Duncan: Test Scores Not the Best Way to Evaluate Teachers of Nontraditional Subjects
This one is really wonky, folks, but if you're concerned about standardized testing, I urge you to read on!
Over breakfast this morning, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged that the administration's success, via Race to the Top, in getting states to agree to evaluate teachers based on student achievement data has outpaced the ability of states to create the student assessments that make such teacher evaluation possible.
"This is clearly going to be a choppy transition period," Duncan said, later adding, "We're clearly, as a country, in our infancy" on using student data to evaluate teachers.
Here's the problem: Currently, fewer than half of all public school teachers teach a tested subject in a tested grade. As states embrace value-added teacher evaluation, however, schools will need to collect data on the