Evaluating evaluations

"I talk about No Child Left Behind like Ivory soap: It’s 99.9 percent pure or something.”\nThat’s Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on the efficacy of the federal law passed in 2002. She continues: “There’s not much needed in the way of change.”\nExperts say otherwise. The latest move away from No Child Left Behind, which is considered by the National Education Association to have “produced many unintended and unfavorable consequences for students, parents and educators across the country,” is a recent bill passed by the New York Assembly, preemptively barring New York City and other districts from linking teacher tenure to students’ test scores.\nAn enormous debate revolves around standardized testing and how test results should be interpreted with respect to the teacher: Do high test scores necessarily mean a great instructor, and vice versa? Or is this a gross oversimplification?\nThe Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind act favors the former view – that test scores are, essentially, just a function of the teacher. In application, this proves to be catastrophic, as the outcry from the National Education Association and numerous education experts has evidenced in the last five years. Such a policy makes it extremely difficult for disadvantaged and low-income children to meet the catch-all, single-tier criteria set out by the policy. As a result, the evaluation rubric has labeled thousands of schools as “failing” – including even 827 out of 1,262 schools to which Bush’s brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, gave the coveted “A” rating in his state of Florida – a condemnation that jeopardizes jobs of all the teachers at a “failing” school, regardless of their true effectiveness. In this plan, “bad test scores” reads as “bad teachers.”\nThe implications, then, are clear: These new testing standards tend to favor schools in more affluent areas, where children come from homes that nurture learning from a young age, and are generally conducive to a high-aptitude K-12 career. The fact is that even if a teacher is very capable, other factors (the child’s family situation, parents’ educational background, the presence of learning disabilities, etc.) play a large enough role that guaranteeing one’s kids can pass the new testing standards is far from certain. \nThis is why we support New York’s countermove: The Assembly members obviously recognize the administration as being consistently out of sync with education experts like the National Education Association, which former Secretary of Education Rod Paige called a “terrorist organization” for its protest against No Child Left Behind. New York wants to take the scare tactics out of the classroom, allowing teachers to once again do their jobs effectively, rather than using frightened “teach to the test” curricula year after year. \n“Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers. “These tests were never intended and have never been validated for the use of evaluating teachers.” \nNew York is right on target with revamping its educational accountability system, which will allow for more correctly distinguishing schools with only a few problems from those that need serious assistance – and not threatening good teachers’ jobs in the meantime.