To Understand The Impact Of Teacher-Focused Reforms, Pay Attention To Teachers
You don’ t need to be a policy analyst to know that huge changes in education are happening at the state- and local-levels right now – teacher performance pay, the restriction of teachers’ collective bargaining rights, the incorporation of heavily-weighted growth model estimates in teacher evaluations, the elimination of tenure, etc. Like many, I am concerned about the possible consequences of some of these new policies (particularly about their details), as well as about the apparent lack of serious efforts to monitor them.
Our “traditional” gauge of “what works” – cross-sectional test score gains – is totally inadequate, even under ideal circumstances. Even assuming high quality tests that are closely aligned to what has been taught, raw test scores alone cannot account for changes in the student population over time and are subject to measurement error. There is also no way to know whether fluctuations in test scores (even fluctuations that are real) are the result of any particular policy (or lack thereof).
Needless to say, test scores can (and will) play some role, but I for one would like to see more states and districts commissioning reputable, independent researchers to perform thorough, longitudinal analyses of their assessment data (which would at least mitigate the measurement issues). Even so, there is really no way to know how these new, high-stakes test-based policies will influence the validity of testing data, and, as I have argued elsewhere, we should not expect large, immediate testing gains even if policies are working well. If we