How are the value-added data for teachers related to the Progress Reports?
The new school Progress Reports introduced the concept of “value-added” for school-level student achievement results. The Progress Reports, especially the “Progress Category” of the reports, measure the gains in learning that students in each school have achieved from wherever they began the year. The Progress Reports also help to compare those gains to what other schools with similar student populations achieved. The value-added data for teachers reports will apply a similar approach to measure the gains each teacher achieves with his/her students from wherever the students began the year and to compare these gains to those of teachers in similar situations. Just as we are committed to using data responsibly to enable educators to drive student achievement, we are equally committed to ensuring that they not be used inappropriately as a blunt instrument. Towards that end, we want to makes sure that the data takes full account of as many important variables as possible in setting expect
