Sunday, August 18, 2013

A bad way to evaluate teachers


A bad way to evaluate teachers      Sent to the Dallas Morning News August 18
According to a current poll ("AP-NORC poll: Parents back high-stakes testing" August 17), parents support the use of standardized tests for evaluating teachers.   
Would parents respond this way if they were aware of the research?
Different tests of the same subject often produce different ratings, and the same teacher’s ratings can vary from year to year, sometimes quite a bit.
The idea of using test scores to evaluate teachers seems like common sense, but it just doesn't work. 
Stephen Krashen

Sources:
Different tests produce different ratings: Papay, J. 2010. Different tests, different answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures. American Educational Research Journal 47,2.
Vary from year to year: Sass, T. 2008. The stability of value-added measures of teacher quality and implications for teacher compensation policy. Washington DC: CALDER. (National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research.) Kane, T. and Staiger, D. 2009. Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation. NBER Working Paper No. 14607 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607.

No comments:

Post a Comment