A warning to college profs from a high school teacher

Re:A warning to college profs from a high school teacher by philwelch on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @02:54PM (#5209063)

If you randomly assign students to teachers (which is already more or less the case) and each teacher has a large enough sample size of students (which is already more or less the case), aggregating the performance of all of a teacher's students will say more about the teacher than about these confounding variables, since all the other factors would be shared between all teachers at the school.

Of course there are other problems to be solved. But the fact that there are no effective controls whatsoever on teacher performance, and that teaching is not a highly selective profession, is still a problem.

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Re:A warning to college profs from a high school teacher by mazelife on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @04:00PM (#5209496)

I address this further down thread, but in a nutshell: there are effective, fair ways of evaluating teacher performance [1]. And I'm all for them. Standardized test performance is not on of those ways. Furthermore, in a lot of the schemes currently being put into place, teachers are not evaluated by test scores at the school level, but at the district or state level. Teacher evaluation is necessary, but it's not easy. Trying to shortcut things by asking standardized test score to do more than they are capable of (which is not much) is exactly the kind of thing that drives good people out of teaching.

[1] See: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-a...

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Re:A warning to college profs from a high school teacher by yuushi on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @01:48AM (#5211787)

That sounds fine for intra-school comparisons, but as far as I know, the teacher comparisons are inter-school, which is a whole lot less random in student assignments.

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