OK. Obama/Duncan/Gates School "Reform" Model: The results Are IN !!! Today's NYT: P. A1

[reACTIONary]

111. Thanks for the reply...

RE: This is what they said about VAM

That's very interesting. If you've got the time or its easy to do, I'd like any links to source material about these two teams and their work. I'm sure their observations are substantially correct. Statistical analysis is not easy to get right. Statistics is exactly the tool that is used when multiple factors stochastically affect an outcome and they need to be differentiated. This is not impossible. But it is difficult.

RE: If this nation really wanted to affect that achievement gap, we'd be eliminating poverty, providing security and continuous adult and parent education.

There is another way to "eliminate" the achievement gap. Stop measuring it. Poof! It's gone! Honestly, if you want to pursue all the great solutions you listed, there has to be an awareness of the problem and its causes. If you don't do the testing, no one will be aware that there is an achievement gap and no one will care.

And then there is the fact that we rely on education as a key means to eliminate poverty. To achieve this goal, we have to find ways to educate children independent of their SES. Or perhaps you don't think that is possible? Reading some of the posts in this thread it seems that there is an underlying assumption that SES is destiny and that there isn't anything that teachers or our educational system can do to overcome that. Personally, I'm not ready to give up on education as a means to eliminate poverty. But there seems to be a large degree of skepticism about that being expressed by those who profess to support public education against its critics.


RE: What is going to benefit the most students? Teachers gathering to work together...

I'm not sure why you think that a teacher whose techniques have been validated by objective testing would be reluctant to share them. Nor why other teachers wouldn't want to know whether "the star" teacher's techniques actually do work or not. I don't even understand how teachers could share "successful" strategies and methods without some sort of understanding and quantification of what constitutes "success". Without testing who is to say whether Jane the disciplinarian or Joe the inspirational teacher is the one to listen to? Whether to use phonetics or see-and-say? Exactly how would "collaboration and sharing" work in the absence of measurable, objective success criteria?


RE: Education is not a business, and does not thrive in a business model.

Exactly. What differentiates a business organization from public service organizations? Business organizations use monetary measures of success in the market place - profit vs. loss, return on investment, etc. Public service organizations use non-monetary, non-market measures of success: Life expectancy, live birth rate, emergency response time, violent crime rates, etc. Like these, standardized testing of student's educational attainment is a non-monetary, non-market measure of the success of our educational system. Use of such criteria is one of the ways that education is differentiated from a monetary, market-based model.


RE: Student test scores are not a measurement of a teacher's work, but of a student's... Come up with a fair, accurate way to evaluate us, and we're not hostile.

It seems to me that to accurately and fairly evaluate a teacher or a school system it is necessary (if not sufficient) to determine what actual affect s/he or it has on a student's knowledge and understanding. And some form of student testing and statistical analysis would be necessary (if not sufficient) to do that. It's even more necessary at the school, the district, and the state levels when you are trying to evaluate the system as a whole, rather than an individual.

There are quite a few critics of public school teachers who claim that the only evaluation technique teachers are open to is "time on the job". And "time on the job" isn't understood by the general public to be a fair and accurate way to evaluate an individual's performance. It is generally understood to be an evasion of evaluation. True or not, when teachers kvetch about standardized testing it plays into the hands of these critics and undermines teacher's standing with the general public.

If teachers don't think standardized testing is a fair and accurate way of evaluating their performance, then they have a professional responsibility to the public they serve to come up with a way that is mutually acceptable. If teachers don't take the initiative, they will eventually, one way or another, have one imposed on them.