Economic Policy Institute stresses caution over the use of test scores to judge teacher

[Orlandodem]

effectiveness. Not that Arne Duncan or Barack Obama care. They've sold teachers down the river. Dems will find out how hard it is to win without teachers on their side. Just sayin....

http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf

Executive summary
Every classroom should have a well-educated, professional teacher, and school systems should recruit, prepare, and retain
teachers who are qualified to do the job. Yet in practice, American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically
developing and evaluating teachers.
Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure can be remedied by calculating the improvement
in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading, and then relying heavily on these calculations to
evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.
While there are good reasons for concern about the current system of teacher evaluation, there are also good reasons
to be concerned about claims that measuring teachers’ effectiveness largely by student test scores will lead to improved
student achievement.

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. True, but easily ignored.

This is DU, after all, where we're just a bunch of highly-paid civil-service drones counting the months until we can retire, still young, on our exorbitant pensions.

Did you read the bit about how the single best predictor of fourth grade student outcomes was the student's fifth grade teacher?

[MadHound]

2. Thanks for posting this

Nice to see there are still rational people out there. A shame they're not in the White House.