Clinton Says ‘No Evidence’ That Teachers Can Be Judged By Student Test Scores
Source: Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton November 16 at 4:19 PM
Hillary Rodham Clinton said she is opposed to using student test scores as a way to judge a teacher’s performance, dismissing a key feature of education policies promoted by the Obama administration.
Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, made the remarks during a closed-door meeting with 25 teachers and paraprofessionals that was organized by the American Federation of Teachers on Nov. 9 in New Hampshire.
Liz Lynch, a teacher from North Bergen, N.J., told Clinton that she was in favor of teachers being held accountable but that in recent years, overtesting has consumed her school.
“Students have been made to take paper and pencil tests in PE and music just so they can be evaluated,” Lynch said, according to a transcript released by AFT on Monday. “Teachers spend an inordinate amount of time giving benchmark tests to prepare for more tests. And all the testing is crowding out time my students and I used to spend on cooperative learning, critical thinking and project-based learning.”
Read the transcript here
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/clinton-says-no-evidence-that-teachers-can-be-judged-by-student-test-scores/2015/11/16/303ee068-8c98-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html
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Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Wow.
yardwork
(61,622 posts)
houston16revival
(953 posts)Did reading early modern literature help my future?
Physics?
Calculus taught by someone who barely understands it?
Reading, writing, math, critical thinking. Personal finance too.
Personality, because you're going to face a lot of different ones, and
some bad ones, and some drama queens and kings.
Textbooks are mostly a waste of money. The publishers have us right where
they want us.
School Principals should all be fired. Halve their salaries and make them teach.
They are a bleed on humanity.
NotHardly
(1,062 posts)I am sorry that even with the help of your teachers that you were unable to make the linking connections of those subjects, your life, the lives of others, this world, and you ended up so bitter.
houston16revival
(953 posts)bitter, but there was a lot of useless education. If we fail to teach basic math
to our kids so they can make better financial decisions for themselves, fail to teach
them to read well, and think well logically, and enough about the world to be upright
citizens not easily bamboozled, and we fail to give them job skills --- what have
we gotten for our educational investment?
Reading three paragraphs of Othello and a passage from the Iliad for students
who can barely read USA 2Day is just a waste of time, resources, money.
Better to build on the basics than to reach for heights they can't understand.
I'm an economics major. It teaches no skills. it doesn't even warn you about
the political aspects of the various schools of economics. When you say "political
economy" in this country all the right wingers hear "MARX!" Yet all economics
involves government and laws, so that's what it is: political economy, as it is often
known in Europe, or the London School.
rogerashton
(3,920 posts)One thing you might learn from economics is to make rational choices!
That said, you are right that it is political economy, and that many economics teachers neglect that. And that people who refuse to learn from Marx impoverish themselves.
My experience of secondary school was a bit like yours, actually. (This was 50 years ago, understand.) I did find that reading Shakespeare helped to make me a good writer -- but I read it on my own initiative in the wrong order. I was a junior reading "MacBeth" and was told, oh, that's for the senior year. But I relied on the classic comics version of the Iliad and I can't say I regret it.
Nevertheless -- don't neglect the indirect benefits of your educational experiences. Obviously you can write pretty well. Having Otello read to you could at least give you a sense of how different language can be, at different times and places. Try reading Adam Smith with that in mind. Keep your OED handy as you do it. (By the way, Smith was an enormous influence on Marx, though sometimes in a negative way.)
Well -- maybe your choice of economics as a major is a Nash-equilibrial best response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_response
houston16revival
(953 posts)It was dad's and his boss's choice, and the quickest way out of a place I didn't want to be.
I regret every moment spent studying business. I wanted to be a journalist. I was an
English major at one point.
Economics didn't improve my writing, give me business math or accounting skills, or
jive with psychology. It is in my view useful to the understanding and analysis of history.
Another of my almost majors - history.
I was told the degree would be useful. Boy were they wrong.
tk2kewl
(18,133 posts)
DamnYankeeInHouston
(1,365 posts)I survived 33 years teaching elementary school in HISD.
There was a well known anti war poster when I was young. It said, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." I'd like to reprint that poster, but change "war to "school."
Although I agree with Hillary's words, I cannot trust her sincerity.
murielm99
(30,741 posts)seems to be today's meme. I see it all over DU today, posted by Bernie supporters.
More groupthink.
Chef Eric
(1,024 posts)That's what I keep reading. So, which is the larger "herd," and more susceptible to a herd mentality?
It seems to me that if anybody is engaging in groupthink , it is the people who trust Clinton regardless of where her money comes from, regardless of her vote for the IWR, and regardless of her support for the DOMA.
It also seems to me that NOT trusting a politician is a healthy thing, particularly when there seem to be valid reasons behind it.
mpcamb
(2,871 posts)
LiberalElite
(14,691 posts)Don't be assigning "groupthink" to a comment when the Clinton fans can swarm around a dissenting poster like a bunch of locusts. People who live in glass houses and all that....
Igel
(35,317 posts)First, there's not a single thing called "critical thinking." You need to have a set of facts at hand and the methods used in each discipline. There are some commonalities, but in some research English professors, biochem researchers, tenured engineers, experienced research chemists all came in at the high-school or early college level for critical thinking outside their area of expertise. Oddly, their level of thinking was about where they stopped studying a given topic.
PhD chemist at an Ivy League school? Sorry, you come in at the 11th grade level for critical thinking in history because that's the last history class you took. However superb your thinking skills are in chemistry.
As for reading, I have kids in dual credit English who can't read at the 8th grade level when given a text where every sentence matters. They can read and digest 100 pages a night and do a good job analyzing the text. Give them one page for 45 minutes and they can't follow it. Again, different skill set needed for different tasks.
Logic is typically math. Close reading is typically science. History has its own methods.
I'll use my first tutee from decades ago, shortly after I graduated college. He never worried about a particular skill because he could get by without it--he didn't really need it and he was in his early 30s, married with a couple of kids. Then his 3rd-grade daughter started asking him to read things and he couldn't, because his reading level wasn't up to the middle of 3rd grade. He was embarrassed. Yet he'd gotten to be 32 or 33 and found that he had no real need for reading past 2nd grade. My second round of tutoring was a kid--19 or 20--who stopped being tutored when he had learned all he'd need--as much as his brother, who was making good money. He was a Cambodian boat person and had mastered enough English to be able to take orders at McDonald's. Like his brother.
My point in saying this? If you don't have a skill, you won't use it. You'll survive, and, well, obviously it's not an essential skill. if you have a skill, you will use it and might even come to depend on it. You can't read at the 4th grade level, you find ways of coping. You can't speak beyond basic English, you find ways of coping. If your coping strategies are seriously flawed you might come to recognize them; if not, you might never notice, and that's fine.
I feel test scores shouldn't be prime decsion on how teachers are doing.that is why i critzed bush's no child left behind.
however i don't trust clinton is being truthful here.
Chemisse
(30,813 posts)She probably just wants to swing with the tide.
DamnYankeeInHouston
(1,365 posts)Chemisse
(30,813 posts)I am just a few years out from retirement, but if I was just starting as a teacher, I think I'd find a new career. The testing is ridiculous, as is the public ridicule, and the lack of appreciation within the school systems.
DamnYankeeInHouston
(1,365 posts)LovingA2andMI
(7,006 posts)This one was easy but, supporting the #FightFor15, hard for her.....
Cassiopeia
(2,603 posts)In 2007 she was doubling down and trying to get pre k component to NCLB.
This is another one of those instances were Hillary has only very recently "evolved."
riversedge
(70,239 posts)Igel
(35,317 posts)The data show that it's an insane, foolish policy that's hurting far more than it helps. She follows the data.
Back when it was passed with Bush II's and Ted Kennedy's insistence, Diane Ravitch was an ardent supporter of NCLB. The best data and analyses of that data said it would help students far more than it could ever hurt them. She followed the data.
It's not wrong to change your mind. It's a horrible thing to refuse to change your mind or at least accept the possibility of being wrong when the data say otherwise.
NCLB, however, gives the central government a huge say and outsized power over education in the US. And only a humble fool in love with democracy would dare to abrogate or annul such a handy source of power. Few politicians so love democracy as to willingly yield power to those they don't control; they typically only like decentralization when it weaks an enemy or strengthens a safe ally.
Oddly, returning to Ravitch's views, everybody likes to cite her opposition to NCLB. However, the last time I checked up on her views on education they were such that I doubt most DUers would even pause to think perhaps they were an idea whose time had come. But true to form, she follows the data.
Cassiopeia
(2,603 posts)However, I think it's also fair to point out that Clinton was on the wrong side of NCLB for nearly 8 years before she evolved.
It is part of her record.
rpannier
(24,329 posts)But that too was started by Bill when he started that national teachers licensing bit
That, and his support for charter schools in the 90's were the first giant leaps toward the idiocy we have now
fbc
(1,668 posts)to evaluate teachers based on how much they make.
polynomial
(750 posts)“My education is the only thing holding me back from learning”.
Einstein
This gives me a laugh and chuckle while reading various lectures, blogs and tutorials or books, manuscripts, Master thesis, or PhD thesis across the Internet salted with this famous saying, it rings very true.
What is becoming very interesting is mixed in the trend of the so called Creative Commons publications. More and more international people are sharing information at an extraordinary pace.
Perhaps even the University system realize the teaching methods have been ass backwards.
The redistribution of knowledge is quickening, as one comment about Shakespeare’s play Othello fiction of the time of great tyranny or obsessions in government, the Church for power in science and discovery.
An important time of obstinacies now called conservative, or free thinking used to be called liberal, in that is the world flat or not, a special “cr-isis” in the church, government or the so called feudal system. That system now reformed called capitalism.
Our ancients looked to the heavens, that was their television…
Android3.14
(5,402 posts)I have to disagree.
Many other factors are important, including but not limited to the location, socio-economic status and education of the parents, special needs population and local culture, but the presence or absence of a teacher is a key factor in academic success and some teachers are better better at the task than others, and a few teachers are simply awful.
It's like saying the recovery rate of a surgeon's patients has nothing to do with choosing the person who is going to perform a triple bypass.
TexasBushwhacker
(20,192 posts)under the current circumstances. I personally experienced principals assigning "honors" classes to their favorites and remedial classes to teachers they didn't like. If anything, struggling students deserve the best teachers. Smart student generally do well regardless of their teacher's proficiency
Francois9
(54 posts)Government and school officials love testing. It doesn't cost much (compared to raising salaries and reducing class sizes) and it makes it look like they're doing something.
