e:\doc\web\99\05\nosax.txt Date sent: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 06:18:47 -0800 To: "ClearingHouse" From: Wayne Bishop Subject: [education-consumers] Re: A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF VALUE-ADDED GAIN ASSE Copies to: Send reply to: Wayne Bishop ===================================================================== I have a beautifully documented example of this phenomenon. Former Commissioner of Education of Texas, Lionel Meno, was asked by the state board of education to support his policy of denying any and all requests for mathematics curricula from Saxon Publishers, including replacement books for those schools that were using them and only needed a few replacements. In the letter to the board, Commissioner Meno used data from the 100 comparison schools (by some sort of Texas measure of comparable schools, socioeconomic, educational, racial; I don't know but that's how the data was presented - overall norms but also comparison with each school's 100 comparable ones). In the report was the fact, almost in passing, that the Saxon schools were collectively higher than their comparison schools but all of the emphasis in the report was on the *increase* not the actual level of performance. From my letter to then the Texas Board of Education: "It should be infuriating to the point of someone's job reassignment or dismissal when the data is as badly misinterpreted as it is in Dr. Meno's Evaluation Report of February 10, 1995. Unless schools have recently changed their curricula, there would be no reason to even consider the data of Chart 1, measuring the change in pass rate, rather than that of Chart 2, the pass rate itself. Think of it this way: In an ideal program in which every student in every school passes every year, it would be impossible to "improve"; Chart 1 would show that 0% of the schools had a passing rate increase. By contrast, schools with terrible performance will easily show an increase in their passing rates; almost anything would be an improvement. Getting up to a high passing rate is quite another matter, of course, and the Saxon schools already show a substantially higher pass rate than their comparison schools although that data is not nearly as clearly presented as it could and should have been. I called the first three on the list of the twenty-five schools that had Saxon waivers and had three very interesting conversations All are pleased with most aspects of their programs and all gave me their actual passing rates, All were well above their comparison schools. At least one had had its renewal request for Saxon materials denied by Dr. Meno but the school felt that the program was successful enough to warrant continuing to purchase Saxon texts but from other funding sources. Another said of waiver requests for Saxon materials, "If you ask, you're not going to get it". I then called Bill Hopkins, whose involvement was described by another Education Agency person as, "Dr. Hopkins did a lot of research on the Saxon books", and asked why such a meaningless statistic was emphasized while the meaningful one (favorable to Saxon) was down-played in the report. His response was, "It could be a hidden agenda here but I don't think that is the case." Nope. No hidden agenda. Wayne. --------------------------------------------------------------- At 10:33 PM 3/15/99 -0600, Arthur Hu wrote: >I think it's worth noting that the notion of measuring >and requiring "improvement" rather than absolute achievement >is a very, very popular reform idea, thus a 99th percentile school >can get penalized for falling to 98th, or failing to improve to >105th (yes, there is no 105th percentile), while a school get >rewards for moving from 5 to 10. > > >On 1999-03-14 professor@education-consumers.com said: > >==================================================================== > >= Value-added analysis of student achievement gains promises to > >revolutionize education by making it possible to track the > >productivity of individual teachers, schools, and school systems. Now > >we as parents, taxpayers, and education decision-makers can see for > >ourselves whether schools are working. It isn't simple, but like > >financial markets, computers, and lots of other complicated things in > >our lives, it is worth knowing about. I hope you find the following > >helpful. John J. E. Stone, Ed.D. Education Consumers ClearingHouse > >P.O. Box 4411 Johnson City, TN 37602 >Arthur Hu "Fairness in Diversity" Kirkland WA >http://www.leconsulting.com/arthurhu/ ===================================================================== EDUCATION CONSUMERS CLEARINGHOUSE networking and information for parents and taxpayers on the internet Subscriptions & Archives: http://education-consumers.com or You are currently subscribed to education-consumers as: arthurhu@halcyon.com TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Send a blank email to leave-education-consumers-989462S@lists.dundee.net ===================================================================== For less mail, click on the following link and choose 1) a daily digest, 2) a daily list of subjects, or 3) no mail (read postings on Web) http://lists.dundee.net/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=education-consumers For more help & info: http://www.lyris.com/help or