David Gamberg is the superintendent of two neighboring districts on the North Fork of Long Island, Southold and Greenport. He shows here how bizarre it is to evaluate educators based on the test scores of students they never taught. This is sometimes called “shared attribution.”

He makes the point by using an analogy.

Suppose all doctors in the community were judged by the weight loss of every community member?

We will assess eye doctors, podiatrists, and pediatricians based on the results of data gleaned from a community’s ability to lose a specific amount of weight by a specific date on the calendar. You happen to be a pediatrician who has just begun your practice, and as such you work in a relatively poor community. Within the first few years of practice your license is revoked due to “poor performance.” You never get to a point in your career where you might consider opening a practice in a more affluent community. This, despite the fact that you are well respected, and have made significant inroads into improving the health and well being of community members in that less than wealthy neighborhood.
To further skew the validity of the measurement the fact remains that the weight loss data was conducted in a poor neighborhood, among community members who may not have attended college, and had less access resources that might bolster their chances of success. Sure, some community members rose above their circumstances and met their weight loss goal, but they were the exception to the rule. Thus, the eye doctors, podiatrists who also practiced in this community as well as the pediatricians who were held to this one size fits all standard suffered the personal and professional consequences of the poor performance of the patients within this area.

Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University posted this graphic on Twitter. It shows the flat lines and declines of U.S. scores on the international PISA test from 2000-2012.

https://twitter.com/ldh_ed/status/484388825645326337

Just think of the waste of billions of dollars for testing under both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Think of the children cheated of a real education. Think about the fact that Arne Duncan says that high-stakes testing is non-negotiable in any new Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Is it not the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over for a dozen years without success and to expect better results if you do it for another 7-10 years?

NPR broadcast a story that identified a genuine problem—the startling decline of people entering the teaching profession– but offered incoherence and confusion about the causes and solutions for the problem.

“Several big states have seen alarming drops in enrollment at teacher training programs. The numbers are grim among some of the nation’s largest producers of new teachers: In California, enrollment is down 53 percent over the past five years. It’s down sharply in New York and Texas as well.

“In North Carolina, enrollment is down nearly 20 percent in three years.”

Why?

Bill McDiarmid, dean of the University of North Carolina School of Education, “points to the strengthening U.S. economy and the erosion of teaching’s image as a stable career. There’s a growing sense, he says, that K-12 teachers simply have less control over their professional lives in an increasingly bitter, politicized environment.

“The list of potential headaches for new teachers is long, starting with the ongoing, ideological fisticuffs over the Common Core State Standards, high-stakes testing and efforts to link test results to teacher evaluations. Throw in the erosion of tenure protections and a variety of recession-induced budget cuts, and you’ve got the makings of a crisis.

“The job also has a PR problem, McDiarmid says, with teachers too often turned into scapegoats by politicians, policymakers, foundations and the media.”

All of this is true, although I don’t see much evidence that the economy is creating sizable numbers of high-paying middle-class jobs for new college graduates.

But the story goes on to quote Benjamin Riley, who previously worked at the NewSchools Venture Fund, a key ally of Secretary Duncan and a core actor in the corporate reform movement, promoting test-based teacher evaluation, non-union charter schools, and other policies that discourage teachers. While at NewSchools Venture Fund, Riley wrote frequently about how terrible teacher education programs are and how wonderful Common Core is.

Riley created a new group called “Deans for Impact,” consisting of 18 education school deans (including McDiarmid) committed to change. Exactly what those changes are is not yet clear.