There's more behind WASL scores than teachers
Do great test scores define a great teacher? After offering $2,100 merit-pay bonuses in Hillsborough County, Florida, a study revealed three-quarters of the so-called best teachers worked in affluent suburban schools. Predictably, only three percent of teachers in low-income schools, where students struggle the most, qualified for merit pay. Read more
In contract negotiations, the Kent School District has agreed to side with teachers in a focus on student achievement. We've devoted our lives, our passion and our careers to this goal, so it is reassuring that the district understands its importance.
Teachers know that when a school provides small classes, hires great teachers and gives our staff time to work on the issues facing individual students, achievement goes up. But at the bargaining table, the district has cut off discussions about reducing class size, or raising salaries significantly to compete in the Puget Sound region, or allowing teachers to spend more time on lesson planning or working with students before and after school.
The district's focus, instead, shifted immediately toward a punitive approach. The district has proposed defining achievement as evaluating teachers based on student scores on the WASL (or its replacement test).
Administrators should recognize their desire to evaluate teachers based on student test scores is, at best, overly simplistic.
Teachers don't control which students are in their classroom, or even their school. Students' families, district administrators and the community share responsibility for student learning, but would not face the punishment directed toward teachers under the district's evaluation scheme. The district's plan (which calls for evaluating and firing teachers based on whether they met the goals of "School Improvement Plans," defined by a school's WASL scores) would drive the best teachers away from hard-to-serve student populations that often face the greatest academic challenges. And such simplistic proposals shift the focus for evaluations from complex sets of professional skills and practices toward a single variable that is easy for administrators to check off.
The folly of such a scheme immediately becomes clear if you imagine two new teachers. One is assigned to a school dominated by the district's gifted students. The other is assigned to students who comprise the district's greatest academic challenges. The teachers pass out this year's standardized tests and wait for the results. Knowing nothing about the quality of the two teachers, who do you predict will fare better in their evaluation based on student test scores?