4/3/2012: From Betsy Hammond in the Oregonian:
Teachers at Reynolds Arthur Academy in Troutdale spurred the biggest gains in individual students’ reading and math scores of any elementary charter school in the nation the past two years. For that, a national charter group soon will hand each of them and their principal bonuses of $4,000 or more.
Many teacher unions, including the one in Oregon City that turned away millions of dollars in federally funded bonuses last fall, oppose rewarding teachers for raising student test scores.
But not Reynolds Arthur Academy’s non-union teachers….
They must teach to the test like crazy. Strong incentives have problems too.
Teaching to the test is not necessarily a problem. Depends on what the test does and does not cover, and what the alternative is.
Let a hundred flowers bloom, as the discredited Mao used to say. But really, this seems fine to me. Nobody forces the students to attend this school, right? (Except maybe their parents.) Let the other, regular schools demonstrate they are better. And the other charter and private schools.
Personally, I’d be very happy to see a statewide voucher program with 0.5 of regular funding, or even 1/3 if 0.5 is too high.
Of course, I don’t expect this to happen, and I expect to see Oregon’s rather mediocre performance on standardized test comparisons continue indefinitely.
The test as a linchpin is incredible incentive to teach to tests and even cheat on the tests. Any time you teach to a test, you’re not teaching the reasoning, you’re teaching the answers; you’re dictating for rote as opposed to actually educating people. Now that we’re seeing evidence of good teachers nationwide being removed because they’re unlucky enough to get the students who had artificially (and possibly unethically) inflated test scores the prior year, or a group of students who don’t have as good an ability (e.g., special needs) in a year after some high performers, the problems are becoming evident. Standardized testing is not a panacea; it’s barely an effective model of measurement. Examine students using tests that require something more than a bubble on a scan-tron form. Oh, wait, that would require actual expertise, time, and care in assessment, which we certainly can’t leave to the teachers trained to do such things through the mechanism of “grades,” can we?