Overtesting is Driving Away the Best Teachers

 

(Are you a supporter of public education and concerned about the overtesting of our children in the Suburban Philadelphia area? If so, please like this new facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/paaphillyburbs)

Overtesting is driving away the best teachers. Ever wonder why there are so many new tests to assess our kids in the fall and spring (often called benchmark assessments)? The State is testing our children even more to use their scores to evaluate teachers & principals... Even if a teacher doesn’t teach a tested subject!

Pennsylvania Public School Teachers will be evaluated 50% by our kid’s data.

 

 
In a NY Times Op Ed, a teacher questions this practice: "… Why do we want a narrow, inaccurate, partial and costly evaluation of teachers through additional student testing? It flies in the face of the best that our “Common Core Standards” promises and demonizes teachers, chaining them to a myopic view of their job: pushing students to constantly meet meaningless short-term goals...If the purpose of evaluating teachers was to help improve instruction, we wouldn’t be testing children overtime and further narrowing curriculum to figure it out. We would be developing tools to measure the quality of the instruction teachers provide every day, and we would focus on only those qualities of sound teaching that are critical to student learning.

How long can our best teachers hang on in this plunge to the bottom? Sadly, I think we’ll find out sooner than we’d like."