Unleashing the Dogs of Data
Our educational system is waltzing with a crowd of reformers who have the hubris to think they know a cure to every ill - and the cure always has something to do with test scores. The latest fix focuses on teacher quality, and proposes to improve evaluation by "unleashing the power of data," as Secretary Duncan put it. But a new report was released last week that suggests this data may be unreliable for the jobs it is being asked to do.
Some of the nation's leading education researchers, including Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Eva Baker and Richard Rothstein, co-authored this report, entitled "Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate