Sanity About Teacher Evaluation

Speaking of Earl Kim, Bruce Baker points me toward a great, short video of Kim testifying before the NJ Senate Education Committee on why the teacher evaluation "framework" developed by the unqualified Teacher Effectiveness Task Force will not work, and how to do it better:

I would challenge anybody at the Depart of Education to show us that the HSPA [High School Proficiency Assessment, the statewide standardized test juniors take] results are correlated to any lifetime outcomes: college persistence, lifetime earnings, unemployment, participation in civic life. It presumes teacher influence over test scores is larger than it is. It is true that, for school-based factors, the teacher's effect is the single most important variable. However - and one of the senators asked this question - "Is it really that big of a factor in total?" And the answer is "No."

Chiang and Schochet, two mathematic economists, explain that teacher effects only explain about 3 to 4 percent of the variation of student achievement on test scores. 3 to 4 percent. So what explains the other 97 to 96 percent? What are we really assessing?

Ooo, ooo, pick me, pick me!

We are assessing the ability of politicians to blame all of society's ills on teachers!

What do I win?