When a Teacher’s Job Depends on a Child’s Test
BY REBECCA MEAD
If it’s March, it must be test-prep season: next month, New York students in grades three through eight will take the state’s standardized English Language Arts and Mathematics tests: three days of exams devoted to both subjects, lasting for upward of seventy minutes a day. These are often referred to as high-stakes tests because of the impact that the results can have on student promotion, teacher evaluation, and school funding—and the stakes of the tests in New York this year may be pushed higher still. In his State of the State address, delivered at the end of January, Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged to make education reform a centerpiece of his agenda. “Everyone will tell you, nationwide, the key to education reform is a teacher evaluation system,” the governor said. He noted that while only thirty-eight per cent of New York State high-school students are deemed to be “college ready,” according to their scores on standardized tests, 98.7 per cent of teachers in New York’s schools are rated “effective.” “How can that be?” Cuomo asked. “Who are we kidding, my friends? The problem is clear and the solution is clear. We need real, accurate, fair teacher evaluations.”
That teachers should be evaluated is an assertion with which no reasonable person involved with education—from a policy-maker to a parent—is likely to disagree. But how teachers might best be evaluated remains a contested science. In New York City, a system that incorporates a range of metrics, called Advance, was adopted in 2013. Students’ results in state tests account for twenty per cent of a teacher’s rating, but the teacher’s curriculum materials are also evaluated, as is his or her classroom practice, which is observed on multiple visits throughout the year by the school principal or another observer.
In his remarks, Cuomo dismissed the methods of evaluation currently in place as “baloney,” and stated his intention to institute a new set of measures. If his proposals are approved along with the rest of the state budget ahead of the annual April 1st deadline, fifty per cent of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on his or her students’ scores on the annual state tests, with the remaining fifty per cent heavily weighted to include the assessment of an outside observer after a one-time visit. The judgment of the school principal will count for just fifteen per cent of a teacher’s effectiveness rating. Any teacher deemed ineffective for two consecutive years may be fired.
Cuomo’s faith in the results of state tests as the best measure of the abilities of both students and teachers is not universally shared. Among those who have dissented is New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. (Assembly Democrats are also reportedly opposed.) In testimony to a joint legislative budget committee in Albany, de Blasio warned that “excessive reliance on high-stakes testing is troubling. Standardized tests should not be the largest part of a full evaluation of a student or a teacher.” The mayor pointed out that test scores might be tipped downward by only a very small variation in student performance from year to year. With their livelihoods potentially in jeopardy over such minor variation, teachers will be obliged to teach to the test, he said, rather than “teaching for learning.” Teachers themselves are warning that, under such conditions, they will be obliged to narrow their curricula, forgoing collaborative science projects for worksheet drills. Other observers have pointed out that When a Teacher’s Job Depends on a Child’s Test - The New Yorker: