Jason Song
State Education Officials Decry Funding Veto (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/10/state-education-officials-decry-veto-of-funding-.html)
L.A. Times
October 28, 2010
Summary: The Governator vetoed approximately $7 million that was supposed to go to a "student data tracking system" called CALPADS. Opponents of the veto claim that it could hurt California's ability to comply with federal regulations and create difficulties implementing the fan favorite value-added analysis at a state-wide level.
Intended Audience: General Public
Key Points: 1) The Governor vetoed a large sum of money intended to go toward the creation of an objective system of student assessment; 2) There is some debate over the proper way assess both students and teachers.
Relevance: Funding is a huge issue right now and so is teacher and student assessment. This article serves as an example of how the two interests can conflict with one another. Implementing systems of data tracking of student scores costs money. States must pay for servers, software engineers, test developers, etc. This all costs money--something that most states are in an extreme shortage of right now. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays itself out over the next few years. Do we go with more standardized tests, more "objective" assessment methods, and spend more money, or do we continue to cut funding for all areas of education?
So much money! Whew.
ReplyDeleteYou picked "objective" out of the article and put the same kind of quotation marks around it that I'm feeling now. The quote from which it comes is "Some experts and policy-makers have embraced the method as a way to bring some level of objectivity to teacher evaluations, which currently rest almost entirely on subjective metrics like observations. Others say it should not be used as the sole measure of a teacher's performance." Having undergone an observation and been privy to the process somewhat with my coworkers at the school here, I can say that there are different kinds of "subjective," and some that start to look REALLY objective.
For my observation (this is a valuable anecdote, bear with me!), I was absolutely brand-brand-new, teaching Japanese to a small class including the daughter of the gentleman doing the evaluation... who is a Japanese professor, no less! It was nerve wracking and a little scary, but he ended up writing the most specific, on-point, accurate and above all HELPFUL summary that I have yet read regarding myself. His "subjective" observation was colored by years of experience at all different levels of education, as well as knowledge of both the structure and growth of the discipline of language pedagogy. You can't get much more "objective" than that, I think! And if every observation is that rigorous, I think that the format is probably an excellent method of evaluation.
Anyway! That's a bit of a digression. When I see huge numbers thrown around like in this article, the temptation is always to divide teachers' salaries into them to see how many this "brand new idea" or "absolutely necessary innovation" could hire in its stead. The tracking of students - especially at the most basic level of keeping track of dropouts - IS an important area, even if it is imperfectly tied to teacher evaluation.