I don't often find myself disagreeing with NYC Chancellor Joel Klein or other smart, determined education reformers who are warriors for equity in education. But I have to disagree on this new drive to publish (in newspapers) the student test scores of individual teachers, even in a value-added way. It's akin to grabbing a pendulum that has gotten stuck in one extreme position and pulling it all the way to the other side. We need a system of evaluating teachers (and having the evaluations count) that is balanced and fair, and that supports great teachers and hard work.
Posts tagged #testing
TEST SCORE MANIA Pt 2
This issue of publishing teachers' names alongside their students test scores (or, more specifically, analyses of those scores to see how much their students progressed in a given period = "value-added" analysis) is of course tied to the current debate about whether student test scores should be used at all, and if so, how, in evaluating teachers.
And while I may disagree with some very smart people (and yes this makes me nervous) about how they should be used (I lean towards principals using them on a micro level, districts and beyond using them at the macro, ie not to evaluate individual teachers, but schools, districts, etc) I don't think anyone can disagree on this hard fact: not every K-12 classroom will be tested every year in a way that is rigorous or consistent enough for value-added analysis.