Teacher Evaluations and Student Test Scores

From yesterdays New York Times:

Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers.

Many of President's staunchest supporters were educators who believed that with the election of a Democratic candidate, the No Child Left Behind Act would be rolled back.

The administration’s stance has caught by surprise educators and officials who had hoped that Mr. Obama’s calls during the campaign for an overhaul of the No Child law would mean a reduced federal role and less reliance on standardized testing. The law requires schools to bring all students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014and penalizes those that do not meet annual goals.

However, the current administrations stance may make the results of standardized tests even more controversial.

The proposed rules make testing an even more powerful factor in schools by extending the use of scores to teacher evaluations. The proposed rules for the $4.3 billion in grants, which the administration calls the Race to the Top, require states to show they are fostering innovation, improving achievement, raising standards, recruiting effective teachers, turning around failed schools and building data systems.

Just to be eligible to apply, a state must have no “barriers to linking data on student achievement or student growth to teachers and principals for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation,” the rules say.

Connecting teacher evaluations to students test scores seems like a logical step; but anyone who has worked inside a real classroom with real students will undoubtedly have passionate opinions about this connection.

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