• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

Huge academic cheating scandal in Atlanta

But, assuming teacher A´s students are comparable to teacher B´s students (i.e. just as lazy or motivated, just as smart or dumb etc), which they ought to be within the same year at the same school, if A´s students score better than B´s students, wouldn´t that mean A is better than B?

Not at any school I've ever been to. Classes tend to be divided by ability to some degree. Do you really want to teach the same way to a class of kids who easily grasp algebra as you do to a class that has a hard time with the word algebra? No, so you divide out the kids based on ability and teach according to their level.

But even then, if you take two classes with similar test scores at the beginning of the year you still have problems. What if one class has to keep changing rooms because the school has heater problems, so every day they spend five minutes extra getting to the right room and settling in for the day. That's around 10% of the teacher's instruction time eaten up by poor facilities. And what if one school has more frequent interruptions for police searching lockers and pulling kids out for questioning in criminal investigations. Or locking down the school for false bomb scares, or real gun possession on campus. Or if they walk in on test day to a bunch of kids who thought "wake and bake" was a good idea for the blow-off test that doesn't affect them.

The point is that a teacher has about 50 minutes a day with the student and that time may easily be decreased by outside influences and the quality of instruction during that time may well be outside of the teacher's control. And then you test that "performance" on one day that the teacher has little control over.

So, yeah, they get a bit pissy when you try to say they aren't doing their job because the test scores aren't working out.
 

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom