Some Of the Evaluation; All Of the Decision
There is a recurring theme in reformy teacher evaluation schemes: "We're not encouraging teaching to the test, because we're using multiple measures. The test scores will only be x% of the teachers evaluation. Stop worrying!"
This theme is important to selling the plan, because even the reformyists acknowledge that teaching to the test will stifle children's learning. They also inherently acknowledge that taking a single test on a single day is going to be prone to error (especially if the test is full of nonsensical questions about rabbits and pineapples, or poorly formed math problems).
What these folks don't want to acknowledge is that even if standardized tests are a small part of the evaluation, they can still become a huge part of the high-stakes decision that follows. It doesn't really matter much if the numerical rating a teacher gets, based on her students' standardized test scores, is only 50% or 30% or 20% of her evaluation; the very nature of its phony "precision" gives that score far more weight when it comes time to make an actual decision based on the evaluation.
No metaphor is perfect, but let's try this:
Suppose we are going to rate and rank a group of restaurants. We need to come up with a system to evaluate each one, but we have to be able to show that the restaurant ranked #1 is better than the one ranked #2,
This theme is important to selling the plan, because even the reformyists acknowledge that teaching to the test will stifle children's learning. They also inherently acknowledge that taking a single test on a single day is going to be prone to error (especially if the test is full of nonsensical questions about rabbits and pineapples, or poorly formed math problems).
What these folks don't want to acknowledge is that even if standardized tests are a small part of the evaluation, they can still become a huge part of the high-stakes decision that follows. It doesn't really matter much if the numerical rating a teacher gets, based on her students' standardized test scores, is only 50% or 30% or 20% of her evaluation; the very nature of its phony "precision" gives that score far more weight when it comes time to make an actual decision based on the evaluation.
No metaphor is perfect, but let's try this:
Suppose we are going to rate and rank a group of restaurants. We need to come up with a system to evaluate each one, but we have to be able to show that the restaurant ranked #1 is better than the one ranked #2,