The Teacher Commitment That Cannot Be Evaluated With Tests
A fourth grade teacher and her intern, left, work with students at Samuel Mason School in Boston. (AP Photo/Chitose Suzuki)
Teachers, parents and students are pushing back against high-stakes testing, over-testing and the fantasy that education is made better by preparing for, conducting and evaluating tests.
As American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten says: "The current accountability system has led districts to fixate on testing and sanctions, has squeezed out vital parts of the curriculum that are not subjected to testing, and has sacrificed much-needed learning time. That is not what high-performing countries do, and it is not what the United States should do."
That’s an increasingly common sentiment, even among former advocates for testing-obsessed initiatives such as George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top.” Diane Ravitch, who served as Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Education now says: "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools—or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not—because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today."
How then should we “evaluate” teachers and schools?
The truth is that many measures exist: some structural and some practical.
America asks a great deal of teachers. And while carefully-developed and cautiously-implemented testing can tell us a little, incidents and events can tell us a lot.
Take, for instance, the response to the winter weather that last week brought the Atlanta area to a standstill. State and local officials—led by Georgia Governor Nathan Neal—neglected warnings