The role of testing in teacher evaluations is properly a complicated one. We should want reliable and accurate measures in place to track where our education system, including but not limited to teachers, is succeeding and where it's failing. But the "reliable and accurate" part of "reliable and accurate measures" is too often ignored by today's breed of education reformers, from the Secretary of Education on down, who want to make teachers' jobs dependent on student performance on tests that have not themselves been tested.
New York is currently fighting out the issue of teacher evaluations, and the state teachers union has won a round. Testing will definitely be a part of evaluations, but after Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Board of Regents tried to double the weight given to testing, the teachers union sued:
The court sided with the union Wednesday, saying just 20 percent of teachers' grades can be based on how much their students improved, or failed to improve, on state tests.
The judge also ruled the Department of Education made it too simple for teachers to be rated ineffective. The law calls for an evaluation system that judges teachers using "multiple measures."
The second 20 percent that officials had hoped to allocate to state tests is not yet a settled matter and may vary from place to place:
Justice Michael Lynch, who heard oral arguments Aug. 12, noted that the regulations do not prevent school districts from using other data that uses a "distinctly different measure of student achievement" for the second 20 percent. They will have to be developed locally through the collective-bargaining process, he wrote.
At Shanker Blog, Matthew Di Carlo writes of valued-added test-based evaluation in general:
This situation would seem to call for not simple “yes/no” answers, but rather proceeding carefully, using established methods of policy evaluation and design. That is not what is happening. Thanks in large part to Race to the Top, almost half of public school students in the U.S. are now enrolled in states/districts that already have or will soon have incorporated growth estimates into their evaluations. Most (but not all) of these states and districts are mandating that test-based productivity measures comprise incredibly high proportions of evaluation scores, and most have failed to address key issues such as random error and the accuracy of their data collection systems. Many refused to allow for a year or two of piloting these new systems, while few have commissioned independent evaluations of these systems’ effects on achievement and other outcomes, which means that, in most places, we’ll have no rigorous means of assessing the impact of these systems.
In New York, at least evaluations will be based on multiple factors, with the involvement of teachers in deciding on some pieces of the puzzle.