Berliner in Australia: The Testing Fiasco
MISUSE OF ISTEP
On December 15 I wrote that, instead of “pausing accountability” and waiting a year to use ISTEP to label teachers and schools, we ought to stop using it altogether because, there is no
proof that the ISTEP has been developed to include measuring the effectiveness of schools and teachers, in addition to measuring student achievement.
DAVID BERLINER
By coincidence, the following day, Diane Ravitch reported on a talk given by David C Berliner titled Teacher evaluation and standardised tests: A policy fiasco. You can read about the video presentation by Dr. Berliner at theMelbourne Graduate School of Education web site and watch the hour-long video below.
Berliner discusses the worthlessness of evaluating teacher competence and teacher training program effectiveness with standardized achievement tests. His impetus for writing the paper was the call by Arne Duncan for the evaluation of teacher training programs based on their students’ students’ test scores.
Berliner maintains that the tests are invalid measures of teacher quality. To use them to measure the quality of teacher training institutions and programs is even worse.
He lays the blame for low test scores on America’s high child poverty levels..
Teachers and teacher preparation programs are perfect targets to take legislators minds off of all the poverty and inequality that make some of America’s education systems an international embarrassment. Blaming teacher education programs and the teachers they produce for disappointing standardized achievement test scores appears to me to be a diversion, of the type used by successful magicians. Blaming institutions and individual teachers directs our gaze away from the inequality and poverty that actually gives rise to those scores. In the same way a magician can divert attention of an entire audience when they make a person or a rabbit disappear.
He lists 14 points which explain why using test scores to evaluate teachers and teacher training programs is invalid.
Effects of Poverty vs. Effects of Teachers
The first point is that “reformers” who insist on using standardized test scores for evaluation of teachers and teacher training programs confuse the effects of Berliner in Australia: The Testing Fiasco | Live Long and Prosper: