Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurs when test scores are used to assess the effectiveness of teachers (registration required):
Re: "Kids' scores may sway teacher ratings," last Thursday's news story.
A week ago I received my annual Christmas letter from Dr. Mike Moses expressing his "deepest gratitude" for my work. I was confused, however, since I felt Dallas Independent School District teachers had already received their true Christmas greeting on the front page that morning. That article outlined Dr. Moses' plans to make 25 percent of our evaluations contingent on students' standardized test scores. How sad.
While politicians, superintendents and so-called education reformers seem to think that incessant testing is the answer to all our public school woes, those who spend their time in the trenches teaching, caring for and loving children know deep within their hearts that testing creates nothing but bored, cynical, uninterested students with lots of data and numbers identifying what they haven't "learned" and "proving" that public school teachers are incompetent. Tying student test scores to teacher evaluations will mean that schools become nothing more than testing farms, where the entire day will be spent in test prep.
With all that teaching, loving, and caring apparently accounting for three-quarters of the evaluation, how could anything other than rock-bottom scores negatively affect a teacher? And since when did administering tests, which are nothing more than discrete items that measure bits of knowledge, become synonymous with not "loving" children? Since when did being in love with your students take precedence over educating them? Since when did tests become the sole cause of students being "bored, cynical, [and] uninterested"?
Funny, but my high school teachers - especially the AP ones - didn't see the SAT, the AP exams, and all the other tests as being in the way of their main goal, which was to create informed, educated, and useful citizens out of the lumps of clay they were given. My guess is that those teachers knew how we did on our exams, and held themselves at least partially responsible for our performance - as they should have. They also knew that if we were bored, cynical, or uninterested, it was partially our fault; we wouldn't have been able to get away with blaming tests for that.
Posted by kswygert at December 31, 2003 11:04 AM