What can you say about the President of the United States?

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The metrics for most (trade)unions are a very low standard the worker needs to meet to keep his/her job. It is definitely NOT job performance, as in a guy who goes above and beyond, that keeps his job in the trade industries. Showing up for work everyday is not really a measurement of job performance as it is attendance only.

UPS is a different monster altogehter. Those guys do work hard and work long hours as well. Not sure how their union works though. At USPS on the other hand, it is in your best interest NOT to work hard as their is no reward for hard work other than bad feet and carpal-tunnel.....

 

The thing is that teaching is a very difficult thing to measure. It's an art as much as a science. Happy students don't necessarily mean good teaching is occurring. POd students ALSO don't mean that bad teaching is occurring. And vice versa on both of the above.

The understandable desire to evaluate teachers can lead to "drive by evaluations" that do not take important components of the situation into account.

This teacher, for example, was caught on what is probably the worst day of her professional career. While it is easy to say that she's an uninformed idiot, we have no record or data on how she's done over the last several years of her career. We merely have a 9 minute snapshot in time.

 

That is one of the least bad ways of evaluating. It still has plenty of problems. First, how much can a test measure? Secondly, I have yet to meet a principal who has the knowledge of the different subjects to be able to create a relevant test or the time to check through them and thirdly it doesn't fully take into account the students' ability to learn. There are plenty of students who learn lots just by being given a text book and the teacher can't really take much credit and there are students that don't seem to learn whatever the teacher does. Fourthly, pretty soon the teachers will know what is on the test and unless the tests are huge we would quite easily be able to focus solely on teaching for the test.

As for advancing them, we are doing something similar now but the problem would be if a student maybe reaches a C on the "pre-test" but really wants and A. They have the knowledge already to pass the course but not to ace it. What to do with those?

Obviously it couldn't be for individual schools, that would be horribly unfair to all involved. That system would need a complete state/government backed program to give the same test to all students starting the same course. It would be quite expensive, are you willing to spend that much money teachers? It would basically be having someone else do and be paid for the job teachers are already being, poorly, paid.

These are just the most obvious problems with what is admittedly one of the least bad ideas I have heard about but I can still see why the teachers' union are negative. Nice to see some constructive ideas though.

 

We have these tests here in Alberta. They are called Provincial Achievment Tests for grades 3, 6, 9 and in Grade 12 the final exams are known as Diploma exams.

As was mentioned, what can one test measure? Multiple choice is good and all but there's some things it can't measure. Essay tests measure other things but they also can't measure everything, and they take a HELLUVA long time to mark with anything close to reliability, fairness, and accuracy. How do you use these sorts of tests to measure speaking skills? Presentation skills? It gets dicey.

Plus, many factors outside the teachers' control can come into play. The socioeconomic and cultural makeup of the school and class are huge factors in student success.

The Diploma exams here are mandatory for core academic classes. They count for 50% of the students' final grades. Let me tell you, quite often teachers end up "teaching to the test", not in a dishonest way, but we spend a lot of time looking at released exams from the past and working toward having our students be able to tackle the kinds of tasks that have been thrown at students before.

In a nutshell, it's not that easy, and professionals (and parents!) have been struggling for decades if not centuries trying to determine the best way to instruct and evaluate students. The debate isn't going to end anytime soon.

 

Le sigh. There are measurements in place -- teacher reviews and such by administration. But they are usually only invoked if the administration is out to hose the teacher over. It's a method of laying a paper trail to intimidate the teacher into leaving. It's quite subjective. But there are efforts to evaluate teachers, and I have to concede some of them are done in good faith.

 

I am horribly intrigued that me and LKD who live in completely different parts of the world who hold WILDLY different views on just about everything can have such very similar experiences and complaints about the teaching job. It leads me to believe that we are maybe not barking up the wrong tree...

 

As someone who has just recently come out of school I find it hard to believe you could evaluate the quality of a teacher through a test. My two favorite teachers, and who I thought were the best in the school, didn't always teach by the book or what was strictly in the curriculum. They made you interested and made you think, and that has to count for something. One of them was very friendly to his students and motivated even the most lazy person to participate. There are things you just can't measure in a teacher and it isn't fair to penalize them just because some other teacher sticks to the basics just so their students will do good on a test as opposed to actually learning and caring.

 

+1

Geez, I thought BTA was an American citizen. We did EXACTLY what BTA suggests in the US - giving a test at the beginning and end of the year to assess improvement. It's the primary means of measure in "No Child Left Behind". Remember that?

The problem is exactly what joacqin points out - teachers then teach to the test. Students actually learn LESS than before, because subjects not covered in the test are given short shrift during the year.

NCLB tested Reading, Math, and Science. So schools geared their curriculum to those three subjects, and greatly reduced the amount of time spent teaching things like history, social studies, spelling, composition writing, and health, to name just a few. If it's not on the test, it's not taught in the classroom. While I'll be the first to admit that I think Reading Comprehension, Math, and Science are very important, all those other subjects being "left behind" actually reduces what the child learns during the year.

 

I'm curious as to why "teaching to the test" is so horrible. Doesn't it make sense that the "test" covers the curriculum that the students are supposed to know? Is the concern that electives will get shorted as people focus on the "test"? If so, I'm OK with that. Electives by definition are optional. If someone wants to learn how to draw, they can join an after school art class.

 

History, composition, health, etc. are electives? Where did you go to school?

 

That is my point. All of those are required classes so if they are teaching to the test aren't they teaching what you need to know about all of them. I don't see what is being left out by teaching to the test.

 

We have national tests in English, Math and Swedish and I am very fond of the one I do in English. It gives me something to lean on in my grading of the students. Although the test is new every year I know exactly what they are asking for and I am teaching to the test. That works fine in English though as the test is divided into four parts: The ability to communicate by speaking and writing and the ability to understand spoken and written English.

Much harder to make a single test to check everything in a history or social science course. The main problem is as has been pointed out before, not all knowledge can be tested in a test. The ability to argue a point? To gather information from different sources, the ability to evaluate different sources. Facts are a small part of school nowadays.

 

They were all part of the standard class regimen where I went to school. Basically we HAD to take English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies(various History classes) and Gym(health was part of gym, 4 weeks of the year you spent in class learning about health). The "electives" were Languages(French, Spanish or Latin), Art, Music, Computers or a part-time Vocational/Technical program at the county Vo-Tech school. I actually choose the Tech option of "Computer Maintenance".