Value Added Portal Launched for FWISD Teachers 

The Fort Worth ISD is opening the door to the future.  Through this portal, teachers will find a new tool – one that will help them use data to more effectively drive classroom instruction.  It’s called Value-Added.  

Most accountability measures only look at what happens on the day a particular student takes a particular test.  By using the Value-Added approach, actual student progress is measured – from where the student was on the first day of class to where he is later in the years.  This will account for how much a student has grown under a teacher’s influence and direction. 

The new Value-Added portal can be accessed through the Fort Worth ISD site (www.fwisd.org) or directly at http://portal.battelleforkids.org/fwisd/.  The portal will be a single stop to find information, training material and, eventually, reports of Value Added analysis reports for each campus by grade and content area. 

“As educators, you and I use many tools,” says Superintendent Melody Johnson. “But with this Value-Added Portal we are developing a new and powerful way to help us help you help our students’ Value-added data provides critical information about a student’s progress and give teachers the insight to how much influence their pedagogy is having.” 

The first step in calculating these analyses is ensuring that the student-teacher links are verified and accurate.  Teachers in grades 3-8 district-wide will be trained and asked to do a quick verification of the students who were in their classroom.  This process is estimated to take only 15-30 minutes.  The online system is set up with data from our current systems and will have been verified by principals.  

In addition all PEAK campus teachers will be asked to complete Linkage (Grades K-12) to ensure accuracy of these analyses.  Value added analyses will be used to reward teams of teachers as part of our pilot PEAK program (www.fwisd.org/peak) 

However, all Fort Worth ISD educators are invited to explore the portal, read the articles and learn more about Value-Added. 

-FWISD-