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So if you have 10 good teachers, you just rank them and kick out the "worst" 2? If your rank the teachers in a strict order, you have to make someone the worst
by rapala 14y ago
So if you have 10 good teachers, you just rank them and kick out the "worst" 2?
If your rank the teachers in a strict order, you have to make someone the worst and someone else the best teacher. But is the administration going to check how much worse the worst teacher really is? I doubt it.
- peterhunt 14y agoNo. You set performance goals for teachers specific to the teacher and district, evaluate the performance objective and make educated decisions based on that data. It doesn't need to be ranked, but it does need to be empirical.
- ColinWright 14y agoI'm interested to know how you set objective performance goals.
- peterhunt 14y ago"Did test scores improve relative to everybody else year over year?" is a pretty good start. Of course, by definition, this won't work for all districts.
- ColinWright 14y agoActually, based on my experience of dealing with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, that won't work either. Test scores are a poor proxy for what students actually know or can do, especially in mathematics. The original linked article provides evidence for that. You put in the caveat "Of course ... this won't work for all districts" but then you're arguing for exceptions to be allowed. That's just a mess. There is no simple fix. There are bad teachers (and I'm leaving the term undefined - it's a bit like porn - undefinable, but recognisable) who get good test results and glowing evaluations, and there are superb teachers who get mediocre test results and undistinguished evaluations. It's easy from the outside or from a limited perspective to suggest "obvious" methods of assessment or "obvious" actions to improve the situation, but in the end, no one has really defined what they mean by "good teaching," so proposing assessments of something undefined will just result in more proxies to be distorted.
- rapala 14y agoExcept that now you are ranking, by introducing the notion relative to everybody else. Why should test scores improve year over year? If everyone is getting a 2/6 then yes, but students in the same grade are not going to get smarter every year. There is the major flaw in using student tests to measure teachers IMO. You are going to get a bell curve around 4/6 from the test results for majority of the teachers. When you don't, it is really hard to tell whether the reason is the teaching, the curriculum, the students or the test and its grading.