Reply #16: The Sanders model is based on identifying "bad" teachers. [View All]

[donco6]

They look at the test scores of students of teachers over a multi-year period, then make conclusions as to the effectiveness of the teacher.

Sanders' research states that a student who has one bad teacher in the early grades never regains the loss in learning he/she suffered in that bad year. That's why he's so adamant about identifying "bad" teachers.

The Just for the Kids model does the same thing, except focuses only at the school level, not the individual teacher level.

Of course, it can be fraught with problems - the biggest one I can think of lies in the way many schools actually work. You often have one teacher who does an excellent job with special ed. students, welcomes them into her room - therefore she gets assigned an inordinate number of them. If you just looked at her scores, you MIGHT conclude that she's a poor teacher. Though Sanders says he corrects for this by modifying the data for kids with IEPs, a lot of teachers are wary of the model for this reason.