Rachel Aviv, writing for the New Yorker:
Since the investigation, the stakes for testing in Georgia have escalated. Although the state is replacing the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test with a more comprehensive method of evaluation, this fall Georgia is implementing a new teacher-evaluation program that bases fifty per cent of a teacher’s assessment on test scores. The program, along with a merit-pay system, is required as a condition for receiving a four-hundred-million-dollar grant from President Obama’s Race to the Top program. Tim Callahan, the spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which represents eighty-four thousand teachers, told me, “The state is going down the same path as Atlanta, and we are not exactly enthused.” He said that many teachers have become so demoralized that they’re retiring early or transferring to private schools. He told me, “Our teachers’ best qualities—their sense of humor, their love for the subject, their excitement, their interest in students as individuals—are not being honored or valued, because those qualities aren’t measurable.”
That last bit is critical in my mind. It’s common among startup people to hear the phrase “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” But my gut response to that is always to say: then let’s make sure we’re measuring the right things!
It’s pretty clear that the the school district here was not measuring the right things. And frankly measuring education by exam performance is a farce — does anyone really believe that the greatest value of education is the ability to perform well on a contrived test? Of course not — it’s just easy to measure.
Well, the outcome is that we’re only improving student exam scores — and we’re not even doing that by improving our students’ performance on exams, we’re doing that by incentivizing teachers to cheat. And that improvement is coming at a huge cost.
Much worse than pointless, this policy is incredibly harmful. Not only does it worsen education, it teaches kids that knowledge is not a useful asset by itself but something to be gamed.
I’m not opposed to measuring teacher performance. But let’s not pretend exam scores really matter.