Showing posts with label Scott Hochberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scott Hochberg. Show all posts

Saturday, July 10, 2010

TEA to Dump TPM?

I’ve been following the series at the Chronicle by Rick Casey on how the TEA is using TAKS scores in their campus rating system, something called the AEIS. Casey is looking at something that we educators have all had our attention turned toward lately, the Texas Projection Measure or TPM.

This is because raw scores notwithstanding, how the TEA uses the TPM, especially in borderline cases, greatly influences which of the four categories your campus will fall into.

Will the campus be rated as Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable or Unacceptable. And how will the district be rated?

This is because, depending on how your campus is rated, it is then determined how many or how few hoops you must jump through as the school year progresses. The higher the rating, the fewer the hoops.

State Rep. Scott Hochberg (D-Houston) is also concerned with this measurement, as we read through Casey’s pieces. As he is chairman of a House education appropriations committee, he is a little worried about the jump in Exemplary campus ratings last year and wondered why that happened. As it happens, 73 of the 74 newly rated exemplary districts made that cut because of the TPM.

That is, actual student performance did not determine a district's exemplary status in 73 cases. Instead it was a statistical projection of the number of students who will eventually pass the TAKS test that did the trick.

And that is well and good if the TPM is an accurate predictor. The trouble is, that isn’t necessarily the case.

In his first piece, Casey revealed that a student could receive a passing TPM score after answering none of a TAKS test’s questions correctly. That is, a student who received a zero on a TAKS text could be scored as a student who would eventually pass the test.

Asked to defend this, Associate Commissioner in charge of the accountability system, Chris Cloudt claimed that the TPM was a “growth measure” of performance. One would assume that this was a comparison of performance from previous tests, and in doing so, one would assume wrongly. It is actually a formula applied to a student’s test score that looks back on “thousands of prior results.” It is, to use an industry term, a “fudge factor.”

The “fudge factor,” as it turns out, was devised by the national testing company Pearson Education. And when the “fudge factor” is applied to a theoretical student who scores a zero on a TAKS test, it transforms the zero to a passing score. Not based on the student’s own improvement but based on improvement of a pool of students.

It is, in short, fiction. Or better yet, it is, in short, wishful thinking.

The upside is that more and more campuses will be awarded Exemplary or even Recognized ratings, and teachers will be less beset by paperwork.

There is a downside, however. If the “fudge factor” skews all test scores upward, then schools that are actually in trouble with attaining an Acceptable rating will fly under the radar, and some necessary corrections and controls will not be applied that should be.

Politically, this could be disastrous. If public schools are viewed as having escaped poor ratings because of a state-sanctioned “fudge factor” that creates test scores that are more myth than fact, this only provides fodder to the rightwing that scream for school accountability by diverting public school funds to private, hopefully religious schools.

It gives those that raise a hue and cry for school vouchers the ammunition they need.

Ammunition that might penetrate Kevlar.

My guess, then, is that the TEA may be poised, as this article in the Austin American-Statesman suggests, to eliminate the TPM as a measure of student progress.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard as we see with what is being entertained by Education Commissioner Robert Scott, who lists three options: “the suspension of the measurement, continued use of the measurement for districts that choose to and modification of the measurement's calculation.”

Hochberg seems unimpressed:

“You don't make an invalid measure valid by doing less of it. I think we should start from scratch and develop a real measure of the progress students make in schools.”

Putting “lipstick on a pig” is how Hochberg characterized this.

Probably the only silver lining in this whole thing is that the state is about to dump TAKS as an accountability standard, replacing it with the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness or . . . ahem . . . STAAR. That is, instead of 4 high-stakes tests in high school, students will take 12.

Silver lining? At least for awhile the statisticians won’t have enough data to do their magic with projections of student achievement.

Monday, April 14, 2008

A Texas SD 17 Special Election Before November? Don't Count On It

Now you would think that with State Senator Kyle Janek stepping down before the end of his term we would be having a bunch of candidates coming out of the woodwork to vie in a non-partisan special election to fill the empty seat.

And in that you would not be wrong. Trouble is, the fix is in and I wonder if anyone is going to be giving up their State House seats to gamble on a 3-way or 4-way election in a race against Janek’s “anointed one”: Austen Furse.

Oh, you say you don’t know who Austen Furse is? No matter. According to this piece in the Chron you don’t need to know, because he has been hand-picked by Kyle Janek to be his successor.

Who is Austen Furse? Well, first, the guy has never held political office. He’s a Harris County-based businessman with connections to local politics. As a whippersnapper right out of Yale, Furse served as a director of White House policy planning in the Bush-41 presidency.

All of that and he has another thing going for him: he doesn’t have to give up his current job to run for this seat.

See, while Kyle Janek has known about his impending exit for some time now, he hasn’t actually handed in his resignation to Rick Perry, and won’t. Originally he was going to resign by March 10th, allowing Perry to replace him during the next regularly scheduled election day, on May 10th.

But no.

If that happened the floodgates would have opened and we would have seen a veritable multitude assemble to take the spot. No, because you see, people are starting to wonder whether SD 17 is as rock solid Republican as it has been. According to the Chron:
“Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama received more votes in this year's primary than Janek received in his general election victories in either 2002 or 2006, non-presidential years.”
No, what you want to do, then, to guarantee a Republican win in SD 17 in a special election is to limit the challengers, and what better way to do that than to put off the special election until November, when State Representatives are all running for re-election? At least two State Reps whose district boundaries overlap SD 17’s were looking at this. One is Sugar Land’s Charlie Howard (R – HD 26), the other is Houston’s Scott Hochberg (D- HD 137). State law forbids a person from appearing twice on the same ballot for the same election on the same day. Both Hochberg and Howard would have to give up their seats to run in the special election.

Furse doesn’t have that problem.

So if anyone was wondering about the change-up we saw last February, and what would cause that, now we have our answer.

Now that appears to be the ploy. It makes you wonder, though if this seat coming available is just too good to pass up.

Scott Hochberg, the only Democrat currently rumored to be considering this race is still weighing his options. While the presidential primary numbers impress, Hochberg is more impressed by the recent showing for Democratic Supreme Court candidate Bill Moody:

“Hochberg said that statistic is less convincing to him that the district is trending Democratic than the fact that Texas Supreme Court candidate Bill Moody got 46 percent in the district with no Democratic get-out-the-vote effort.”
Makes you think, doesn’t it? Will Furse get opposition from Charlie Howard? I can think of a few who will absolutely rejoice at that. Will those two fight over the dwindling Republican vote in SD 17 letting Hochberg take the Democratic vote plus independents to win?

Seems like a better plan.