This only works if you test each student at the first of the year which will reflect on their previous teachers. There is no way any one in their right mind will accept an unknown and untested student at the first of the school year and have their job continuation be based on 100% being at or above grade 9 months later. You could raise them three grade levels and be judged a failure because the improvement isn't what is being measured.

What a great idea to get a great number of teachers to decide to retire and/or leave the state and the more rural areas short of teachers. There are already shortages of high school physical science, Spanish, ESL, and foreign language teachers. A teacher sees a student for 6 hours out of 24 hours 5 days a week and the parents SHOULD have them the rest so it is obvious that all of the student's issues are due to teachers because 18% of their week is school.

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What CBB said.

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be real quite and listen................that whisper is a tiny call by some people with an interest in education to develop a way to evaluate the quality of instruction provided by teachers.

It is not a demand to pay teachers based solely on their students test scores, but ideally it would be nice to reward teachers who do better than their peers and it would be nice to have tools to help identify teachers who need help to improve skills.

Now one can say, "it can't be done", but it probably can to some degree. You can probably say, "The system you are proposing has flaws because of differences in student populations" which is likely true. You can say, "A better way to do this would be ......."

Unless teachers are different from doctors, and coaches, and realtors there are ways to tell who is better and who is punching a clock.

If a good teacher was rewarded and I felt I was a superior teacher, I want a good tool to prove that.

I wonder what that tool looks like.

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cbb,

You say teachers sees students for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week or 30 hours a week. Parents see their kids maybe 1 hour before the bus, lets says 6:30 A.M. and the again after 4:30 and 5:00 P.M.( this is not for all kids, some more some less). If the kid has to get up at 6:00 A.M. and gets the suggested 10 hours of sleep then it goes to bed at 8:00 P.M. The parent sees the kid for 1 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening or 4 hours a day and 20 hours a week excluding Sat. and Sunday. With most kids they want some after school play time that doesn't include their parent, along with bath time, and if they have any school work or other activities the parent might be lucky to see their kids at dinner and one or two hours a night. This is far from the 6 hours a day the teacher has with the kids.

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We all know that the readers of this blog believe that if someone is receiving tax dollars, they should be held accountable, and we should see exactly what we are getting for our money.

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If my "value added" test scores are going to be published, may I reserve the right to publish the names of the students:
1. Who moved into my classroom the week of testing?
2. Who moved out of my room after the first day of testing, and whose blank tests were counted as ZEROS by the state department?
3. Who moved from my district WEEKS before the test, but whose unopened test booklet was scored and reported?
4. Who moved to 5 different schools in one year?
5. Who missed every Friday, also usually missing at least another day each week, missed a week before and after winter break, etc, etc.
6. Who was homeschooled for two years, and came back to public school writing numbers backwards and can't do basic addition or subtraction at Fourth Grade?

And these are just some a few of the real life examples off the top of my head during my 15 minutes of lunch break!

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Good luck on getting good teachers to work in failing schools. Or work in public schools period (since I doubt this will apply to private schools.) I don't have a problem with a principal/supervisor using the scores to help improve a teacher's performance. But I have a problem with it a) being published and b) only applying to teachers. Let's just publish the performance reviews of every single state/federal employee.

All this will lead to is increased pressure to get failing kids to drop out, high risk of cheating and even more emphasis on teaching the test.

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Why shouldn't test score data be available by individual teacher? I can't believe it isn't right now.

It's ironic that the people who are grading my child don't want to be graded themselves. How can someone who is not accountable teach accountability? How can someone in an environment where results don't matter or can't be measured prepare my child for a society in which results do matter and managers will find a way to measure them?

Teachers are the only occupation I can think of where understanding who the best employees are is either impossible or forbidden. Every teacher will get 'problem' children. Every employee in every occupation has problems outside their control.

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This is a terrible idea...especially if the newer, less experienced teachers are given the more challenging students every time and the better, more experienced staff get the more teachable children every time. Sheesh! Sure makes me glad I am not in the teaching field. Stupid....

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I don't know how common that situation is erl, but it does raise the case for evaluation of administrators who make those assignments.

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Teaching and learning are not the same thing. The job of teachers is to teach, and the job of students is to learn. The evaluation of a teacher should not be based on the performace of the students. Teachers should be evaluated on how well they teach, and students should be evaluated on how well they learn. Why would anyone want to evaluate Person A based on the performance of Person B?

However, teachers who are curious and well-educated should be proud to make their qualifications public. Lots of professional people hang their diplomas for college, graduate school, and professional school on their office walls. Licenses and certifications can also be made public. The degrees of professors are listed in the college catalog.

Why shouldn't a parent be able to find out where a K-12 teacher went to college and what degree(s) they received? Why shouldn't a parent be able to find out if K-12 teachers are licensed in the subject(s) that they are teaching? I've been told that half of the math teachers in Arkansas are not licensed to teach math. Parents and students should have the right to know if their math teacher is licensed to teach math.

However, there are far too many things that get in the way between teaching and learning to use student performance as the basis for judging teachers.

It is inappropriate to blame a teacher for the failure of a student to learn unless all of the other possible reasons for the failure are ruled out.

It is also inappropriate to give a teacher credit for a student's learning unless it is proven that the student didn't learn the subject elsewhere (a book, a parent, a friend, another student, the Internet, etc.).

Learning from a teacher is usually a small part of learning. Good students learn from a wide variety of sources and experiences. A love of reading combined with access to good books is still the best prescription for learning.

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"Why would anyone want to evaluate Person A based on the performance of Person B?"

Absolutely!! Why should a physician be evaluated based on the health of the patient?

The comment is an example of the edu-babble that makes our educational system what it is.

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If everyone is in agreement that there is no way to tell a good teacher from a bad one, we should pay them all the same thing..........and I bet that won't be very much.

But yeah, it is probably unfair to evaluate the teachers based on the performance of their students. The last year I was in LR schools I had the math teacher from Hell for two math classes. At best this woman was qualified to teach Algebra I. I'm pretty sure no one in my trig class learned a danged thing, but I was blessed with a bright fellow student who actually knew some some geometry and had a gift for math. After the second week of class, the teacher sat quietly in her chair while the student lectured and did problems for an hour. On Fridays she'd hand out the tests and on Monday she'd hand out grades.

I suspect she would have gotten a pretty decent evaluation based on our scores!

Amazingly, in spite of a host of complaints, with documentation, she was allowed to return and screw a second year of students out of a math education.


She's probably teaching somewhere now, scared to death someone is actually going to try to evaluate her.

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"Absolutely!! Why should a physician be evaluated based on the health of the patient?"

Doc, when you find a way for me to evaluate a physicians performance - that I can freely access - let me know! The ONLY things I've seen have been pay to view websites that list only the most rudimentary information about a Dr. Make their insurance history public information and I'll start listening to your arguments.

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Kinda tickles me - the idea that you can't give a teacher a score.

They are doing it to doctors. Already done it to hospitals. You can look up the readmission rate for hip surgery at Cleveland Clinic and compare it to ElDorado General. You can see the suvival rate for heart bypass at Cedar Sinai and compare in the Washington Regional.

The data is now being collected for doctors. Soon you will be able to see how well your doctor does in giving immunizations, how many complications his diabetics have, how many smokers does she convince to quit.

Of course you pity that poor doctor who is treating Aunt Minnie, who smokes like a train and eats entire Karo Nut pies even though her blood sugars run about 300 on a good day. She is going to screw up someone's score.

But when it is all said and done, good patients mixed with bad ones, a doc scoring 85%, 80% and 92% is probably better than one scoring 42%, 81%, and 27%.

To tell the truth, I think the scoring system they are using now is pretty weak, but it is going to be tweaked and twisted and will be more accurate in 2012 and better in 2018. Will an 97% always be better than a 89%? Probably not, but danged it I am going to want someone with a 25% score doing my son's vasectomy.

Can't evaluate teachers. Hah! Just haven't tried hard enough.

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Mr. Duncan's problem seems to be the Chicago Way! While he demands excellence from teachers, the rewards go to non-poverty schools. Under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter, remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school. Teachers should be accountable, but The Race To The Top demands
you are already at the Top.

A letter to Duncan from Rita Solnet, a Florida businesswoman and education activist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/educatio…

Mr. Lindsey, I hope the NY Times is considered a reliable source.

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Best letter today was Hume N. Bien's well-reasoned one about teaching vs learning and who is accountable for what.

As to physicians and accountability: anyone familiar with these hospitals set up by doctors to handle their specialty (orthopedics is a prime example) knows that they are prone to dump their problem patients on regular hospitals the moment something gets out of line. Then these docs have the audacity to tell the patients that it's not the specialized clinic's fault that there are unexpected difficulties with their recovery.


And you know what else? If you're not close to being the perfect patient, they prefer that you get the work done by the regular hospital instead of presenting their staff with any extraordinary problems that will soak up their budget dollars. And if you're uninsured or have bad coverage, well they will be glad to refer you elsewhere.

And you want me to believe in them because the numbers say they're doing so well???

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You may have been drinking the kool-aid served by the old general hospitals.

About 4 years ago, one of my long time uninsured patients needed knee surgery. The first was at the hospital and it took about half her savings. The second was done at a specialty hospital. Same surgeon, same surgery. Cost exactly half as much.

Haven't looked at it closely, but have heard BCBS pays the specialty hospitals about 60% of what they pay the big boys. So the more stuff done outside the hospital, the less dollars spent on health care.

I can tell you when I have an non emergency uninsured patient needing surgery, both the hospital and the specialty center ask for payment up front. The hospital asks for more.

I guess your scenario could happen. "You can have your surgery for $10,000 at Specialty Hospital or you can pay $18,750 and have it done at Big Hospital". "Oh, I'd rather pay $8,750 more"

As far as dumping, you may be right, but of the couple of hundred patients of mine that have had hip, knee, heart, eye, or ear surgery I can't think of one that got transferred.

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