Nevada has to eliminate a provision in the law that prohibits student testing data to be used in teacher evaluations. Eliminating this prohibition puts Nevada in competition for between $60 million and $175 million in additional federal funds.
The legislature has approved a bill that allows student testing data to be used, but the governor is considering vetoing it because the law seems to say that teachers should not be disciplined if their students perform poorly (i.e., don't learn anything).
The provision reads,
The information must be considered, but must not be used as the sole criterion, in evaluating the performance of or taking disciplinary action against an individual teacher, paraprofessional or other employee.So the question is whether or not the data can be used to dicipline bad teachers. At the very least, it appears that the new law would prohibit student testing data from being the sole criterion used to discipline teachers. If other criteria must be used, then what would be necessary to discipline or to get rid of bad teachers? Teacher attendence?
Still, legal writing can be confusing, so the main concern is whether or not teachers can be disciplined if they fail to actually teach their students anything. If teachers can't be disciplined (or fired) if they can't teach students, what is the point?
Additionally, the law needs to go a step further. Removing the old prohibition is meaningless if the school districts don't take action and use student testing data as part of teacher evaluations. In fact, we'd bet they won't do it unless ordered. Nevada needs to evaluate teachers using testing data because we need to know who the good teachers are and how to make average teachers even better. Importantly, we need to get bad teachers into a new profession.
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In your last paragraph you say that, "Nevada needs to evaluate teachers using testing data because we need to know who the good teachers are and how to make average teachers even better." This is a very naive statement at best. I am an Honors science teacher with students who always do well on standardized tests. What about teachers without Honors students? Should these teachers be penalized because of their student's socioeconomic status? Education is not a simple commodity that can have a business plan applied to it and simply determine if one is successful or not. Education is a multi-faceted beast that may only show results in light of a student's progress long after they are out of the classroom. Am I against standardized testing? No. I am very much a proponent. I am however, against using it as the sole criteria for evaluating a teacher's performance. Other factors, such as class composition, student gains in learning, complexity of the subject matter, or lesson content must also be considered.
Hey Brian -
The points you raise are certainly valid. There will be big differences between Honours students and those students with a history of underperforming.
However, there is a test that takes that into account -- Value Added Assessment Tests.
More info is here -- http://www.npri.org/publications/its-time-to-grade-the-teachers or http://www.ppionline.org/documents/Value_Added_Testing.pdf or http://www.sas.com/govedu/edu/opp_hurdles.pdf but let me try and give a brief overview.
Basically value-added assessments don't measure how much a student knows (as you correctly point out how much a student knows at the end of the year is determined by many factors and some, if not most, are out of the teachers control), it measures how much more the student knows at the end of the year (how much value has been added by the teacher).
As Patrick writes in that first link - "Teachers are evaluated based on how much knowledge their individual students gain over the course of the year, rather than their students meeting or exceeding some preset benchmark.
Individual students' test scores are compared with their own scores from past years — not with other students' — and a trend line predicting future student achievement emerges."
I also agree with you when you say - Education is a multi-faceted beast that may only show results in light of a student's progress long after they are out of the classroom.
That's why I think it's so important for parents to have control over where their child attends school. There's no way a gov't bureaucrat or one size fits all system can determine what is best for each indvidual child in a system that is so "multi-faceted." But parents deal with their children everyday. They have the best info about their child and whether the child's teacher/school is a good fit and getting the job done.
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