How students with top test scores actually hurt a teacher’s evaluation
Imagine that you are a doctor and your evaluation is based on patients you didn’t have. Or a car dealer, and you are assessed by how many cars your colleagues — not you — sell. It sounds preposterous, right? Well, that’s just what is happening to public school teachers.
In this school reform era in which high-stakes standardized testing is the chief assessment metric, some teachers are being evaluated in some part on how well their students do on new exams. Other teachers are being assessed on how well students they don’t teach do on exams, as well as on test scores from subjects they don’t teach.
For example, an art teacher in New York City explained in this post how he was evaluated on math standardized test scores, and saw his evaluation rating drop from “effective” to “developing.” High-stakes tests are only given in math and English language arts, so reformers have decided that all teachers (and sometimes principals) in a school should be evaluated by reading and math scores.
Sometimes, school test averages are factored into all teachers’ evaluations. Sometimes, a certain group of teachers are attached to either reading or math scores; social studies teachers, for example are more often attached to English Language Arts scores while science teachers are attached to math scores. (A love of test scores led Washington, D.C., school reformers under former chancellor Michelle Rhee to evaluate every adult in every public school building — custodians and lunchroom workers included — in part on the school’s average test scores, a practice stopped a few years ago.)
In some cases, teachers are being set up to fail with goals that are literally impossible to achieve. How? In Indian River County, Fla., an English Language Arts middle school teacher named Luke Flynt told the school board a tale about his own evaluation that is preposterous — yet true. Flynt’s highest-scoring students wound up hurting his evaluation. How did this happen?
School reformers, including Obama administration education officials, have gotten it into their heads — despite warnings from assessment experts — that linking student test scores to teacher evaluation is a bad practice. They say this because the method by which the determinations are made are not reliable enough and not valid as a measure of achievement. Some economists came up with something called “value-added models” that purport to be able to tease out, by way of a mathematical formula using the test scores, how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s academic progress. These formulas are said by their supporters to be able to factor out things such as a student’s intelligence, whether the student is hungry, sick or is subject to violence at home. But critics say they can’t.
According to a report by the American Statistical Association warning against the high-stakes use of VAMs:
The measure of student achievement is typically a score on aHow students with top test scores actually hurt a teacher’s evaluation - The Washington Post: