Article Critique on "Test Score to Measure Teacher Performance Critique"

Article Critique 6 pages (2192 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

For example, the issue of claimed, exempt and non-exempt category of students pertains to those that the school administration addresses as requiring special learning aids or extra tutoring needs and may be deleted from the rosters given to the teachers. The authors of the article debate the manipulations (possible) strategies used by teachers (with the aid of school administration, at times) to achieve better scores for themselves. Table 1 (p. 81) displays the scores where the authors suspect that teachers do not claim students who would have lowered their scores. However, they do allow for inconsistencies and errors. As such, they admit that the results may not always be inaccurate. Further, to nullify the effect of possible discrepancies, and biased or manipulated data of teacher evaluation, the authors created a second table (Table 2, p.82) that exposed the scores of students whose exams were supervised by their subject teachers or total strangers. The deduction was that there is minimal difference on the evaluation of the teacher irrespective of the supervision.

The authenticity of VAM as an assessment tool for teaching capabilities, thus fails to account for many factors beyond teacher's control- administrative lapses, continuity of students attendance to the respective class, the methodology applied to account for exempt, non-exempt, claimed and unclaimed students or a combination of these types of students. Secondly, VAM places more emphasis on maths proficiency than other equally important subjects like science, literature, social studies and the like. The relevance of this issue is obvious- in maths, a little help from supervisor/teacher can make a difference in the score of the student, whereas in other subjects such a possibility is difficult to achieve.

In addition, learning and education by itself cannot be equated with proficiency in a few subjects solely. Social conduct, moral development, personality development and character building, in addition to logical analysis of real-life scenarios capability are some of the larger aims of imparting education. As in Singapore, there is a need to supervise the overall methodology a teacher uses to grade him/her as a proficient or lesser teacher. The author of the article fails to attend to the requirements a teacher needs to have while casting aspersions on the methods being used (VAM) to rate teachers. Also, Teachers need to collaborate to find the best solutions to problems faced by student. Collaboration amongst teachers is a point wholly missed by the VAM methodology that is applied to assess the quality of a teacher.

Thus, the author has missed pointing out a number of issues that would form the basis of recommendations towards a better assessment of teachers. The author should also have pointed out the premise of rewarding the teachers found accomplishing their tasks within or above expectations along with those of penalising those found inadequate.

Conclusion

This article has taken samples from the school administration that they themselves contend, could be manipulated. Secondly the legitimacy of VAM method of evaluation is questioned in the article, yet, the authors try to induce control for obtaining corrected results. Thus, it appears that more control, such as students' background, teacher's history and administration lapses should also have been used as control factors in the study to provide a more accommodative discussion on the issue of evaluation of a teacher based on test scores. Grounding teacher evaluation mainly on student test scores never accurately distinguishes more from less effective teachers since even using relatively sophisticated methods cannot sufficiently address the various statistical problems arising from estimating a teacher's effectiveness. VAM uses averaging concepts of statistical analysis, and extend and apply it to disparate groups of students (background, economic status, home support, learning disabilities) and institutions (offering better infrastructure, management, regular teachers (through better pay), rendering the evaluation prone to inaccurate outputs. Even though some advocates contend that the flawed value-added methods tend to be preferred to other prevailing cumbersome methods of identifying, dismissing, or remediating ineffective teachers like in the study, the argument generates a false dichotomy.

References

Ballou, D., & Springer, M. G. (2015). Using Student Test Scores to… READ MORE

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