5 ms·

Any teacher worth half their salt will know how well the kids are doing. It takes literally 30 seconds of looking at a piece of student writing, for example, t

Any teacher worth half their salt will know how well the kids are doing. It takes literally 30 seconds of looking at a piece of student writing, for example, to have a pretty accurate assessment of their writing ability. The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers. If teaching is the problem, why are we testing students? We don't blame bad code on the users, do we? The second problem with your statement, is the unanswered question of who is doing the testing, and who is fiddling with the knobs. Not an easy question, but one that can't be ignored.

shardling 14y ago
>The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers. >If teaching is the problem, why are we testing students? And, err, how do you propose to test teachers?
- JacobJans 14y ago
  Well, that should be the job of the principle in charge of the school. One of the big problems is that it is very difficult to fire bad teachers, even if it is obvious they are not performing well. Right now, union rules make it very difficult for a school principle to properly do their job. This isn't 'automated' accountability. But it is a real answer, not the short-cut that many people are looking for with standardized testing.
  - michaelhoffman 14y ago
    People complain a lot about union rules making it hard to fire teachers. Since the unions are sufficiently weak in some states so as not to be able to impose such rules, it stands to reason that there should be some evidence that teaching quality is better in these states. Yet no one has ever presented me with such evidence. They just repeat the anti-union talking points.
  - shardling 14y ago
    Ok, that makes more sense, but isn't how you phrased it initially. (No one would call that "testing teachers").
  - mazelife 14y ago
    There seems to be a common temptation to chalk student performance solely up to teachers. This despite the fact that there are plenty of things that are out of teacher's control that strongly affect how well a student performs. Here in Maryland, there have been a bunch of recent articles about an alarmingly high percentage of students coming to school without getting adequate nutrition outside of school hours. This has a huge effect on concentration acquisition of new material. In general, socioeconomic and cultural differences between communities have very strong effects on schools; teaching in a school district with highly involved parents gives a huge boost to test scores vs. districts with largely uninvolved parents. Same for rich vs. poor districts, rural vs. suburban districts, etc. Also, what makes you think school administrators have some answers that teachers don't when it comes to how to do the job, or have any idea, really, how to fairly and correctly evaluate teacher performance. Similarly, why do the same people who routinely call for teachers to be fired for poor performing classrooms never seem to want to hold administrators and school boards to account for their poor performance? Why do state and local governments who cut education funding year after year get a pass? I think it's a comforting world view to think that if we could just bust the teacher's unions and start firing people, we'd get real results. But it ignores the fact that the system is broken in may more ways—and in many worse ways—than just the teachers.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      If you randomly assign students to teachers (which is already more or less the case) and each teacher has a large enough sample size of students (which is already more or less the case), aggregating the performance of all of a teacher's students will say more about the teacher than about these confounding variables, since all the other factors would be shared between all teachers at the school. Of course there are other problems to be solved. But the fact that there are no effective controls whatsoever on teacher performance, and that teaching is not a highly selective profession, is still a problem.
      - mazelife 14y ago
        I address this further down thread, but in a nutshell: there are effective, fair ways of evaluating teacher performance [1]. And I'm all for them. Standardized test performance is not on of those ways. Furthermore, in a lot of the schemes currently being put into place, teachers are not evaluated by test scores at the school level, but at the district or state level. Teacher evaluation is necessary, but it's not easy. Trying to shortcut things by asking standardized test score to do more than they are capable of (which is not much) is exactly the kind of thing that drives good people out of teaching. [1] See: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-ashley-a-great-teacher-with-a-bad-value-added-score/2012/09/13/27836e4e-fdb7-11e1-a31e-804fccb658f9_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-a...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

shardling 14y ago

>The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers. >If teaching is the problem, why are we testing students? And, err, how do you propose to test teachers?

JacobJans 14y ago
Well, that should be the job of the principle in charge of the school. One of the big problems is that it is very difficult to fire bad teachers, even if it is obvious they are not performing well. Right now, union rules make it very difficult for a school principle to properly do their job. This isn't 'automated' accountability. But it is a real answer, not the short-cut that many people are looking for with standardized testing.
- michaelhoffman 14y ago
  People complain a lot about union rules making it hard to fire teachers. Since the unions are sufficiently weak in some states so as not to be able to impose such rules, it stands to reason that there should be some evidence that teaching quality is better in these states. Yet no one has ever presented me with such evidence. They just repeat the anti-union talking points.
- shardling 14y ago
  Ok, that makes more sense, but isn't how you phrased it initially. (No one would call that "testing teachers").
- mazelife 14y ago
  There seems to be a common temptation to chalk student performance solely up to teachers. This despite the fact that there are plenty of things that are out of teacher's control that strongly affect how well a student performs. Here in Maryland, there have been a bunch of recent articles about an alarmingly high percentage of students coming to school without getting adequate nutrition outside of school hours. This has a huge effect on concentration acquisition of new material. In general, socioeconomic and cultural differences between communities have very strong effects on schools; teaching in a school district with highly involved parents gives a huge boost to test scores vs. districts with largely uninvolved parents. Same for rich vs. poor districts, rural vs. suburban districts, etc. Also, what makes you think school administrators have some answers that teachers don't when it comes to how to do the job, or have any idea, really, how to fairly and correctly evaluate teacher performance. Similarly, why do the same people who routinely call for teachers to be fired for poor performing classrooms never seem to want to hold administrators and school boards to account for their poor performance? Why do state and local governments who cut education funding year after year get a pass? I think it's a comforting world view to think that if we could just bust the teacher's unions and start firing people, we'd get real results. But it ignores the fact that the system is broken in may more ways—and in many worse ways—than just the teachers.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    If you randomly assign students to teachers (which is already more or less the case) and each teacher has a large enough sample size of students (which is already more or less the case), aggregating the performance of all of a teacher's students will say more about the teacher than about these confounding variables, since all the other factors would be shared between all teachers at the school. Of course there are other problems to be solved. But the fact that there are no effective controls whatsoever on teacher performance, and that teaching is not a highly selective profession, is still a problem.
    - mazelife 14y ago
      I address this further down thread, but in a nutshell: there are effective, fair ways of evaluating teacher performance [1]. And I'm all for them. Standardized test performance is not on of those ways. Furthermore, in a lot of the schemes currently being put into place, teachers are not evaluated by test scores at the school level, but at the district or state level. Teacher evaluation is necessary, but it's not easy. Trying to shortcut things by asking standardized test score to do more than they are capable of (which is not much) is exactly the kind of thing that drives good people out of teaching. [1] See: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-ashley-a-great-teacher-with-a-bad-value-added-score/2012/09/13/27836e4e-fdb7-11e1-a31e-804fccb658f9_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-a...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]