Students Take the Test for Teachers

New York City education officials are developing up to 16 new standardized tests for 3rd through 12th graders. But these tests, unlike other standardized tests, will rank teachers, not students.

Costing roughly $25 million to create, these tests will be added to the battery of standardized taks that US students already take. In  The New York Times' current "Room for Debate," editors ask, What have we learned about tests as accountability tools for teacher performance? Why do school systems believe that tests are the answer to reforming education?

Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of Education at Stanford University, kicks of the debate by reminding us that there's long been a saying that "US students are the most tested, and the least examined, of any in the world." She also reminds us that top-scoring countries in student achievement, like Finland and Korea, have eliminated crowded testing schedules and improved their scores by doing so.  And the inevitable result? Not higher scores, smarter kids, or better teachers. Rather, teaching and curriculum further narrowed further, as teachers — and the surrounding system — focus more intensely on these tests.

All true, but as Michael J. Petrilli, another debater and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, point out, at least New York City is trying. Granted, as he puts it, city officials are pretty much "attacking a fly with a sledgehammer." Still, as Petrilli explains, "it’s only common sense that one element of [teacher] evaluations should be an assessment of how much students are learning under the teacher’s charge." For Petrilli, the answer isn't a move "to centralized, rules-based, bureaucratic evaluation models, as indicated by New York City’s decision to add a dozen new tests to collect more teacher performance data." Rather, the approach out to be to simply trust the principal.