[wireties]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

State mandated testing bothers me primarily because it is also used as a gauge for teacher quality. I will admit we need to ensure quality teachers and that the students are learning. The issue is that a student's score on a test is not indicative of the value added by their experience with that teacher.

Agreed - gauging teacher quality is difficult/impossible. We should definitely prefer differential or incremental comparisons. But (it seems to me) other teachers can quickly identify bad teachers. I wonder if one could leverage that somehow, maybe some sort of peer evaluation system...