America’s pastime is back, but with a new twist. This season, Major League Baseball has introduced an Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System that allows players to challenge umpire decisions in real time and overturn clearly wrong calls.
The change has been highly controversial. Purists see umpiring as more art than science and worry that technology strips the game of its human element, holding umpires to near-impossible standards. Supporters counter that ABS encourages data-driven decisions that improves fairness and accountability.
If this debate sounds familiar to folks in K-12 education it should.
More than a decade ago, reformers tried to fix a broken teacher evaluation system that failed to distinguish between high and low performers and rarely used measures of actual effectiveness in deploying, rewarding and retaining teacher talent. Most controversially, reformers embraced new technology known as “value-added” measures of teacher effectiveness that were ultimately abandoned for reasons ranging from political resistance to questionable usage.
In many ways, the ABS system for grading umpires offers a useful lens for revisiting what teacher evaluation reform got right, where it went wrong, and what reformers and critics missed.
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