Even though it’s a low bar, the fact that it is in there as a licensure renewal criteria, to me it was almost as if the Department was signaling to teachers that they want them to be cognizant of student growth in their professional practice.

“Data” points and developmentally appropriate education are not mutually exclusive, as you seem to argue. I would argue very much the opposite – they can go hand in hand.

I mostly agree with your big picture goal (I think there are more things) about developmentally appropriate education to children. That’s what I care about doing too.

But how do we know it’s working when we zoom in on that big picture and get into the details of the day to day school experience for students?

The only way to know if you’re doing that or not is to evaluate it over time. “Data” points, which could be quantitative or qualitative. Like I said in a previous comment – I think we need a “goldilocks” amount of data collection to inform the practice of teaching to benefit students.

I’m anti-overtesting too, but I’m not anti-test altogether.

How do we know a child can read well by the end of 3rd grade? We can’t just ask him or look at him and determine. If you say a teacher just knows, and can write it down on a report – that’s a data point too, but we could debate about if it is the most meaningful and sound data point we could collect for our big picture goal of developmentally appropriate education.

What’s more important, the quality of a child’s experience in school, or “data points”? You’re losing sight of the big picture here. We should never sacrifice developmentally appropriate education for “data points.”

I could give YOU many websites that show research into how these value-added scores are unreliable and invalid, but I doubt you would read them.

I also think we have too high a data percentage here in TN as a part of our evaluation metric. If I had the power I would lower it to at most 33%.

Making a licensure decision based on one year’s TVAAS data point would be crazy. But that’s not the suggested policy. It’s have at least a level 2 on overall TEAM, plus level 2 on growth score for 2 of 3 years to advance to Professional Licensure or renew Professional License. You have multiple years, plus the overall TEAM score is 50% quantitative/50% qualitative.

Level 2 on the growth score is also a weak bar in my opinion (but licensure is meant to be a “minimum” bar mark, not an evaluation mark). Level 2 growth score means only having a growth index score of -2 or better.

The state estimated their new licensure rules would affect 100 to 200 teachers a year for non-renewal. That’s a tiny tiny portion (less than 1/2 of 1%) of the state’s 65,000 teachers.

I suggest two readings that I’ve learned from:

from 2010
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2010/11/17-evaluating-teachers

“ignoring value-added typically lowers the reliability of personnel decisions about teachers” and also want to point out the state doesn’t release individual teacher TVAAS scores publicly.

I will point out that most teacher’s pay in TN is not based on TVAAS scores or your TEAM level score. Still step and ladder.

Test more, ha! (I’m not for testing more, I think it’s about right now) If we tested less, we’d lose enough data points throughout time to be able to discern statistically reliable student growth.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2014/01/22-more-testing-whitehurst

Not only is the TN DOE fully aware that they are the target of proposed legislation, but they are fully aware that there is now a legal challenge to TVAAS by a very large group of TN teachers. Not only will they have to fully disclose the TVAAS calculations, but they will have to defend it’s calculations and use. From what I understand, there are only a very small handful of people that have this knowledge and only one of them has any educational background.