Many researchers and testing experts have cautioned that evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students—called value-added assessment—is fraught with problems. Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent scholar at Stanford University and one of the nation’s leading authorities on issues of teacher quality, has written that the measures say more about which students are in the classroom than about the competence of the teacher.
The National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association issued a joint statement saying the same thing. Those who teach students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-performing students are likely to get smaller gains in test scores than those who teach students from affluent homes in well-funded schools. Using test scores to rate teachers will penalize those who teach the students in greatest need. Over time, teachers will avoid the students who jeopardize their jobs and their reputations. This will be harmful to the students who need talented and experienced teachers most urgently.
Across the nation, as districts put into effect the “reform” that Secretary Duncan wants, the consequences have been counterproductive. Houston fired its teacher of the year. Other districts are discovering that their best teachers are getting low ratings. A teacher in Florida was recently photographed in front of her elementary school, whose billboard honored her as teacher of the month, as she held up a placard saying she had just been rated “ineffective.”
So what we have here is an effort by politicians to devise a metric to rate professionals. The measure makes no sense. No other nation—unless it is following our own bad example—is rating teachers in so crude a fashion. Even researchers at the company that designed New York’s evaluation system warned that it was too soon to use it to make high-stakes decisions about teachers.
And where are the unions in this? Well, you have obvious moles like Randi Weingarten all too willing to sell teachers down the river and even proposing nutball "bar exams" for teachers. Somewhat inconsistently and at the same time the privatizers are working overtime to get rid of certification requirements altogether. Hell, why not just have a bunch of high school dropouts with prison records teach kids? Education simply isn't valued at all by the privatizers, who hold a neoliberal bent and believe education is a waste of money and resources. Low education standards are the norm in the third world, and in the degenerate minds of the neolibs, we in what used to be called the first world have to lower ourselves to their standards.
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