A Glut of New Reports Raise Doubts About Obama's Teacher Agenda
Although much of the Obama administration's education reform agenda promotes test score-based teacher evaluation and pay, the tide seems to be significantly turning against such policies, at least among wonks and academics.
Last week the National Academies of Science published a synthesis of 10 years worth of research on 15 American test-based incentive programs, finding they demonstrated few good results and a lot of negative unintended consequences.
Meanwhile, the National Center on Education and the Economy reported that high-achieving nations have focused on reforming their teacher education and professional development pipelines, not on efforts to measure student "growth" and tie such numbers to individual teachers.
Today, a paper coauthored by the Asia Society and the Department of Education itself calls Singapore a model for teacher evaluation. That nation's teachers are assessed on four "holistic" qualities, including the "character development of their students" and "their relationship to community organizations and to parents." There is no attempt to create a mathematical formula to tie student test scores to teacher evaluation or pay.
Lastly, even the free-market American Enterprise Institute has a new paper, by Fairfax County,