May I make a suggestion regarding rating teachers?

[hedgehog]

Somewhere in the metric take account the cumulative absenteeism of their students. A kid who has missed 40 days in kindergarten isn't ready for 1st Grade. If he misses another 40 days in 1st Grade, he's behind when starting 2nd grade.

The teachers can't make sure the students show up for school. Maybe instead of hiring administrators to design tests and compile test scores, we should hire social workers to identify kids at risk and make sure they actually show up to class.

[MichiganVote]

1. You get the gold star. Schools are letting go of social workers to make room the budgets for testing

[yurbud]

2. I would add something else: working with people aint making widgets

All of these ''measurement'' pressures are coming from business people who are used to measure success and failure in terms of profits and stock prices. If people buy the product (or more often if they cook the books a certain way), profits and stock prices will go up.

Teachers, social workers, psychotherapists and others who work with people know there are too many variables to guarantee the outcome.

The difference between teaching and other jobs is like the difference between driving a car and riding a horse. The car responds predictably to inputs. The horse only does so some of the time. There are better and worse riders, but how well one does with a particular horse doesn't tell the whole story.

[Sherman A1]

3. I believe that there is a supervisory system already

established with an evaluation system built in to it.

It may not be perfect, but I bet there is no perfect system.

I think we just stick with the current system until some other one is proven to be superior.

[hedgehog]

4. The current system doesn't tell us what we need to know to

ensure that every child is being properly taught. I for one don't believe that everyone should go to college. Nor do I buy the mantra that we are "falling behind in math and science". If so, why has productivity increased year after year? However, we need for every citizen to be able to read with understanding, able to do arithmetic, understand how to read a graph and have a basic knowledge of American history. The ability to balance a checkbook and understand a loan agreement would also be good. The greatest teacher in the world can't do a thing with a child who isn't there. My sister is a school nurse in a middle class district, and she has some students who are missing 30% of the time for dumb stuff like missing the bus.