Education researchers gauge the quality of an individual teacher by looking at student test scores. If scores go up in a teacher's classroom, that's a sign the teacher is doing a good job. Education reformers are pushing schools to use test score growth as part of teacher performance evaluations. But experts are urging caution.
The Obama administration wants schools to do a better job identifying which teachers are effective in the classroom and which ones are not. The administration is offering billions of dollars through its Race to the Top initiative to get school systems to adopt new evaluation systems. To be eligible for the money, states cannot have laws that prevent teacher evaluation from being tied to student test scores. Teachers' unions fought hard for those laws; they have long opposed using test results to evaluate teachers. But some state legislatures are scrapping their bans to get federal money.
Many teachers and union leaders are upset. They say the American education system is too focused on test scores already, and measuring teachers by test scores will make the problem worse. "Using test scores to measure teacher effectiveness fosters a tendency to focus not on learning but on improving test scores," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation's most powerful teacher's unions. Weingarten says teaching is too complex to be measured by a test score alone.
On the other side of the argument are education leaders like Michelle Rhee, the public schools chancellor in Washington, D.C. "In order to have the privilege of teaching kids you have to be able to show that you can significantly move their academic achievement levels," she says. "And if you can't show that, then you need to find another profession." Rhee launched a controversial evaluation