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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You asked for an example, so I gave you one. There are something like seven bullets on that page I linked to -- that was just one.
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Yes but none of them would really have that much influence on how much a student would learn in a single year. In other words they wouldn't effect how teachers were reflected in the test much.
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop You seem to think I'm suggesting that teachers are irrelevant. Hardly. Of course they matter. My point is that a bunch of other things matter too, so you can't simply look at test scores and start canning people.
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What other criteris would there be besides tests scores?
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
The more you talk, the more subjective this sounds. Which is fine, if you trust the "you" here -- the school administrators -- more than you trust the teachers. We all agree that there are bad teachers. What I don't understand is why you think that giving school administrators lots of discretion is going to help.
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Actually that is the way if may "sound" but addinng data makes it more objective. You just don't fire a teacher over one or two years data, or from one placement. But over time, if a teacher pefroms significantly less well than their peers in many different situations over time, that is about as objective and as fair as you can get.
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
That is absurd. It's also not what I said. My point was that if it were easy to assess outcomes in education, it would be easier to make it a business. But it's just a fact of the world that it's hard to do, unlike many businesses. You can tell how many widgets a factory makes, or how many hours a GA bills. You can't quantify how much a 3rd grader learns.
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Actually, I think you are wrong. That is where annual testing comes in. It is not hard to test for progress in basic learning skills.
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
No. I'm saying that it's hard to do, and that's it's fairly subjective. It's not just a function of spitting out some test scores and canning the low-scoring teachers.
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If there are multiple tests giving in multiple situations, and teachers results are matched against their piers and they are doing signficantly less well, I think it is that simple.
In any event this is an irrelevent argument. The point is whether you agree that annual tests should be taken and such data collected. Right now we are not using annual tests so we can't even use such data as part of the teacher evaluation. I think collecting such data would be really valuable for both the student and the system. You can debate its relative, cut don't you agree such information is really useful?
