AACTE Endorses CAEP; Testing Companies Win.
Once again a major education organization has proclaimed its intention to grade teachers (this time, teachers in training) using student test scores.
Talk about “status quo.”
Allow me to begin this post by addressing this foolish notion. I realize this topic has been written about repeatedly, yet reformers (and those yielding to reformers) insist that grading teachers using student scores must work. One of my first writings on the issue of modern education reform concerns the attempted us of student test scores for grading teachers.
In December 2012, I wrote a critique for Louisiana legislators regarding the 2011 Louisiana pilot study on value added modeling (VAM), or the idea that one can simply plug numeric student attributes into a computer and arrive at an outcome score supposedly indicative of the impact of an “effective” teacher upon a given student. The “prediction rate” is terrible. One simply cannot possibly account for all variables outside of teacher control, measure these variables quantitatively, plug these measures into a formula, and accurately predict a student outcome score for a given teacher in a given class with a specific student.
My surprise that education organizations approve of this practice is magnified by the indisputable truth that students must assume some degree of personal responsibility for their learning. In short, in order to allow my students the opportunity to mature via