ABSTRACT
A federal judge ruled that the Houston ISD's use of a secret algorithm to evaluate teacher performance denied employees the right to challenge their terminations - giving teachers the green light to continue their lawsuit against the nation's seventh largest school district. The algorithm HISD used was part of the Educational Value Added Assessment System, or EVAAS, that was created by the private technology firm SAS. One of the teachers' experts admitted that there is evidence that a teacher's EVAAS score is correlated with that teacher's impact on student learning growth as measured by standardized test scores. Union officials painted the ruling as a watershed moment in the fight against attaching high stakes to standardized tests, while district officials said the judgement has little bearing on its ability to use value-added models to evaluate teachers.
