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Brilliant. Well, yes, that is the best way to measure a teacher's efficacy, if your goal is to teach students to jump through hoops and pass standardised tests rather than to think.
The best teacher I ever had was my grandmother - she taught me the most important lessons I'd ever learn, such as:
"Observe the world around you."
"Reach your own conclusions."
"What was fact yesterday may be fiction tomorrow."
Tests are a distraction from learning.
I, like many, hope the MET project yields fruit. However, see this post for a strong critique of one of the key claims of the MET study: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-milli... Namely, in the scatterplot correlating predicted effectiveness and actual effectiveness, they pooled teachers into 5% groups. This naturally reduces the variance, yielding a much straighter line of points than would an…
The 5% groupings doesn't evaluate the metric. It just means that if they plan to use this actual study as a guideline, they should use the same technique in grouping teachers.
1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are.
2. How many resources the school and teacher are given.
3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home.
4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood.
5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards education.
6. Whether a child's parents are active in their child's education and in a PTA.
Study after study has shown that these factors greatly influence a child's attention and attitude to school work, their attendance, and ultimately their performance at school.
No child's performance on a standardized test, and no evaluation of a teacher's performance is going to pick up on the above factors, yet they can critically impact how well the child ultimately learns and what the child learns.
Standardized testing of a child that is unfortunate enough to live in a situation where the above factors are against them will likely notice a poorly performing student, one who gradually does worse and worse on the tests until they finally flunk out.
Then, instead of getting extra aid, the funding to the school that has a lot of such children will be cut (thanks to programs like No Child Left Behind), and their teachers penalized.
These factors, which are strongly associated with poverty, are things a given teacher is in no position to influence, but which society as a whole could address. If it has the will.
I can't say whether the findings are correct or not, but I like this: >> The teachers who seemed to be effective were, in fact, able to repeat those successes with different students in different years, the researchers found. Their students not only scored well on standardized exams but also were able to handle more complicated tests of their conceptual math knowledge and reading and writing abilities. To everyone wh…
I grew up in the UK in a school where the emphasis of our entire education was "the test." Teachers entirely forgot how to teach a subject and our whole time was taken up with what essentially amounted to "test prep." I did pass their tests, but did I get a good education? Frankly, no, I don't think I did. I mean statistically I got a great education, but it seems we have forgotten why we even educate to begin with..…
I think we're all for this type of metric. The problem is that no one has yet been able to show a teacher's ability to achieve that.
So you're against testing. What metrics are you for? Do we at least agree that without any sort of metric to judge a good teacher vs a bad teacher that the whole educational system suffers tremendously?
There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are. 2. How many resources the school and teacher are given. 3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home. 4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood. 5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards edu…
But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control.
What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situation that they do have.
How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?
I can't say whether the findings are correct or not, but I like this: >> The teachers who seemed to be effective were, in fact, able to repeat those successes with different students in different years, the researchers found. Their students not only scored well on standardized exams but also were able to handle more complicated tests of their conceptual math knowledge and reading and writing abilities. To everyone wh…
Students are not a commodity. What works well for one person does not necessarily work well for another. Without focusing on the individual, you are always going to leave a group needlessly behind.
In middle school, the last three weeks of each semester were spent watching movies (the same two or three movies over and over). In high school, I was taught that the big bang theory was when the continents divided. I was taught that the most direct route between two points on the globe is through the north pole. My Spanish and woodworking teachers taught math because they knew that the math teachers weren't doing it.
When you're talking about schools like the ones I went to (which weren't nearly as bad as many other schools in America) I think that test scores are a decent indicator of the education a student is receiving. You're measuring things like "can this kid read English" and "can they multiply two numbers together." Standardized tests are certainly capable of measuring things like that. Testing probably breaks down for measuring intelligence/education as the level of education improves, but I encourage everyone to consider just how dysfunctional many schools are before ignoring testing entirely.
Dewey believed that the goal of education should be to produce good citizens. Systems with metrics based upon the model of student as consumer are more likely to produce outcomes biased toward producing consumers.
The entire set of good teachers includes those who inspire a lifetime of learning. It includes those who teach kindness, sportsmanship, and good humor. It includes those who teach subjects for which there are few students and in which standardized tests make little sense such as art and shop.
Maybe the study can point us in the right direction. But few districts will bring outside evaluators from Cambridge's famed institutions. Few districts will fund ETS analysis or purchase their tools.
What we are likely to get are processes localized to the political reality on the ground.
It's common for people who received good educations to say that test scores aren't an acceptable indication of learning. It's probably true that if you already have an acceptable level of education, test scores shouldn't be too important, but it seems like the people criticizing test scores haven't experienced what education is like for the children being "left behind." In middle school, the last three weeks of each…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in the UK in a school where the emphasis of our entire education was "the test." Teachers entirely forgot how to teach a subject and our whole time was taken up with what essentially amounted to "test prep." I did pass their tests, but did I get a good education? Frankly, no, I don't think I did. I mean statistically I got a great education, but it seems we have forgotten why we even educate to begin with..…
Or do we educate so people are actually more well rounded, have a better grasp of the world around them, and do better as adults? I think we're all for this type of metric. The problem is that no one has yet been able to show a teacher's ability to achieve that. So you're against testing. What metrics are you for? Do we at least agree that without any sort of metric to judge a good teacher vs a bad teacher that the w…
When tests become a core part of how you judge someone's worth as an educator that educator is going to put all of their efforts into better test scores.
The question is do test scores mirror the quality of education or do test scores just tell you someone's potential at performing well on a test?