SKILLS TESTS FOR TEACHERS MISS MARK, STUDIES FIND
The skills tests that most public school teachers must pass to get a job are poor predictors of whether they’ll actually be good teachers — and in some cases may even keep good ones from entering the classroom, new research suggests.
A pair of long-term studies challenge longstanding policies in 48 states that require teachers to pass standardized exams to get jobs, reports Greg Toppo. In one, Marc Claude-Charles Colitti of Michigan State University examined data going back to 1960 and found teachers’ scores had almost no correlation to principals’ evaluations of their classroom performance. “How smart a teacher is doesn’t necessarily tell us that they’re a good teacher,” he says. Teachers’ SAT or ACT college entrance exam scores, or even their own scores on fifth-grade skills tests when they were children, would be as accurate at telling whether they’ll be good teachers, he says.
Before 1983, only three states required teachers to pass general-knowledge tests. By 1999, 39 states had such requirements. By the time President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, with its requirements for “highly qualified teachers,” passed in 2002, 48 states required the tests.
Teachers, schools and states now spend an estimated $50 million to $100 million on such exams. But University of Washington researcher Dan Goldhaber warns that passing a general-knowledge or even a specific-subject-matter test isn’t a silver bullet. “This is by no means a guarantee that you’re getting the right people in and keeping the right people out.”
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This is old news, but a good example of how policy makers are impervious to vast amounts of research evidence that practices (like teacher testing or retention in grade) are deleterious. Ideology runs so deeply as to be immune from evidence.
So “smart” teachers are not necessarily “good” teachers? To prove that statement one way or the other we’d have to first find a smart teacher.