APPR Score Bands Have Serious Flaws

By carolcorbettburris, July 18, 2013

Next month school districts will receive their teacher and principal “growth scores”, which are the final component needed to compute APPR scores.  As I noted in this WAPO blog, which you can find here , the bands themselves have serious flaws which will result in teachers who have no scores in the ineffective category being rated Ineffective overall. 

In an attempt to fix those flaws, the Commissioner gave entirely different score bands to New York City.  He has yet to acknowledge, however, the problems of the scoring bands he and the legislature gave to the rest of the districts in New York State, nor has he suggested a remedy to address the flaws.  Meanwhile, the New York city “fix” has its own problems.  I show the two sets of score bands, as well as the problems associated with each of them. below.   Just click on the link. Problems with Bands and the problem with the score bands (as well as an alternative)  will become apparent. There are other state evaluation systems that were approved by Race to the Top that do not depend on numbers.