Monday, January 3, 2011

Yet another report that measuring teachers by student test scores leads to errors | Seattle Education 2010

Yet another report that measuring teachers by student test scores leads to errors | Seattle Education 2010

Yet another report that measuring teachers by using student test scores leads to errors

Attempts to measure and judge teachers by student standardized test scores continue to be fraught with errors, reports the Dec. 26 New York Times.

The full article, by Sharon Otterman, can be found here: Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers.

Excerpt: 

For the past three years, Katie Ward and Melanie McIver have worked as a team at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, teaching a fourth-grade class. But on the reports that rank the city’s teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores, Ms. Ward’s name is nowhere to be found.

“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.

Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-