Recently, the state published report card grades for schools. My school earned a D due to low academic achievement. I'm concerned that our overall test scores (ACT and grade-level state tests in English and Math) could cause some teachers to be "written up" for poor performance. And as a math teacher who teaches math tp the grades that are being tested, do I have anything to worry about?
Test scores are a terrible way to judge teaching skills. Low test scores are strongly associated with poverty, not teaching skills. So a low-skilled teacher in a high-income area might get higher than average scores, and a highly-skilled teacher in a low-income area would likely get lower scores. What a shame it would be to punish the teacher with low scores. That said, your district might be using test scores as part of their teacher evaluation matrix. I'd check with your union to get more information.
My state has had school report cards and public performances published for years. They also rank all of the schools in the state and publish the lists in the biggest newspapers in the state. Schools that show the lowest performance have been taken over by the state. They sent “experts” in to give the teachers more work to do so that they can’t actually do the work with kids that they need to do. All of that really doesn’t do anything besides stress everyone out. They did finally start looking at a student’s performance vs. their past performance instead of comparing different groups of kids and different schools, but it’s still completely contrived. I taught English, and my husband taught math. We were in the two areas where the most pressure is with testing. It wasn’t fun at all. DH managed to switch to computers for a few years, and I switched to an intervention program for a year. Less stress, but still not great. We decided to retire as soon as we could just to avoid all of the nonsense.
