Mr. Obvious wrote:
Azaleas wrote:These are the kind of testing-centric goals that are ruining education in America. If you tie the entire teaching system's incentive structure to performance on standardized tests, guess what they're going to do: teach to the test.
They won't just teach to the test, they will cheat the tests. Look at what has happened in Atlanta, among other places.
This is clearly a possibility, but I don't think it requires us to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
When race to the top was announced a few years ago, I got all fired up about it...brought it up in academic senate...tried to convince my fellow teachers that if we didn't start thinking of innovative ways to assess ourselves, that the state was going to come and apply some sort of one size fits all measure of performance.
I created a rubric to rate teachers based on multiple measures, among which were the California Standards Test. I think that any effective measure of a teachers performance MUST include a measure of his students' performances.
However, rather than using straight scores on the test, I proposed measuring how students did in my classes vs. those of another teacher. Year after year, I've been depressed when I see the results of my students' test scores in my lower level classes. I teach Earth Science, which in our school is the science class into which all of our academically disinclined students are funneled. Of course my kids scores are going to be low. For the most part, they don't care about school very much.
However, about 4 years ago, I had the chance to see a statistical analysis of my Earth Science kids' scores vs. the test scores they received in all their other classes. What I saw was this; my kids scored better in Earth Science than they did in all of their other subjects. By this measure, I was getting more out of these kids than any of their other teachers. These kids may have not been that smart nor that motivated, but for me, they were better than they were for anyone else. So, I wrote this measure into my rubric.
I also included things like: showing up on time in the morning (proposed putting a time clock in the office), showing up for your adjunct duties (because as a track coach I'm always getting stood up by the teachers assigned to duty), extra curricular clubs and sports, tutoring, a parent survey, and a student survey (both annonymous).
To make a long story short, CA decided to opt out of "Race to the Top" and my rubric sits in storage on my hard drive.