A few weeks ago, I posted a video of David Berliner’s speech in Australia, in which he explained why teachers and teachers’ education programs should not be evaluated by standardized test scores. This, as you know, is the policy that was the centerpiece of the failed Race to the Top. Its main effect has been to create teacher shortages; many experienced teachers have left the profession and enrollments in teacher education programs has sharply declined since the introduction of “value-added modeling” (VAM).

 

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley has done all of us a favor by transcribing Berliner’s speech. You can find it here.

 

 

Here are a few (not all) of his reasons:

 

 

 

“When using standardized achievement tests as the basis for inferences about the quality of teachers, and the institutions from which they came, it is easy to confuse the effects of sociological variables on standardized test scores” and the effects teachers have on those same scores. Sociological variables (e.g., chronic absenteeism) continue to distort others’ even best attempts to disentangle them from the very instructional variables of interest. This, what we also term as biasing variables, are important not to inappropriately dismiss, as purportedly statistically “controlled for.”
In law, we do not hold people accountable for the actions of others, for example, when a child kills another child and the parents are not charged as guilty. Hence, “[t]he logic of holding [teachers and] schools of education responsible for student achievement does not fit into our system of law or into the moral code subscribed to by most western nations.” Related, should medical school or doctors, for that matter, be held accountable for the health of their patients? One of the best parts of his talk, in fact, is about the medical field and the corollaries Berliner draws between doctors and medical schools, and teachers and colleges of education, respectively (around the 19-25 minute mark of his video presentation).
Professionals are often held harmless for their lower success rates with clients who have observable difficulties in meeting the demands and the expectations of the professionals who attend to them. In medicine again, for example, when working with impoverished patients, “[t]here is precedent for holding [doctors] harmless for their lowest success rates with clients who have observable difficulties in meeting the demands and expectations of the [doctors] who attend to them, but the dispensation we offer to physicians is not offered to teachers.”
There are other quite acceptable sources of data, besides tests, for judging the efficacy of teachers and teacher education programs. “People accept the fact that treatment and medicine may not result in the cure of a disease. Practicing good medicine is the goal, whether or not the patient gets better or lives. It is equally true that competent teaching can occur independent of student learning or of the achievement test scores that serve as proxies for said learning. A teacher can literally “save lives” and not move the metrics used to measure teacher effectiveness.
Reliance on standardized achievement test scores as the source of data about teacher quality will inevitably promote confusion between “successful” instruction and “good” instruction. “Successful” instruction gets test scores up. “Good” instruction leaves lasting impressions, fosters further interest by the students, makes them feel competent in the area, etc. Good instruction is hard to measure, but remains the goal of our finest teachers.
Related, teachers affect individual students greatly, but affect standardized achievement test scores very little. All can think of how their own teachers impacted their lives in ways that cannot be captured on a standardized achievement test. Standardized achievement test scores are much more related to home, neighborhood and cohort than they are to teachers’ instructional capabilities. In more contemporary terms, this is also due the fact that large-scale standardized tests have (still) never been validated to measure student growth over time, nor have they been validated to attribute that growth to teachers. “Teachers have huge effects, it’s just that the tests are not sensitive to them.”