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January 18, 2007
Teach for America and Value Added Assessment
Categories: Classes, EDUC 110
A student in the 2:00 class yesterday asked about Teach for America and their success at recruiting and retaining persons of color. I didn't have a good answer to her question, so I did some quick checking. The 2006 Corps has 28% of its members as persons of color. That may be due to an agressive recruting effort and a visible emphasis on diversity within the Corps.
I found these details at Teach for America's website. Clearly, there is a higher percentage of people of color in the Corps than would be suggested by the % of college graduates that are people of color (9% of the Corps is African-American, while only 6% of college gradautes are African-American).
Beginning today, we are going to talk about Robert Holland's article "How to Build a Better Teacher." In that article, he talks a lot about value-added assessment. Some quick google searching revealed additional resources about VAA (since I didn't think Holland did a very good job of explaining it). Pennsylvania is using VAA, so here is a very comprehensive page about the methodology by the Center for Greater Philadelphia. There is also a good basic explanation of it in this article by John Holloway.. The later article is particualrly interesting, as it is housed on the NEA website. Holland is very cirtical of the NEA in his article, intimating that they are opposed to value-added assessment. That doesn't seem to be the case.
Posted by Nakia at January 18, 2007 09:42 AM