For those of you interested, and perhaps close to Houston, Texas, I will be presenting my research on the Houston Independent School District’s (now hopefully past) use of the Education Value-Added Assessment System for more high-stakes, teacher-level consequences than anywhere else in the nation.
As you may recall from prior posts (see, for example, here, here, and here), seven teachers in the disrict, with the support of the Houston Federation of Teachers (HFT), are taking the district to federal court over how their value-added scores are/were being used, and allegedly abused. The case, Houston Federation of Teachers, et al. v. Houston ISD, is still ongoing; although, also as per a prior post, the school board just this past June, in a 3:3 split vote, elected to no longer pay an annual $680K to SAS Institute Inc. to calculate the district’s EVAAS estimates. Hence, by non-renewing this contract it appears, at least for the time being, that the district is free from its prior history using the EVAAS for high-stakes accountability. See also this post here for an analysis of Houston’s test scores post EVAAS implementation, as compared to other districts in the state of Texas. Apparently, all of the time and energy invested did not pay off for the district, or more importantly its teachers and students located within its boundaries.
Anyhow, those presenting and attending the conference–the Houston Education and Civil Rights Summit, as also sponsored and supported by United Opt Out National–will prioritize and focus on the “continued challenges of public education and the teaching profession [that] have only been exacerbated by past and current policies and practices,” as well as “the shifting landscape of public education and its impact on civil and human rights and civil society.”
As mentioned, I will be speaking, alongside two featured speakers: Samuel Abrams–the Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education (NCSPE) and an instructor in Columbia’s Teachers College, and Julian Vasquez Heilig–Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at California State Sacramento and creator of the blog Cloaking Inequality. For more information about these and other speakers, many of whom are practitioners, see the conference website available, again, here.
When is it? Friday, October 14, 2016 at 4:00 PM through to Saturday, October 15, 2016 at 8:00 PM (CDT).
Where is it? Houston Hilton Post Oak – 2001 Post Oak Blvd, Houston, TX 77056
Hope to see you there!
