Ed Reform 101: Summary Edition
Standardized testing is generally bad for students, expensive, unreliable and biased. It is a terrible tool for evaluating teacher effectiveness. No parent would ever want their child's entire academic identity to be boiled down to one single test on one single day. Who even likes these tests? Not the administrators. Not the teachers. Not the students. But despite that, stacks of bubble sheets, in all of their irrelevance, should be used for making staff decisions in our schools? Even though the folks who design the tests explicitly say that they should not be used for that purpose? And what about those who teach art, music or physical education? The question itself is arbitrary and absurd: "What percentage of teacher evaluation should be based on standardized test scores?" The clear answer for any serious educator or statistician is "zero."
Teachers are critical to the academic success of young people in New Jersey. But teachers are not the most influential factor in student achievement. It simply doesn't matter how "good" a teacher is - a child with a troubled home life (a.k.a. real life for many students) cannot simply walk into a classroom and leave behind the baggage of abuse, neglect, addiction, poverty, or broken family, or any other number of issues faced by students
