Test Scores Low? Blame Your Teacher

As Mike Smith noted in November, slight changes to the rules of controversial $4.35 billion federal funding program, Race to the Top, indicate that student test scores will not be the only measure used to determine teacher and school success among state applicants. (For instance, student test score growth over time can now be factored into teacher and principal evaluation programs –- not just absolute scores in a given testing period.)

This is better than nothing, of course, but does little to shift the dominant paradigm –- that standardized tests are the premier indicator of student learning and teacher effectiveness.

Naturally, in an effort to secure these grants, states are scrambling to shift their policies in time for the application deadline. In many cases, this means implementing programs that reward or boot teachers and administrators based on their students’ test scores.

In Tennessee, for instance, state legislators just approved a bill that “for the first time would allow student achievement scores to be factored into a teacher’s job rating.” In Illinois, according to the New York Times, “Governor Quinn signed a measure last week that ties teacher evaluations to improvements in student performance.” In Iowa, the state board of education voted on January 14th to require school districts to develop teacher evaluations based on their students’ performance, too -- at least in part.

Of course, teachers and administrators need high-stakes performance evaluation like all other employees in all other industries, and standardized tests are one way of measuring something as difficult to quantify as student learning. But when are we going to strop inextricably linking a teacher’s performance to his or her students’ scores? Isn’t there a way to moderately factor it in, without making billions of federal dollars, and now state dollars, reward teachers and students for a narrow, binding indicator of what it means to be educated?

Who is responsible for a student’s success or failure on such tests, anyway? Is it his second grade teacher, who taught him English grammar in an exciting way and encouraged him to read every night, or his third grade teacher, who administered some tests that suddenly reflected the pieces he’d put together over the last year?

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (and one of Change.org's Changemakers), is proposing a comprehensive teacher-evaluation system that uses test scores, but also adds classroom observations, written work, portfolio and lesson plan reviews. An effective compromise? Let’s hope.

Photocredit: neuezukunft