Wednesday, November 20, 2013

"I'm not even going to read the question."

...So said one of my students, prior to my handing out the wonderful test for my VAM score today.  And while this student wound up actually reading (at least) some of the questions, others wanted to start filling out the bubble-sheets before they even got the test.  Others were done with the 40-problem test within ~5-10 minutes. So please, tell me highly-paid "educational experts", why is it a good idea to judge me on these test scores?

How many millions of dollars are being spent collecting junk data for a statistically flawed analysis that is shown to be inappropriate and has essentially no basis as far as effectiveness is concerned?  It's stupid bogus sophistry (BS) like this that makes me think the schools probably would have enough money if the people at the top (Federal, State, District) knew what they were doing.