A Manufactured Obsession with Measuring

A parent approached me to tell me that at a school district community meeting a few weeks ago, she was impressed by both the passion and knowledge displayed by my badass mom and me. She asked how my son was doing in kindergarten and I told her that he loved it and was doing an excellent job. I worried that he would stagnate because he is ahead academically when he came in, but the way that his teacher works with him and encourages him to use the same strategies that she is teaching the class in order to solve more advanced problems (like sounding out multisyllable words or solving more complex math equations in his head) has led to massive growth. He is also doing well socially.

She asked me questions about teachers and how my son's teacher seemed to be so good at differentiating, where her kids were not having that experience, even with smaller class size at a private school. She is considering making a switch for her kids, to their neighborhood public school. We got to talking about measuring effective teaching and I said that I didn't stand behind any measurements of teachers that use test scores as the primary measure, and she agreed.

I then told her that my sister, in a different state, teaches in a very challenging school and isn't judged in the same way, that while test scores are examined, and evaluations do happen, they just don't make as big of a deal about it and they focus on building stability and keeping the environment positive. So this parent asks me "then how do they measure teacher effectiveness?"

I realized at that point that this language has been brought into our local education dialogue thanks to that horrible grant from the Gates Foundation and their "Empowering Effective Teachers" program. Thanks for nothing. Who is being empowered, and who is being disenfranchised? Administration is being empowered. Testing companies are being empowered. Pearson education has a LOT of power. Teachers are powerless. Teachers, forced to give more and more standardized tests, spend a greater percentage of their time telling students that they are unable to offer any assistance. Time spent testing is time not connecting. The question of how teacher effectiveness is measured has gotten so entrenched in our everyday education chat--because we were speaking from one education-minded parent to another, not teacher to teacher--that even a person who just finished telling me how excited she was about the concept that a public school teacher could better serve her children's needs has no problem questioning how another teacher in another public school is being measured. Even though she agreed that test scores do not tell the whole story, the concept of measuring effectiveness is so ingrained in the public mindset around here that she had no problem questioning another district that doesn't do it the same way.

My response regarding my sister and her effectiveness: "They just don't obsess over it like we do here." And yet, my sister gets excellent results both in the factors that can be measured numerically and in those that cannot. Without having an Office of Teacher Effectiveness.