Wisconsin State Journal Editorial:
Teachers routinely use test scores to help them evaluate their students.
Wisconsin schools should similarly use student test results to help them evaluate teachers.
Every other state except Nevada allows this.
Wisconsin should, too.
And if we don’t, our state won’t be eligible for any of the $4.5 billion in “Race to the Top” grants President Barack Obama plans to award starting next year.
That’s how important this reform is to the Democratic president.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced last week he’ll push to repeal a Wisconsin law preventing schools from using tests to help evaluate teacher performance.
The Legislature needs to move fast to nix this law because Wisconsin has only a few months to submit an application for some of the $4.5 billion in federal innovation grants.
Just dumb, dumb, dumb!
Just another proof that the reason for our national ills is that even those who have the indicia of an education remain pathetically ignorant.
The key issue: There is no possible way to measure teachers’ effectiveness with standardized tests. The thousands of variables which go into a student’s test score completely confound any attempt to attribute success or failure or score to any one cause, much less to a given teacher or set of teachers.
No amount of statistical manipulation can tease out this information.
The whole of this topic is nothing but pseudo-science, and those involved with pushing this crap and buying into it have no better qualifications than the Wisconsin’s dairy cows.