<story><title>North Carolina teacher&apos;s resignation letter</title><url>http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/27/nc-teacher-i-quit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justin_vanw</author><text>It&apos;s fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests.&lt;p&gt;Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years.  Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks.&lt;p&gt;The reason testing is good isn&apos;t because it is somehow super accurate.  It is good because it keeps teachers honest.  Without testing, how do you measure teacher performance at all?  How can you tell if someone who is capable of teaching well isn&apos;t just being lazy or getting distracted?&lt;p&gt;So, if you aren&apos;t a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better.   Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s easy to point out problems.  It&apos;s useful and important that people find flaws and fault.  In this case, however, just pointing out the deficiencies in standardized testing doesn&apos;t help anyone unless it either leads to a more effective alternative, or improvements in standardized testing.  Standardized tests might be very imperfect at measuring teacher performance, but it&apos;s far better to use the tool we have than to just throw up our arms and assume that all teachers are equally competent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bud</author><text>&lt;i&gt;So, if you aren&apos;t a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the &lt;i&gt;entire issue&lt;/i&gt; in question, and then just blithely assuming you are correct.&lt;p&gt;In fact, the evidence which is staring us in the face indicates that you are not correct, and that we were far better off before we decided to let No Child Left Behind and a group of for-profit &quot;education&quot; companies co-opt our system and turn it into a giant standardized-test machine.&lt;p&gt;You want an alternative that works better? No problem. Go back to doing things the way we did them before January 2001. By the way, this would emphatically NOT mean that we had &quot;no metric at all&quot;, of course...we had testing before 2001. We just didn&apos;t structure our entire system around constant standardized testing and force teachers to teach to those tests, that&apos;s all. We also had other metrics, such as observing how students do in college.</text></comment>
<story><title>North Carolina teacher&apos;s resignation letter</title><url>http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/27/nc-teacher-i-quit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justin_vanw</author><text>It&apos;s fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests.&lt;p&gt;Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years.  Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks.&lt;p&gt;The reason testing is good isn&apos;t because it is somehow super accurate.  It is good because it keeps teachers honest.  Without testing, how do you measure teacher performance at all?  How can you tell if someone who is capable of teaching well isn&apos;t just being lazy or getting distracted?&lt;p&gt;So, if you aren&apos;t a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better.   Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s easy to point out problems.  It&apos;s useful and important that people find flaws and fault.  In this case, however, just pointing out the deficiencies in standardized testing doesn&apos;t help anyone unless it either leads to a more effective alternative, or improvements in standardized testing.  Standardized tests might be very imperfect at measuring teacher performance, but it&apos;s far better to use the tool we have than to just throw up our arms and assume that all teachers are equally competent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbooth</author><text>Software developer performance in the US has been terrible for many years as well.&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should institute some standardized tests?&lt;p&gt;And if you&apos;re gonna complain about how measuring KLOC doesn&apos;t make any sense, well, it&apos;s not enough to just point out problems.  You&apos;ve gotta point out solutions.  Be a team player.</text></comment>