Willingham: In defense of measurement

Daniel Willingham & Valerie Strauss:

My guest is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of "Why Don't Students Like School?"

By Daniel Willingham
I have recently written about the problems in trying to use student achievement data to measure teachers' effectiveness.

But that doesn't mean that I think teachers' effectiveness should not be measured.

Indeed, I think it's essential that it is.

People focus on just one of the uses to which measurement of teachers could be put: rewarding the successful and firing the unsuccessful. But if you're interested in improving the practice of teaching, you must have a method of measuring teachers' effectiveness.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 17, 2010 2:32 AM
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