Miss Frizzle fails IMPACT evaluation
Last week a few hundred teachers were fired in the Washington D.C. school district based on a teacher evaluation system called IMPACT that was instituted under former chancellor Michelle Rhee.
There have been many complaints about the system, including charges that it is unfair to teachers who work in high-poverty schools, and that is chief assessment tool is five 30-minute observations by administrators and master educators of teachers each year as they work in the classroom. That’s a total of 2 1/2 hours a year of observation. Some teachers are also evaluated by the standardized test scores of their students, which many argue is an invalid and unfair method of evaluating a teacher.
Read full article >>Test yourself on NAEP geography questions
Here are some geography questions that students in fourth, eighth and twelfth grades were asked on the 2010National Assessment of Educational Program.
The newly released test results were considered disappointing: Fewer than one-third of the nation’s fourth, eighth and twelfth graders were proficient in the subject.
The geography questions (and questions in other subjects assessed by NAEP) are on NAEP’s Questions Tool, which you can find here. Below are the answers and the percentages of students who gave the correct answer.
Read full article >>How much geography do kids know? Not so much
Newly released geography scores from the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress show that fewer than one-third of the nation’s fourth, eighth and twelfth graders were proficient in the subect.
On the following seemingly easy question, only 33 percent of eighth-grade students who took the test got the correct answer:
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