Lots of blanks to fill in on California’s education test
As California faces the prospect of barely imaginable cuts to its floundering public schools, U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan appeared in Los Angeles Tuesday, calling for reform of the nation’s education reform program.
According to a story by Jason Song in the Los Angeles Times, Duncan criticized the so-called No Child Left Behind reforms as rigidly tied to raw test scores that are compared in a vacuum. Duncan, a proponent of so-called ‘value-added’ measures of assessment, called for the re-writing of the law before an education summit organized by United Way.
Under the method Duncan is pushing, teachers would be assessed (earn a raise or get fired), based on the difference between what statisticians assume a student with a given background should get on a standardized test and the students’ actual score. The difference between the assumption and reality would reveal how much a particular teacher helped or hurt pupils. (more…)