Last week the New York State Education Department and the teachers’
unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test
scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after
Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an
agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not
explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they
would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the
agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this
urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama
administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s
creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test
scores.
The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not.
Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100.
Teachers will be rated as
“ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent
of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test
scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as
classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and
peers, plus feedback from students and parents.
But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers
rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments
must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher
who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no
matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In
other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually
counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher
is fired.
The New York press treated the agreement as a major breakthrough that
would lead to dramatic improvement in the schools. The media assumed
that teachers and principals in New York State would now be measured
accurately, that the bad ones would be identified and eventually ousted,
and that the result would be big gains in test scores. Only days
earlier, a New York court ruled that the media will be permitted to
publish the names and rankings of teachers in New York City, even if the
rankings are inaccurate. Thus, the scene has been set: Not only will
teachers and principals be rated, but those ratings can now be released
to the public online and in the press.
The consequences of these policies will not be pretty. If the way
these ratings are calculated is flawed, as most testing experts
acknowledge they are, then many good educators will be subject to public
humiliation and will leave the profession. Once those scores are
released to the media, we can expect that parents will object if their
children are assigned to “bad” teachers, and principals will have a
logistical nightmare trying to squeeze most children into the classes of
the highest-ranked teachers. Will parents sue if their children do not
get the “best” teachers?
New York’s education officials are obsessed with test scores. The
state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce
higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe
that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added”
qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year
after year—are
inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable.
Teachers in affluent suburbs are likelier to get higher value-added
scores than teachers of students with disabilities, students learning
English, and students from extreme poverty. All too often, the rise or
fall of test scores reflects the composition of the classroom and
factors beyond the teachers’ control, not the quality of the teacher. A
teacher who is rated effective one year may well be
ineffective the next year, depending on which students are assigned to his or her class.
The state is making a bet that threatening to fire and publicly
humiliate teachers it deems are underperforming will be sufficient to
produce higher test scores. Since most teachers in New York do not teach
tested subjects (reading and mathematics in grades 3-8), the state will
require districts to create measures for everything that is taught
(called, in state bureaucratese, “student learning objectives”) for all
the others. So, in the new system, there will be assessments in every
subject, including the arts and physical education. No one knows what
those assessments will look like. Everything will be measured, not to
help students, but to evaluate their teachers. If the district’s own
assessments are found to be not sufficiently rigorous by State
Commissioner of Education John King (who has only three years of
teaching experience, two in charter schools), he has the unilateral
power to reject them.
This agreement will certainly produce an intense focus on teaching to
the tests. It will also profoundly demoralize teachers, as they realize
that they have lost their professional autonomy and will be measured
according to precise behaviors and actions that have nothing to do with
their own definition of good teaching. Evaluators will come armed with
elaborate rubrics identifying precisely what teachers must do and how
they must act, if they want to be successful.
The New York Times interviewed
a principal in Tennessee who felt compelled to give a low rating to a
good teacher, because the teacher did not “break students into groups”
in the lesson he observed. The new system in New York will require
school districts across the state to hire thousands of independent
evaluators, as well as create much additional paperwork for principals.
Already stressed school budgets will be squeezed further to meet the
pact’s demands for monitoring and reporting.
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 are required to evaluate
teachers based in part on their students’ test scores in order to
compete for federal funding. When New York won $700 million from the
Obama program, it pledged to do this. What the President has now urged
(“stop teaching to the test”) is directly contradicted by what his own
policies make necessary (teach to the test or be rated ineffective and
get fired).
No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test
scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a
successful program of this kind. The State of Tennessee and the city of
Dallas have been using some type of test-score based teacher evaluation
for twenty years but are not known as educational models. Across the
nation, in response to the prompting of Race to the Top, states are
struggling to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, but none
has figured it out.
All such schemes rely on standardized tests as the ultimate measure
of education. This is madness. 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.
Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by
experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be
allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t
improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for
low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone
to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for
widening income inequality.
For a decade, the Bush-era federal law called No Child Left Behind
has required the nation’s public schools to test every student in grades
3-8 in reading and mathematics. Now, the Obama administration is
pressuring the states to test every grade and every subject. No student
will be left untested. Every teacher will be judged by his or her
students’ scores. Cheating scandals will proliferate. Many teachers will
be fired. Many will leave teaching, discouraged by the loss of their
professional autonomy. Who will take their place? Will we ever break
free of our national addiction to data? Will we ever stop to wonder if
the data mean anything important? Will education survive school reform?
