The New York Sun once again shows why it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about education in New York City. In an editorial on this week’s test-for-tenure flap, they have a different take on how to hold schools accountable:
“The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the president of the teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, are locked in a bitter debate over whether test scores should be used to evaluate teachers. Mr. Klein thinks they should and Ms. Weingarten thinks they shouldn’t. The legislature and the governor have sided with Ms. Weingarten, and it looks like New York is going to be the only state in the union that will forbid using test scores to evaluate teachers. As it happens, we’re not terribly excited about this fight one way or another, because we don’t think test scores should be the device for evaluating teachers. We have another contraption we favor for evaluating teachers. It’s called parents.”
With all due respect, I disagree with the idea that parents can provide adequate assessment of a teacher’s performance. Primarily, teachers and parents come into contact when a serious issue takes place involving the student (i.e., when a parent is concerned about a student’s grade or the student has broken the classroom rules for behavior). Even when the teacher is consummately professional and entirely in the right about the grade or behavior, parents are rarely pleased and tend to view her/him as the enemy. I’m also concerned about the fact that they simply do not *see* what teachers do on a daily basis.
Interesting post.
I think we cannot talk about differentiation and not also use it when talking about teacher assessment. We cannot eliminate the use of test scores, but neither can we discount parental input, administrator observations, peer observations, leadership within the school, professional development, etc…We assess student success using a variety of measures, should we not use a variety of measures to evaluate teachers as well? I don’t understand a one-way or the other, single-criteria concept of teacher evaluation. Evaluating any professional should be a complex equation made up of many variables to achieve a simple goal: is this person successful?