Student Learning and Teachers' Performance in America

Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer:

The New York Times coverage of the recent National Education Association (N.E.A.) convention focused on the inconsequential, while paying little notice to what harbored fundamental significance. It aimed its spotlight and lingered on what it referred to as a shift in position: "... the nation's largest teachers' union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country." (The New York Times, July 5, 2011).

In fact, there was little in the way of concessions by N.E.A. on this point, as The New York Times article itself conceded: "But blunting the policy's potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers..." And the Times added that the N.E.A. went on to insist that only those tests that have been shown to be "developmentally appropriate, scientifically valid and reliable for the purpose of measuring both student learning and a teacher's performance" should be used. This qualification eliminates almost, if not all, conventional tests.

The N.E.A. is right to be cautious about basing teacher evaluations and the fate of teachers on the test scores of their students, as the Obama administration has been single-mindedly promoting. We know that students' standardized test scores are correlated above all with their economic standing. As Joe Nocera recently pointed out in an op-ed New York Times article (April 25, 2011): "Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended -- and unquestionably proved -- that students' socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 9, 2011 1:59 AM
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