He’s young and handsome, blessed with soulful brown eyes, soft blonde hair and a powerful speaking voice. He’s charming and affectionate – in short, the total package.
He does, however, have one major character flaw: he doesn’t bring back the tennis balls I throw for him.
(I had you going, didn’t I? I suppose that introduction is one way for me to spike the hit counter.)
I tease my friends about their dog being “broken” or “flawed” because he doesn’t quite do all the things that I think dogs ought to do. He won’t fetch. He experiences dramatic mood swings ranging from hiding under the kitchen table to gleeful, kangaroo-esque acrobatics, to aggression toward an innocent UPS driver (and once toward the rear end of an unfortunate Packer fan who had the misfortune of standing up during a key play during last year’s Super Bowl). There’s really no predicting which personality trait will come out on a given day.
“Flawed” though he may be, my friends soldier on and love their dog as a member of their family. Even after they adopted him from a rescue group and his heretofore unknown personality quirks slowly began to emerge, they accepted his behavior as simply that of a dog with a backstory. The first few weeks were touch and go, but as time passed, he became less nervous around my friends and their children. He is now thriving and loved and is fiercely protective of his family.
But since he can’t fetch a tennis ball, and since that’s my sole standard for what makes a quality dog, I think my friends should be banned from being dog owners.
Sound ludicrous? It’s not. This is the new reality in which students’ standardized test scores can be used as a reason to fire a teacher in the state of Wisconsin.
Standardized tests, applied judiciously, can be an important evaluative tool to measure student progress and their strengths and weaknesses. They can inform instruction school- and district-wide. I believe that they can be used to help districts map out their curriculum and long-range planning. But I’m dubious of their value as a measure of individual teacher performance.
Now, just to be clear here: if teachers are underperforming in areas that are in their direct control (e.g., lesson planning, classroom management, parent communication, professionalism), they should be evaluated, corrected, and if need be, counseled out of the profession. No teacher worth his or her salt abides colleagues who aren’t willing to invest the time and care to perform at their absolute best. Our work is far too important to allow unprofessional people to muddy the waters.
Further, I realize that the law provides that the test score cannot be used as the only measure of performance. Even so, using student test scores as an evaluative measure is just far too subjective to provide a quality result. Is a test given in early October a measure of the previous year’s teacher? Do students who are wise to the system deliberately perform poorly on a test so that a teacher with whom they have a personality conflict is fired? Is a student who comes to school hungry or worried about the safety in his neighborhood going to even care about the test at all?
I teach an elective course. Even if a standardized assessment is developed to measure progress in elective courses, isn’t it reasonable to assume that I’m already a step or two ahead of many of my colleagues because I have a roomful of students whose simple presence in the course is a sign of their increased level of motivation?
Finally, and perhaps I’m being a bit cynical here, but aren’t the WKCE tests that have been in place since 2002 essentially being phased out because of the assessment’s many drawbacks? And now teachers are going to be evaluated based on those tests, or their replacements (which could be even worse)?
My friends didn’t know much about the dog they rescued, and they didn’t blame the rescue group when he came to them “as is.” They simply took him into their home, did the best they possibly could with him and went about their business as usual, adjusting their routine for him as needed. And he’s turned out to be a great dog in every way.
Some things are simply more important than fetching tennis balls.
