dennis roberts wrote:
> well, if george bush pushes for more testing for accountability ... across
> the nation like in texas, then i suspect more WILL get into this debate ...
> either voluntarily or, being forced into it for some reason or another
>
> the major problem is not that the community of assessment folks ... can't
> agree on some reasonable plan ... they ACTUALLY can (even while debating it
> very strongly) ... the difficulty is that this is totally a POLITICAL ISSUE
> ... that is spawn in the wells of state legislatures ... and so too if
> bush's plan moves forward, the wells of the us of a congress
>
> it is very hard for those in some professional arena ... to make the kind
> of technical dents in the pragmatics of the legislatures' thinking caps ...
>
> so, while i sympathize with chris' plea ... this will be a very difficult
> nut to crack ... particularly at the national level
I sort of agree. There are good statistical models for school effectiveness
(e.g., the work by Harvey Goldstein's group at the IOE in London), but even in
the UK the government has been very slow to shift to "value added" models from
flawed league tables of raw data. This may change, but probably only because
value added tables are (I think) going to be published in Northern Ireland.
Thom
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