This was in today’s Times. It looks like the DOE is putting yet another quantitative spin on education.
I suppose the idea is: if you’re going to test the students you might as well test the teachers.
But come on.
This makes me sick. How do you measure the art of teaching. How do you quantify a teacher’s contribution to a student’s life. Do you get points for being inspiring? For explaining things clearly? For being patient and illuminating? How about insight and encouragement?
How do you measure that stuff?
Sure, these tests will reveal something worth knowing. And it some cases they reveal inadequacies in a particular teacher’s methods. But I am so sick on this reliance on tests, which is dehumanizing and gross.
It’s also a waste of time and just one more bit of busy work that takes teachers and students away from what they should be doing: TEACHING and LEARNING.
New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be
announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much
their students improve on annual standardized tests.The
move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools
participating have not told their teachers that they are being
scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.While
officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data,
which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used
to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in
performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility
that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.“If
the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the
city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it
what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said
Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the
project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole
aspect will change behavior.”
I also laugh at your turn-of-phrase “quantitative spin”. This sort of quantitative effort is an an attempt to remove the influence of QUALITATIVE spin that infects all large social systems.
While I can fully grasp the difficulties inherent in attempting to quantify teaching in this way, I feel an appropriate answer to your question “How do you measure that stuff?” is to ask “How can you NOT measure that stuff?”
Every other profession is held to peer review and public servants should be held to public scrutiny. All too often, teaching is a lonely, isolated profession with little direct oversight and with politicized, self-interested organizations left to police themselves. The result has been an evolving disaster for the past several decades. Your arguement against a more standardized approach to judging teaching performance misses the necessity for a universal, unsubjective approach to collect relevant data in such a large system as NYC schools. The only people who fear this sort of information gathering are those who have something to hide about their own lazy teaching or their own failing school.
Better information = better judgement. I’d rather have this info added to the public sphere than be forced to solely rely on some beaurocrat’s “Gut feeling” on who’s teaching well.
It is not a problem to read the data. The problem is what on earth does it reflect?! That our children and their teachers are molded to respond certain questions certain way? And how much time do they all spend on preparing for those tests? What is their curriculum besides preparing to those tests? Who are those people who evaluate teachers’ work and students’ tests? Where can I see the actual work of my children during those tests? How about ambiguity of the material of those tests? There is no way for parents and teachers to discuss and correct them – how about that?