Sinquefield pushing it, but new study shows using test scores to evaluate teachers doesn't work

It appears likely that Missouri voters will soon decide whether teachers should be evaluated and paid based on scores their students make on standardized tests.

Retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield has poured more than $1.3 million into an effort to put the issue, coupled with the elimination of teacher tenure, on the ballot.

The push across the country to make teachers "accountable" has led to the creation of value-added formulas that supposedly show the contributions that teachers make to the test scores of their students. What most of them have shown is that the highest scores are posted by the teachers who manage to get the best students.

Furthermore, as you might expect, these formulas do not take into account any of the other factors that go into test scores- everything from a student's poverty level to abuse at home, emotional problems, or even being under the weather on the day of the big tests.

Even without the ballot initiative, Missouri has been moving in the direction of basing part of a teacher's evaluation on test scores and the reason is purely financial. The Obama Administration's Education Department has made it clear that if you do not make scores a part of the process, you are not going to be receiving any federal money, and that, of course, is the language that speaks with the most clarity to our state officials. The moves have also been necessary in order for states to receive relief from the horribly conceived No Child Left Behind.

So in order to rake in Race to the Top money and to satisfy billionaires who have made it clear that they are not friends of public education, we continue moving in the direction of a nightmarish scenario where even great teachers can end up losing pay or their jobs because of the luck of the draw on which students they receive. And with the stakes raised for teachers and administrators to improve test scores, we are already seeing increased instances of cheating.

What the "reformers" who are pushing for these so-called value-added metrics are conveniently ignoring is that studies are showing that the system simply does not work.

One such study, released Tuesday by the American Educational Research Association finds little correlation between these value-added measures between testing and effective teaching. The shocker is that the study is based on data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been pushing the new methods of teacher evaluation.

One of the researchers who released the study, Morgan S. Polikoff of the University of Southern California, says the results show that value-added metrics are nowhere near being ready to use in teacher evaluations. Yet we are moving full speed ahead.

As long as we continue to believe that all of education's ills come from having "poor' teachers and never address the many other factors that contribute to student failure we are doomed to shortsighted reforms that in the long run will damage public education far more than it will help it.