Using Student Growth Percentiles in Educator Evaluation

The folks at ESE recently released several Implementation Briefs focused on timely questions regarding District Determined Measures and Student Impact Ratings. One of these briefs focuses on the question, "How do districts use median Student Growth Percentile in the evaluation of teachers and administrators?" Many of the questions we have been asking about this use of SGP are addressed in this brief, including clarification about determining which teachers (and administrators) should use SGP as part of their Student Impact Rating determination.

While the median growth score for a group of students is the measure used, it is also very valuable to for an educator to examine the distribution of their students' MCAS growth and performance scores. In Edwin Analytics, we can look at a scatter plot of growth and performance by grade level, but no such report exists at this time for a classroom set of students. Creating this type of plot by hand can be very valuable in helping an educator explore classroom-level growth data in a reflective way.

Here's a link back to the activity (originally posted in August 2012, so the references are to EDW rather than Edwin Analytics) which gives some suggestions for facilitation along with a blank scatter plot and other resources: http://southeastdata.blogspot.com/2012/08/exploring-classroom-growth-data.html. I believe this is a valuable exercise as we talk about SGP in the context of educator evaluation - grounding the overall median score in reflection and explanation!

Educator Evaluation Update, District-Determined Measures

The Commissioner recently released a memo with an update for the timelines and expectations for implementing District-Determined Measures (DDMs) and the Student Impact Rating of the educator evaluation system. The DDM update can be found here http://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.aspx?id=7640