Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs)
David C. Berliner, Regents’ Professor Emeritus here at Arizona State University (ASU), who also just happens to be my former albeit forever mentor, recently took up research on the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, for example, using value-added models (VAMs). While David is world-renowned for his research in educational psychology, and more specific to this case, his expertise on effective teaching behaviors and how to capture and observe them, he has also now ventured into the VAM-related debates.
Accordingly, he recently presented his newest and soon-to-be-forthcoming published research on using standardized tests to evaluate teachers, something he aptly termed in the title of his presentation “A Policy Fiasco.” He delivered his speech to an audience in Melbourne, Australia, and you can click here for the full video-taped presentation; however, given the whole presentation takes about one hour to watch, although I must say watching the full hour is well worth it, I highlight below what are his highlights and key points. These should certainly be of interest to you all as followers of this blog, and hopefully others.
Of main interest are his 14 reasons, “big and small’ for [his] judgment that assessing teacher competence using standardized achievement tests is nearly worthless.”
Here are his fourteen reasons:
- “When using standardized achievement tests as the basis for inferences about the quality of teachers, and the institutions from which they came, it is easy to confuse the effects of sociological variables on standardized test scores” and the effects teachers have on those same scores. Sociological variables (e.g., chronic absenteeism) continue to distort others’ even best attempts to disentangle them from the very instructional variables of interest. This, what we also term as biasing variables, are important not to inappropriately dismiss, as purportedly statistically “controlled for.”
- In law, we do not hold people accountable for the actions of others, for example, when a child kills another child and the parents are not charged as guilty. Hence, “[t]he logic of holding [teachers and] schools of education responsible for student achievement does not fit into our system of law or into the moral code subscribed to by most western nations.” Related, should medical school or doctors, for that matter, be held accountable for the health of their patients? One of the best parts of his talk, in fact, is about the medical field and the corollaries Berliner draws between doctors and medical schools, and teachers and colleges of education, respectively (around the 19-25 minute mark of his video presentation).
- Professionals are often held harmless for their lower success rates with clients who have observable difficulties in meeting the demands and the expectations of the professionals who attend to them. In medicine again, for example, when working Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs) | VAMboozled!: