<\/strong>I taught sixth grade in a local public middle school for six years.\u00a0 It was a struggling, blue-collar district.\u00a0 My students\u2019 parents did not have a college education, often worked minimum wage jobs, and at times had unstable home lives.\u00a0 But it was a great job\u2014the district was racially diverse, my colleagues were terrific, and the parents were generally very supportive.\u00a0 The students, though sometimes very challenging, had an unguarded charm all their own.<\/p>\n

Teaching is tough, and anyone who\u2019s been a student knows there are many bad teachers out there.\u00a0 In recent years more and more politicians are calling for teachers to be evaluated more stringently based on the standardized test scores of their students, and it\u2019s easy to see the appeal of this.\u00a0 After all, it\u2019s \u201chard\u201d data\u2014we can analyze percentiles, look for movement in grade equivalencies, disaggregate by subgroup, and make \u201cobjective\u201d assessments of which teachers are failing and which are succeeding.\u00a0 But anyone who has actually been in the trenches teaching in a classroom can tell you why using standardized tests to evaluate teachers is problematic at best and truly dangerous when taken to the extreme.<\/p>\n

Teaching vs. testing<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most obvious problem with relying on standardized tests to evaluate teachers is that it operates on the premise that everything that happens in my classroom can be quantified into a tidy formula that can calculate my success as a teacher (or, in the case of proposed merit pay systems, how much my paycheck should be).\u00a0 Much of what teachers do all day is valuable work that won\u2019t raise the students\u2019 composite percentile one point.<\/p>\n

My students generally did very well on standardized tests, but I can think of many instances when the work I did with a student didn\u2019t have an immediate<\/em> impact on test scores, but definitely made a difference a couple years down the line.<\/p>\n

I had a student named Brandon [not his real name], for example, who came into my sixth grade classroom with an extremely negative attitude towards authority in general and teachers in particular.\u00a0 I worked every day for nine months for him to feel like I was an ally and wanted him to do well.\u00a0 He did manage to pick up a book now and then, but the main transformation for Brandon was that by the end of the school, year he felt like school was a place where he was welcome.\u00a0 In seventh grade, Brandon’s academics really took off; he began actually turning in assignments and mastering the material.\u00a0 The groundwork for this turnaround was laid in 6^{th<\/sup> grade, but it took a while (and the continued hard work of his 7th<\/sup> grade teachers obviously) for this to happen.<\/p>\n}

Inciting unhealthy competition among teachers<\/strong><\/p>\n

The more insidious problem with using test scores to evaluate teachers is that it pits teachers against one another and encourages unhealthy competition in precisely the environment where collaboration and cooperation should be flourishing.\u00a0 At my school, charts were routinely distributed at faculty meetings showing each teachers\u2019 students\u2019 scores on the latest round of benchmark assessments or standardized tests.\u00a0 This meant public humiliation for the teachers at the bottom of that list, the clear implication being not that your students were struggling but that you as a teacher<\/em> weren\u2019t cutting it.\u00a0 None of us wanted to be at the bottom of that list, and it was easy to resent the teachers who were at the top of it.\u00a0 This obviously bred a competitive environment where teachers were a little reluctant to share fresh ideas and pass along test preparation methods that seemed to actually work.\u00a0 If you wanted your students to have the top scores so you could earn the professional\u00a0 kudos that went with that, you went about your work quietly and weren\u2019t quick to collaborate with your colleagues on new lessons.\u00a0 I can only imagine how much more chillingly competitive things would be if teachers\u2019 salary was based primarily on students\u2019 test scores.<\/p>\n

The risk for at-risk students<\/strong><\/p>\n

Finally, in a competitive system where teachers\u2019 evaluations are based in large part on their students\u2019 test scores, it\u2019s the at-risk students who lose the most.\u00a0 Put simply, it creates an environment where teachers will do anything in their power to get rid of students that will hurt their scores.\u00a0 This kind of (to put it crudely) \u201cpass the trash\u201d mentality already exists, but if teachers are given a professional incentive to do it, it will become much more widespread.<\/p>\n

In the six years that I taught, I had many students who were a drain on my energy and who I knew were not likely to perform well on the end of the year tests.\u00a0 Often these were also students who disrupted the learning of others.\u00a0 All teachers have these kinds of kids in their rooms, and the right response, I think, is to not give up on them, but to doggedly work to minimize their negative impact on the class and maximize their potential.\u00a0 But if my contract renewal depended on my students\u2019 test scores, I would be very tempted to do just about everything in my power to have that student transferred to another teacher, sent to the office a lot, or (what goes on a lot) spend their days sitting in the hallway.\u00a0 In other words, I\u2019d be tempted to cut my losses with that student and concentrate on the other students.\u00a0 I doubt that\u2019s the kind of social Darwinism we want going on in our public schools, but that\u2019s exactly what is encouraged by high stakes standardized testing.<\/p>\n

Quality, not quantity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not all efforts to hold teachers accountable for the job they are doing are bad\u2014teachers should be<\/em> evaluated, and crummy teachers who show inclination toward improvement should be dismissed.\u00a0 Standardized tests might even be a very small part of such an evaluation.\u00a0 But the power these tests wield now in the lives of teachers and students is completely out of proportion to their value.\u00a0 A teacher should be evaluated by administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and students, and there should be a real effort to do the hard business of qualitative rather than merely quantitative evaluation.\u00a0 Teaching isn\u2019t just a science, after all.\u00a0 It\u2019s an art, too.\u00a0 Anyone who\u2019s ever sat in a classroom with an amazing teacher knows that\u2014and it might not show up in her MAP scores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I taught sixth grade in a local public middle school for six years.\u00a0 It was a struggling, blue-collar district.\u00a0 My students\u2019 parents did not<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":446,"featured_media":12016,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1275,1276],"yoast_head":"\n