All Testing All The Time

All standardized test taking all the time - you give us 185 schools days, we'll give you 8 standardized city tests for high school students and another batch of state standardized tests.

That's the new testing battery put in place in order to pull off the new plan to evaluate teachers:

New York City education officials are developing more than a dozen new standardized tests, but in a sign of the times, their main purpose will be to grade teachers, not the students who take them.

Elementary school students would most likely take at least one or two additional tests every year, beginning in the third grade. High school students could take up to eight additional tests a year, and middle school students would also have extra tests. These would be in addition to the state English, math and Regents exams that students already take.

The exams, which would begin rolling out as early as next academic year, are being created as part of a statewide overhaul of how teachers are evaluated. Under a law passed last year that helped the state win $700 million in a federal grant competition, known as Race to the Top, each school district must find a way to evaluate teachers on a scale from “ineffective” to “highly effective,” with teachers facing potential firing if they are rated ineffective for two years in a row.

Under the law, 40 percent of a teacher’s grade will be based on standardized tests or other “rigorous, comparable” measures of student performance. Half of that should be based on state tests, and half on measures selected by local districts. The remaining 60 percent is to be based on more subjective measures, including principal observations.

...

But New York City, which has made standardized tests a centerpiece of its school reform efforts, is pushing ahead. The city schools system is planning to use up to one-quarter of its $256 million share of the federal grant money for as many as 16 new standardized exams to cover science, math, social studies and English in the 3rd through 12th grades.

$256 million for test development, no money for teachers.

The test proponents say this will improve public education by showing us exactly, with scientific logic, who the "bad teachers" are.

And then we can fire them.

But only after humiliating them in public first as "bad teachers."

A fool-proof plan.

Except when the value-added measurements are wrong.

Which, given the margins of error in these things, is often.

Oh, yeah - this is going to end well.