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I don't know how any of this could surprise anyone. Testing has become the end all of every aspect of teaching these days. I'm very glad my daughter is not part of the fiasco by having to take them. I refuse to have her participate in testing.
lol @ teacher cheating on state tests. And this is why my wife was laid off and the 'cheaters' stay teaching, all because they have tenure. Oh brother, stop rewarding the these people folks.
Its is deplorable. But its the inevitable result when you abolish the normal curve by legislative fiat.
Research has show that with hard work you can raise the test scores of about 90% of the population(excluding the special education kiddos) to 1 standard deviation above the mean or to about the 84th %ile. You cannot raise it above that for the normal population unless the ability of the kid is already at that.
Putting teacher performance on test scores without at the same time making realistic estimates of all childrens' academic potential is folly. Human's abilities to perform in any task vary from very low to very high; everyone has disabilities and cannot perform at the 100% level in everything. My daughter got a 750 on the specific writing test of the GRE's, but I had to pay $900 to have her tutored through high school algebra; my son majored in math and physics, but his writing abilities are completely average(around the 50% level).
Matching test scores to teacher performance can be done, but only if you make allowances for the learning potential of each child in the class based on a number of factors, of which school ability is just one of them.
Any other way will eventually lead to lowered quality. Not only the poor teachers will quit, but many of the high quality ones who are being asked to do things that they know are simply impossible will find other lines of work. This whole pattern will lead to the demise of the entire education structure in the United States. No one can know what the fallout will be, but it won't be good ultimately.
And...... we can look forward to a serious teacher shortage in about 10 years if this keeps up. People don't mind working hard at difficult tasks. People won't work continually at impossible tasks.
I think it's because the "carrot/stick" approach is heavy on the stick part.
Schools are punished if they don't improve and money is taken away.
The pressure is on to do well regardless. Cheating, lowering standards fits the bill.
It would be so much better to use the carrot approach.
Give the schools money to operate and reward the improvement rather than punish it.
There SHOULD be objective assessments used to evaluate teachers. BUT, the key is to have COMPREHENSIVE, MULTI-FACETED assessments; not one single multiple-choice only test. Allow kids to demonstrate knowledge in more ways than just MC and have a couple of different tests throughout the year. Another important thing that needs to happen is have the testing agency-I guess its ETS for everybody, right?-be the ones to administer the freaking test(s). It makes no sense for teachers and school administrators placed in the position of administering some other agencies test. If the schools themselves are not the ones administering the tests, there is no chance for them to be tempted to fudge answers or results. I, for one, would be ECSTATIC if I no longer had to administer ETS tests on behalf of ETS.
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