and the least effective to the untested grades (K-2).

On the surface, this might seem like a strategy that would boost accountability ratings without affecting students’ overall performance. After all, if you lose 10 points in kindergarten but gain 10 in third grade, isn’t the net change zero?

In fact, the authors found that moving the least effective teachers to the earlier grades harmed students’ overall achievement, because those early grades simply matter more to students’ long-term trajectories. The schools’ gaming behaviors were having real, negative consequences for children.

This strategy should go down in the annals of what doesn’t work, a category that we simply don’t pay enough attention to

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