Guest Post: Here’s What Was Missing From The Wall Street Journal’s Column On Teacher Evaluation
Guest Post by John Thompson
When I first followed Larry’s link to Tom Kane’s Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal (see Disappointing Op Ed On Using Tests To Evaluate Teachers By Head Of Gates’ Project), I also was disappointed. Perhaps I’m naive but, upon reflection, I was struck by Kane’s conclusion. The Gates Foundation’s scholar concluded that, “as imperfect as the current measures of effective teaching are—and they must be improved—using multiple measures provides better information about a teacher’s effectiveness than seniority or graduate credentials.” In other words, after investing tens of millions of dollars in research, the best thing he can say about the use of test score growth for evaluations is that it is better than two of the weakest indicators available?
In fact, I wonder why Kane compared his attempts to quantify instructional effectiveness to two issues that have little or nothing to do with that issue. Seniority is the teacher’s First Amendment in that it protects educators from the whims of their bosses, not to mention politicized fads. There are many simpler and safer ways to
When I first followed Larry’s link to Tom Kane’s Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal (see Disappointing Op Ed On Using Tests To Evaluate Teachers By Head Of Gates’ Project), I also was disappointed. Perhaps I’m naive but, upon reflection, I was struck by Kane’s conclusion. The Gates Foundation’s scholar concluded that, “as imperfect as the current measures of effective teaching are—and they must be improved—using multiple measures provides better information about a teacher’s effectiveness than seniority or graduate credentials.” In other words, after investing tens of millions of dollars in research, the best thing he can say about the use of test score growth for evaluations is that it is better than two of the weakest indicators available?
In fact, I wonder why Kane compared his attempts to quantify instructional effectiveness to two issues that have little or nothing to do with that issue. Seniority is the teacher’s First Amendment in that it protects educators from the whims of their bosses, not to mention politicized fads. There are many simpler and safer ways to
