Student Test Score Based Measures of Teacher Effectiveness Won’t Improve NJ Schools
Op-Ed from: www.northjersey.com
The recent Teacher Effectiveness Task Force report recommended basing teacher evaluation significantly on student test scores. A few weeks earlier, Education Commissioner Cerf recommended that teacher tenure and dismissal, as well as compensation decisions be based largely on student assessment data.
Implicit in these recommendations is that the state and local districts would design a system for linking student assessment data to teachers for purposes of estimating teacher effectiveness. The goal of statistical “teacher effectiveness” measurement systems, including the most common approach called value-added modeling (VAM), is to estimate the extent to which a specific teacher contributes to the learning gains of a group (or groups) of students assigned to that teacher in a given year.
Unfortunately, while this all sounds good, it just doesn’t work, at least not well enough to even begin consider