Quote:
Originally Posted by AGDee
Well, if one kid in your class had a really bad first grade teacher, wouldn't it follow that about 1/6th of your kids had the same teacher? If your district isn't blaming the individual teachers, I think you're lucky. The teachers I know, up here, are very much judged based on how their kids do on those tests even though the test is administered in October, when the teachers have only been teaching those particular kids for 5-6 weeks. It was really crazy in the elementary school, when teachers would approach you and ask you to request them for your child for the next grade because they knew your kid was a good student and, therefore, would make them look good. There were 3 teachers at our elementary who did that. I deliberately requested different teachers because of it. And no, NCLB doesn't say to punish the teachers whose kids don't do well, but sh*t always rolls downhill, as the saying goes. The blame all goes to the teachers when the district is in danger of losing its funding.
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We have pretty big schools where I am and most of the kids are on grade level, so I'm not seeing what you are seeing where you are. It's just not that high stakes.
We also have relatively easy state tests, so it's not that hard for an average learner to catch up to speed in a year, assuming that they aren't years behind, which does happen some places by high school.
We see our individual results but nothing ever seems to be said about them, which kind of stinks when you are really doing well, but I guess if we're going to look at it as cumulative learning, these results aren't solely the one teacher's good results either.
I think that a lot of teachers have really strong perfectionist streaks and even when there aren't any real job consequences for lackluster performance in a certain area, even calling it to their attention freaks them out. So, if the principal is giving out verbal gold stars for high scores, some teachers would try to pre-load their classes for success by trying to attract easier kids. It may not be the case that they have any realist fear for their jobs.