After two preliminary questions (nature of your interest in schools; where you live), the survey (reproduced below) asks how important the responder thinks various factors are “for federal accountability purposes.”
There are fourteen questions about matters such as pass rates, academic growth, graduation rate, dropout rate, etc.
Then, second from the bottom, there is one about the crucial element in school success, the teachers. But Our Leaders fall back on the old, misleading stupidity of measuring inputs and ignoring outputs: They ask about teacher credentials, not teacher effectiveness.
This fits into an ugly pattern:
It is clear that SOL performance decreases with increasing poverty. Under the federal prod, VDOE began calculating Student Growth Percentiles (“SGPs”) that were essentially uncorrelated with economic disadvantage.
The SGPs proved to be embarrassing to the Virginia “Education” Association and VDOE: They allowed a clear measure of teacher effectiveness (see this and this). So VDOE abandoned ship and introduced “Progress Tables” that roughly measure student progress but mostly ignore the lack of progress.
Now they ask about the importance of teacher credentials (that do not measure teacher effectiveness) but they ignore even their diluted measure of teacher effectiveness.
Guess what: You and I get taxed to pay for this deliberate sidelining of the most important public influence on our schoolchildren, teacher effectiveness.
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Here is the meat of the survey form:
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