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If the Board of Regents approves a proposal today to double the weight of student test scores in teacher evaluations, they’ll be spurning the advice of 10 leading education researchers.

The researchers — who include Linda Darling-Hammond and New Yorkers Aaron Pallas and Henry Levin — sent a letter to the Regents yesterday that summarizes studies that they say point to problems with basing teacher evaluations on student scores. Those problems include teaching to the test and disincentives to help students with special needs.

“We urge you to reject proposals that would place significant emphasis on this untested strategy that could have serious negative consequences for teacher[s] and for the most vulnerable students in the State’s schools,” the researchers say.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week told the Regents that he thought test scores should play a larger role in teacher evaluations. The state’s year-old teacher evaluation law bases 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations on student test scores and another 20 percent on local measures of student achievement. The proposal being considered today would allow districts, with the approval of their local teachers unions, to use the same measures for both parts of teachers’ evaluations.

The Regents meeting is being broadcast online beginning at 4:45 p.m. (more…)

Henry Levin

Today’s “Those Who Dared” excerpt is from the essay by Henry Levin, a Columbia University economist whose work focuses on the economics of education.

Earlier in his career, Levin supervised the Accelerated Schools Project, an effort to push a handful of low-performing California elementary schools to offer enhanced instruction to all students. Because of that experience, Levin argues that teachers should spend more time preparing instruction, not delivering it. This opinion sets him apart from some contemporary policy wonks who are pushing schools to adopt a longer school day and school year. He writes:

There is never enough time for planning, problem-solving, group learning, democratic participation in decisions, gathering information, celebrating, and all of the other activities that need to be incorporated into an Accelerated School. So called in-service days are few, and allocations for preparation time are typically encumbered by other demands that cannot easily be shed. Democratic decision-making for the school, problem-solving with inquiry methods, and the formulation and implementation of powerful learning units take considerable time, but all expand equity and effectiveness of instruction considerably. ASP always found that even creative ways of obtaining time outside of instruction were challenging and required compromises of personal time and school activities. Somehow we must find ways of building more time into the school day for planning and collaboration (as the Japanese do), even if there are fewer minutes of instruction.