ELA GAINS, FUZZY MATH: Linking ELA gains to individual teachers is unfair, says ED Hirsch, who convinced Doug Lemov to refine his thinking on value-add algorithms for ELA (they’re still better than nothing, in his opinion, but reflect a school more than individual teachers). The syntactically tortured but important kicker: “A given teacher’s scores correlate 50% less to that teacher’s scores in a subsequent year when she is a reading teacher than when she is a math teacher.” In other words, the math works better with math.
