No, you can attest that there’s a profit or loss to the *student* and by extension the parent.

If those outcomes are immaterial to the teacher, and as importantly, the principal then they’re profits and loses without meaning to the people who have contracted to do the educating. Since that’s the condition that applies from top to bottom in public education, for all practical purposes there’s no profit and no loss in public education.

That’s one of the reasons public education is in the pickle it’s in.

It’s also the reason for the popularity of edu-fads. If the professionals aren’t gauged by the quality of their professional performance that doesn’t mean they have no way to distinguish themselves. They just have to get creative and find those people whose approval has professional consequences and appeal to whatever motivates them.

In public education that, unfortunately, consists of edu-fads that don’t have to result in kids actually learning anything since that’s not measured and thus unimportant.

Superintendents and school boards who do have a say over the professional lives of teachers and principals may or may not be motivated by educational considerations dependent on local conditions but they’ll always be motivated by ego and where educational considerations aren’t important ego that’s all that’ll motivate them. So nonsense like “child-centered learning” and “whole language” become important not because they result in kids learning but because they allow education officials to indulge their conceits.

One of the great benefits to me as a parent of a kid with disabilities was to be able to look beyond his individual scores and see that the preponderance of similarly identified kids in his school were, or were not doing well. Looking across other schools to see that in fact some were doing far (really far) better in those groups, said a lot about what was possible.

The NYT article said that many principals were sitting on the teacher reports. While I am not certain that these should necessarily be distributed to parents (although in my state a teacher’s personnel records are public and can be requested by news agencies, etc) at this point, I don’t get why these would not be shared with teachers as a matter of course. Looking over the sample, there is nothing that statistically complex about them. I would hope that teachers would have sufficient mathematics background to be able to understand them.

The breakdown in logic for me is when otherwise sensible people say, “Yes, I know it’s unreliable, but we need to measure individual teachers and the fact that we don’t really know how to do it is no reason not to.”

This is why jokes like “close enough for government work” gain traction.

As a parent, I can attest that in the end, there is profit or loss to education. It’s “out there,” in the world experienced by students after school is over. You can count it in employment statistic, success or attendance in college or post secondary education. Heck, you can even perceive it in crime and health statistics. The standardized test scores are just markers along the way.

Any individual test score at any point in time (“n” of one) is highly unreliable. This should not lead us to believe that the proliferation of indicators amassed across populations and remaining consistent over time are merely collections of random points.

Is the ability to read, write and cipher a valid indicator that education is occurring? Pretty much. We can slice and dice it in all kinds of ways to show growth, or to try and tease out the in-school vs the out-of-school variables that have an impact. But, in the end, we can be pretty certain that some kids are coming out of school with a whole lot more of it than others. Some schools have looked at this and taken steps to improve. Others admire the problem. Some blame the test.

Posters say that statistical performance rating must be used because it is a part of the American culture, not because it works very well in education. In fact, it may be the sense that it is unfair and invalid in one’s corporate workplace which makes people particularly avid to see it applied to schools.

One would think that the whole point was to express frustration rather than fix schools. Any truth to that impression?

In the corporate world, the system can only be gamed so far. In the end, there is a concrete profit or loss, and everyone agrees that that is the only purpose of the enterprise.

In education, the more people talk, the less they agree on the purpose of education, and regardless of the official statistics being gathered, there is no defining bottom line. This reality makes abuse not only possible but inevitable.

The more teeth you put in the accountability scheme, the more you get manipulation, cheating, spin, and distortion of curriculum to prepare for the tests. In other words, it makes education for our young people worse, not better.

While I sympathize with the public’s desperation, I despair at the public’s inability to think this problem through.