Impacted By IMPACT - 10% Of Evaluations Calculated Wrong, Teacher Fired In Error To Be Rehired

       This revelation brings up all sorts of questions - how long has DCPS known this? Has this happened before? How was this found out? Have those methods been used on previous year's results? Hmmmmm...  In this age of accountability, is anyone accountable? Responsible?
      Of particular note to me is that while 44 teachers are only about one percent of all teachers, they are also represent ten percent of the teachers actually being evaluated. So this is not a one percent error but a ten percent error. That is not acceptable.

D.C. schools gave 44 teachers mistaken job evaluations

By Nick Anderson, Published: December 23

Faulty calculations of the “value” that D.C. teachers added to student achievement in the last school year resulted in erroneous performance evaluations for 44 teachers, including one who was fired because of a low rating, school officials disclosed Monday.
School officials described the errors as the most significant since the system launched a controversial initiative in 2009 to evaluate teachers in part on student test scores.
Half of the evaluations for the 44 teachers were too high and half too low, said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for D.C. Public Schools.
Those affected are about 1 percent of about 4,000 teachers in the school system. But they comprise nearly 10 percent of the teachers whose work is judged in part on annual city test results for their classrooms.
Kamras said the school system will leave unchanged the ratings that were too high and will raise those that were too low. He said the school system is seeking to reinstate the fired teacher and will compensate the teacher — whose identity was not revealed — for lost salary.
“We will make the teacher completely whole,” he said.
In addition, Kamras said, three teachers whose ratings are being revised upward will shortly receive bonuses of $15,000 each.
The evaluation errors underscore the high stakes of a teacher evaluation system that relies in part on standardized test scores to quantify the value a given teacher adds to the classroom. The evaluation system, known as IMPACT, has drawn widespread attention since it began under former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. It remains a centerpiece of efforts to raise the performance of long-struggling schools in the nation’s capital — and a flashpoint in the national school-reform debate.
Backers of IMPACT say it is essential to hold ineffective teachers accountable for poor results and reward those who are highly effective. Critics say efforts to distill teaching outcomes to a set of numbers are misguided and unfair.
Elizabeth A. Davis, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said the disclosure of mistaken teacher ratings for the 2012-13 school year was disturbing.
“IMPACT needs to be reevaluated,” Davis said. “The idea of attaching test scores to a teacher’s evaluation — that idea needs to be junked.”
Davis sent a letter to D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson demanding more information about the errors and the evaluation system.
Kamras said school officials moved to rectify the errors as soon they learned of them from Mathematica Policy Group, the research firm the city hired to crunch numbers used in the evaluations.
“We take these kind of things extremely seriously,” Kamras said. “Any mistake is unacceptable to us.”
The value-added calculations are complex. The first step is to estimate how a teacher’s students are likely to perform on the citywide D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, based on past test results and other information. Then the predicted classroom average is compared to the actual classroom average. The difference is what school officials call the value that a teacher adds.
The value-added formula applies to English language arts teachers in grades four through 10 and to math teachers in grades four through eight — about 470 instructors in all. Kamras said the faulty calculations were the result of a coding error by Mathematica.
Under IMPACT, all teachers are evaluated based on classroom observations and other metrics. The value-added formula accounts for 35 percent of the evaluation for teachers in affected grades and subjects.
Teachers are given one of five ratings — ineffective, minimally effective, developing, effective or highly effective. Those rated ineffective are subject to dismissal. The same is true for those rated “minimally effective” two years in a row or “developing” three years in a row.
Kamras said that for the 2012-13 school year, 30 percent of DCPS teachers were rated highly effective, 45 percent effective, 19 percent developing, 5 percent minimally effective and 1 percent ineffective.
Of the 22 teachers whose ratings are being raised, Kamras said, three are moving to the highly effective rating; 12 to effective, six to developing and one to minimally effective. The latter is the teacher who was fired mistakenly.
In October, researchers from the University of Virginia and Stanford University who have examined IMPACT reported that its rewards and punishments were shaping the school system workforce, affecting retention and performance. The study found that two groups of teachers were inspired to improve significantly more than others: those who faced the possibility of being fired and those who were on the cusp of winning a substantial merit raise.

Emma Brown contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-school-officials-44-teachers-were-given-mistaken-performance-evaluations/2013/12/23/c5cb9f26-6c0c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html

DC Council Responds To Pro Legalization Push

  The conversation in DC has moved...... now the real details.....

D.C. poised for a giant leap toward legalizing small amounts of marijuana

By Aaron C. Davis, Published: October 24

D.C. lawmakers took more than 15 years to allow cancer patients to use marijuana for their pain. But over just a few months, city leaders have coalesced around a plan to decriminalize small joints, blunts or bowls full of marijuana in the nation’s capital.
Ten of 13 council members have signed on to a bill to make possession of less than an ounce of marijuana punishable by a fine of no more than $100. On Wednesday, Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said for the first time that he supports the idea. And on Thursday, the author of the bill and the office of the attorney general said they could agree to an even smaller, token fine of $25.
Such a move wouldn’t go as far as changes by Colorado and Washington state, where voters have legalized marijuana. Seventeen states also have eliminated jail time for possession in favor of civil finesof up to $1,000. If the bill passes, the District would rank behind only Alaska, which has no fine, as the most forgiving.
Even advocates of full legalization are surprised by the breakneck speed of the legislation in the District, where lawmakers have long been reluctant to test Congress on federal drug laws.
Two recent studies that ranked the District among the worst for racial disparity in marijuana arrests and the Justice Department’s growing leniency toward state plans for the medical usage of marijuana have given formerly reluctant Democrats cover to support the idea.
The city’s coming mayoral election has also turbocharged the debate.
Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), who is seeking the Democratic nomination, wrote the bill. Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), another mayoral candidate, has signed on in support. So has David A. Catania (At Large), who might run as an independent. And as Gray decides whether to seek reelection, he has bowed to the political reality that the measure is likely to clear the council in December or January with a supermajority that could override a veto.
Wells has cast the effort in lofty terms of lifting up the city’s African Americans and has done so comfortably, with Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) by his side as co-author.
“Less than one ounce would not be a crime. . . . That would no longer mean a drug-arrest record,” Wells said Wednesday night to applause at a community hearing on the bill in Anacostia.
On Thursday, during a continuation of the hearing in the D.C. Council’s chamber in the John A. Wilson Building, Wells said: “Punishment for drug crimes disproportionately falls on the shoulders of blacks and Latinos. . . . We don’t want to accuse the police, we don’t want to accuse anybody . . . but it is a major societal justice problem, and we are going to fix it.”
The numbers that have shaped the debate so far have come largely from a study published in July by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and another earlier in the year by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The study by the lawyers’ committee found that nine of 10 people arrested in the District on charges of simple drug possession are black, even as blacks account for less than half the city’s population.
The ACLU study also found that the District is arresting more people than ever for marijuana possession: It was up 60 percent in the decade that ended in 2010, with black residents accounting for much of the jump.
Over the summer, the NAACP criticized authorities in the District and other cities for using a pretense of smelling marijuana to stop blacks.
The legislation doesn’t go as far as some legalization advocates would like, and they are awaiting the outcome of Wells’s bill to decide whether to press ahead with trying to get a nonbinding referendum on the ballot in 2014 to fully legalize and regulate marijuana sales in the city.
Backers of that idea said Thursday that they might abandon a costly referendum if a proposed amendment by Barry makes it into the legislation. Barry wants to let the District go the way of Uruguay and allow residents to grow a small number of marijuana plants in their homes.
If residents have their own, Barry said, it could “cut out a lot of the economics” of illegal street sales of the drug.
“My motivation is very simple. We have hundreds of black men, black boys, being locked up for simple possession, given a criminal record,” Barry said. “In my community, I talk to somebody almost every day who says: ‘Somebody just got arrested for having a bag of weed. Come on, man — What’s that all about?’ ”
Also during the summer, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier urged a “robust discussion” of the proposal and cautioned against using the ACLU study to justify decriminalization.
“Some of the information being used as an argument for decriminalization is flawed,” she said in a statement. “Marijuana users are simply not being targeted in the manner suggested.” Lanier did not testify for Gray’s administration on Thursday.
That was left to the office of the attorney general, which among other things asked Wells to ensure that marijuana possession in school zones is still considered a crime. Wells said he agreed with that idea for adults but not for children, who under the bill would have their drugs confiscated and their parents called.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-poised-for-giant-leap-toward-legalizing-marijuana/2013/10/24/db183fb0-3cbe-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html