As we reported this week, it turns out that teachers’ evaluations can be hurt by students who earn perfect scores on Florida’s standardized tests.
That’s right. When students have earned a perfect score one year, Florida’s teacher-rating formula predicts that they should earn scores higher than perfect the following year. When they don’t, their teachers get demerits for supposedly not helping them improve enough.
But since most students don’t get perfect scores, how often is this actually a problem?
Up to tens of thousands of times a year, it turns out.
Data provided by the Florida Department of Education show that more than 15,000 students in Florida earned a perfect score last year on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. More than 13,000 earned a perfect score on the math portion.
Their perfect scores most likely won’t hurt their new teachers this year because the Legislature just voted to suspend the penalties. And some counties make efforts to mitigate this fluke in the state’s formula.
But for others, that could have meant their teachers being nicked for not ‘improving’ their perfect scores in past years.
Vero Beach middle school teacher Luke Flynt exposed the problem after noticing he was being marked down last year for a student who earned a perfect score on the FCAT’s reading portion. Since that student had earned a perfect score the year before, the state’s formula figured her new score should have been better than perfect, Flynt said.
The negative effect on Flynt’s evaluation wasn’t enough to alter his overall rating, but he said it raised broader questions about the accuracy of the state’s formula for measuring teachers effectiveness.
The state’s testing data show that Flynt isn’t alone. It’s difficult to estimate exactly how many teachers are affected by this flaw, but given the number of students receiving perfect scores, it could be thousands.
State officials say that county school districts have flexibility to adjust their teachers’ ratings to account for this flaw so that their teachers aren’t penalized. But it’s not clear how many do.
Check out the chart below to see just how many students received perfect scores last year. And click here to read our full report in Tuesday’s Palm Beach Post.