The LA Times has obtained standardized test results from the Los Angeles school district and is using that information to publish ratings of individual teachers. There’s little doubt that their methodology has flaws, but that’s an argument for better metrics and analysis, not shutting down this line of inquiry. I am a huge believer in public education — it’s probably the most successful government program ever launched — but there’s a bit of a black hole when it comes to accountability. There’s some understanding of which school districts and schools are better than others, but very little information on which teachers are good at their jobs and which ones aren’t.
A lot of people are complaining already that the teachers are being judged on the basis of performance on standardized tests and that there’s more to teaching than improving test performance. I’d agree, but judging them on that basis puts them in the same boat as their students. Students are judged based on their performance on standardized tests starting at an early age and ending when they apply to graduate school. If it’s not fair to judge a teacher based on how their students do on achievement tests, how is it fair to choose which kids get to go to magnet schools based on the results of those same tests?
It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.
Matthew Yglesias asks whether we should have a college version of the GED? There could be a test or series of tests you could take that gives you the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, or even an associates degree to start out. It seems like a logical idea to me — it would give the self-taught an opportunity to obtain needed credentials and provide real competition to regular universities and alternative schools like the University of Phoenix. I really think that everyone who wants a college education should have the opportunity to have one. That said, given all the lectures and course materials available online, the makings of a college education already exist if you have Internet access. What’s lacking is the granting of credentials once you’ve learned the material. It seems logical for someone to grant those credentials. On the other hand, if that happened, I suspect that many universities would pull down the courseware they currently post due to the new competition.
The Daily Beast has a list of anonymous college admissions administrators discussing the criteria they apply to winnow out applicants. Let’s face it, our cultural fixation on merit is quaint at best.
What I learned today: graduating from college and entering the workforce during a recession can have a lifelong negative impact on your earnings.
The New York Times has an op-ed on standardized tests that’s worth reading. Even as college administrators recognize that standardized test scores are an imperfect measure of the quality of college applicants, all of their incentives are tilted toward placing greater weight on test scores:
Consider the admissions director at our hypothetical college. He knows that college ranking systems take SAT’s and ACT’s into account. He knows that bond-rating companies look at the same scores when judging a college’s credit worthiness. And in lean times like these, he would be especially eager for a share of the so-called merit scholarship money that state legislators give students who test well.
It reminded me of a point Matthew Yglesias made with regard to the financial markets today:
Ever since the crash, there’s been a lot of self-serving talk from people in the business about how nobody could have foreseen this. That’s wrong. What would be more accurate — and more disturbing — is that it’s not clear that it actually would have been smart for people in the business to have behaved in a radically different manner even if they had understood the situation well. There are a lot of fields of endeavor where it’s more important to be in tune with the CW than it is to actually be correct, and this seems to me to mostly be one of them.
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