Teachers Ranking and Standardized Tests

  Last Friday Ney York City schools released the “rankings” of 18,000 elementary and middle school teachers in New York. There had been a court battle for a year before the court ruled to release the teachers’ rankings. I can understand sharing this information with parents of the students but not with the whole world!

Stacey (the author of the blog Two Writing Teachers) spoke with some of the teachers from New York who were her former colleagues. They told her not only they are worried about being fired but also having parents asking administrators to not put their child in their classes and also worried about being able to move to another school in the New York. None of them felt the rankings were indicative of their teaching ability. I was glad to read that because I don’t feel that student’s test scores are always a reflection on teachers. There are some students who will never test well no matter how much instruction they receive!!

Standardized tests are not the only way to measure achievement. The tests have some value in measuring basic skills and rote learning, but their overuse distorts education. No standardized test can accurately measure the quality of education. Students can be coached to guess the right answer, but learning this skill does not equate to acquiring facility in complex reasoning and analysis. It is possible to have higher test scores and worse education. The scores tell us nothing about how well students can think, how deeply they understand history or science or literature or philosophy, or how much they love to paint or dance or sing, or how well prepared they are to cast their votes carefully or to be wise jurors.  (Retrieved from The New York Review of Books on 2/26/12.)

In 2010 a school in Los Angeles, California released their teacher’s rankings to the public. It makes me wonder how many more schools are going to do the same thing. I also wonder how many “wonderful” teachers will leave the profession. I also wonder if perhaps, this will cause some teachers to cheat on the standardized tests to keep from losing their jobs. It happened in the past and there is a strong chance it could happen again.

Diane Ravitch (the author of the blog The New York Review of Books) wrote that “President Obama said in his State of the Union address that teachers should stop teaching to the test, but his own Race to the Top program is the source of New York’s hurried and wrong- headed teacher evaluation plan. According to Race to the Top, states have are required to evaluate teachers’ based in part on their students’ test scores in order to compete for federal funding.”  I believe teacher’s should be evaluated but not by using standardized test scores. They are not an accurate depiction of student learning. There are some students who have disabilities who could never take a standardized test so how could that teacher be evaluated?

Reading these two blog posts has left me feeling sad and worried. How will this affect student teachers? Will this make some change their major? How will this affect us when we get out there and get a teaching position? If we rank low our first two years, will we lose our jobs? I certainly hope not because I feel it will take me a few years to be the teacher I know I can be!