There's more to grading teachers than test scores
Published: Monday, November 22, 2010, 6:35 AM
Gov. Chris Christie talks with Marie Corfield, an art teacher from Robert Hunter Elementary School in Raritan Twp.By Barbara Keshishian
On education reform, New Jersey residents get it. Too bad our governor does not.
A recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll asked New Jersey voters if teacher pay should depend on student test scores. They rejected it overwhelmingly, with 63 percent opposed and 32 percent supporting it. Yet the governor has proposed that at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on test scores.
Most people instinctively understand that test scores are too unreliable a measure to make high-stakes decisions about students or their teachers, and that they tell us too little about what really happens in the classroom. In Albert Einstein’s words, “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Unfortunately for New Jersey’s students, many of Gov. Chris Christie’s so-called