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Are test scores the right measuring tool for teachers?
The Obama administration wants schools to do a better job identifying which teachers are effective in the classroom and which ones are not. The administration is offering billions of dollars through its Race to the Top initiative to get school systems to adopt new evaluation systems. To be eligible for the money, states cannot have laws that prevent teacher evaluation from being tied to student test scores. Teachers' unions fought hard for those laws; they have long opposed using test results to evaluate teachers. But some state legislatures are scrapping their bans to get federal money.The concept is simple: take each student's test score at the beginning of the school year, compare that to their score at the end of the year, and the amount the score has grown is what the teacher added to the student's knowledge that year. Experts call it a "value-added" score.
Michelle Rhee, the public schools chancellor in Washington, D.C. says "In order to have the privilege of teaching kids you have to be able to show that you can significantly move their academic achievement levels, and if you can't show that, then you need to find another profession." Rhee launched a controversial evaluation system in Washington where test score growth counts as 50 percent of a teacher's annual performance score.
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/testing_teachers/judge.html