Ah! shift in agency from the standards to the educators. This represents a fundamental divide in ed reform. While ostensibly aiming for same target, target exists in parallel universes...

Speaks to Teemu's contrast: accountability is more for businesses while 'responsibility' is for educators and those in the human services.

The problem with observations is they have been too minimal. One of the key differences to high performing charters when compared to their urban peers has been the amount of observation and coaching involved in the classroom.

This is what happens when economists speak of teaching. They see it as merely controlling students and ensuring that they are all in their seats like good little cattle. Don't forget all of these VAM models came from agriculture. My students aren't cattle.

Could we not make the same argument about the test scores? If NAEP and TIMMS growth have been stagnant for the last 25 years doesn't that mean accountability based reform are a waste of money?

The idea that any employee should go through the year and not have an observation and be evaluated by their supervisor seems silly,

We needed a study for this.They are uncorrelated because they are different measures. That being said we do not pay enough attention to capacity of evaluators nor do we use teacher observations in growth models.

Just because we should doesn't mean we can. I just do not think enough unique variance year over year can be teased out from teacher effects

A good observation report should make the connection to student learning. Too often evaluators do not focus on the learning.

Actually a good teacher observation model is much more than a checklist approach. It is not a dichotomous measure as the author suggests

You can be an effective teacher and still have students score low on tests. They are two different measures. The idea that student scores are low so majority of teachers must be ineffective is a false claim.

Would you expect the majority of doctor and lawyers to be ineffective? No, people with decades of experience and 8-10 years of schooling are surprisingly good at their jobs.

We can not fire our way to greatness. Instead we should invest in our teaching corp.

Did the bloggers make the assertion. I do not think the authors did. In the abstract they clearly refer to this as an "article"

only going to be...this statement gets me. This is exactly what a teacher evaluation system should strive to be.

An effective feedback tool leads to growth. In fact we know from John Hattie's work that effective feedback has some of the largest impact on learning.

I want evaluation systems that are based on being effective feedback tools for teacher growth.

Here I agree. We need to make it easier to give principals control over hiring and firing. There needs to be some flexibility in tenure systems.

There is zero evidence that this is even statistically possible. In fact the AERA and a majority of Deans at Schools of Education have come out against this practice.

This is silly we need different leadership and instructional capacity rubrics for school leaders.

This is because SLO's are a failure. Trying to have all teachers base their goals on student growth is a fallacy. I know the "alternative" is to judge teachers solely on HST testing but then you have art teachers judged on reading scores...that's silly...so in an effort to create "objectivity" teachers have to right SLO's. These contribute to overtesting, fall victim to Campbell's Law, and make no sense.

Why can't a goal for an art teahcer be: "Create a community based art show that connects students to local artists..."

Because it can't be quantified.

SLOs need reform.

There is some statistical reasons for doing so. If you are going to use Value Added scores you need multiple years of data. Switching assessments reset the clock.

A delay was statistically required.

Why is this hard to believe? That a majority of teachers would be effective. This idea that we must have a witch hunt to "weed" out ineffective teachers makes NCTQ reports suspect.

Could you imaging saying the same thing about doctors or pilots? Wouldn't you want the vast majority of those flying you throw the sky or taking a scalpel to your skin to be effective or highly effective?

Connecting to standards and assessment was something baked into the DNA of national standards.

But wait...I thought your promise of accountability fixed the drop-out problem. If it is a problem still then it sounds like accountability based reform did not work.

This same kind of data could be gathered without annual testing. Newsflash: Being born white and rich has its privileges. Do we need to spend hundreds of millions each year to prove this point?

This is fear-mongering in conjecture. Include annual testing or graduation rates will plummet. Such a base rhetorical move.

Just because accountability is inescapable does not mean it has to be done incorrectly.

Says nobody ever who has had to waste countless hours doing SPAR reports.

Because we do not already spend in ordinate amount of time and treasure on accreditation?

Yes because we are all bad and hate improvement. More blame the teachers stuff.

So the leading experts on measurement could not agree on how to hold schools of education accountable for student learning and the government went ahead and did it anyway? That isn't inevitability that is stupidity.

This line is untrue. Any of the "economic" statistical models being pushed on education recognize the small but significant contribution teachers make is only after controlling for all other external elements. While technically true (again after poverty, language, parental income, parental education, etc) the contribution teachers make in predicting student performance explains only a little variance and this fluctuates greatly.

There still is not enough evidence, in fact much more against, that VAM and SPG are sensitive enough to parse out the variance teachers have on student test scores.

This is especially troublesome for teachers who work with the neediest or brightest students.