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Teacher Accountability: What to Do?

February 9th, 2010 by Deborah Cahill
Categories: Calabasas, Calabasas Hills, Calabasas Park Estates, Classic Calabasas, The Oaks Of Calabasas
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School Accountability Needs Proper Metrics

By: Deborah Cahill

I agree with Professor Daniel Willingham (see below) that there are no good tools to measure teachers.  If you base a teacher’s success strictly on student test scores, you have done a gross injustice to teachers and students alike.  This throws us right back to teaching to the test and sacrificing core curriculum and content which are so enriching, interesting and necessary.  Having to limit our content means our students are missing valuable material and are even less prepared if they are attending college.  Even more unconscionable is withholding funds from those states who disagree with this practice of  evaluating teachers based on test scores.  If the federal government and President Obama want educators to be held more strictly accountable then they must come up with a fair and effective way to measure teachers’ performances and stop black mailing states if they do not go along with this practice.

Law & Policy

Op-Ed: School Accountability Push Will Fail Without Proper Metrics

University of Virginia Psychology Professor Daniel Willingham writes in an op-ed in the Boston Globe (2/4), “In an effort to improve public schools, President Obama wants to hold individual teachers accountable for student test scores; indeed, states that prohibit the practice are ineligible for the ‘Race to the Top’ funds.” However, “we do not have good tools to measure teachers, and when you hold people accountable with poor measures, things…get worse. The reason is simple: Accountability changes workers’ focus from ‘do a good job’ to ‘do a job that looks good according to the measure.’”

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Tags: Daniel Willingham, School Accountability Push Will Fail Without Proper Metrics