New Pennsylvania Teacher Tests Won't Improve Teacher Performance, Keystone Research Center Finds

Harrisburg, January 22 -- Pennsylvania's new system of teacher tests won't improve teacher performance in the classroom, according to a new evaluation released today by the Keystone Research Center.

The Research Center recommends that Pennsylvania save the $16 million budgeted for the new teacher tests over the next four years and shift teacher assessment and training to a "Teacher Effectiveness Initiative" that would improve student achievement.

Authored by nationally recognized testing expert and University of Nebraska Professor Barbara S. Plake, the Keystone evaluation concludes that the new teacher tests do not measure the right thing. The tests fail to measure how well teachers perform in the classroom. For many teachers, the tests do not even measure teachers' knowledge of the subjects they teach.

"These tests are not up to the task of reasonably measuring teacher quality or effectiveness," Plake concludes. "It is entirely possible that a teacher could score well on the Pennsylvania tests and yet be a poor classroom teacher," Plake adds.

The tests consist of basic math and reading questions based on state standards for what is to be taught by grades 5, 8, and 11. All Pennsylvanian teachers must take a reading test. All elementary teachers and middle and high school math and science teachers must take a math test.

About 20 percent of Pennsylvania's public school teachers took the exams in November and December of 2001, with another 20 percent scheduled to take the tests in each of the next four years.

"An auto repair technician and a restaurant chef may need to have math and reading competence," noted Stephen Herzenberg, Executive Director of the Keystone Research Center. "But no private company would waste millions of dollars testing the average performance of such workers in basic skills so indirectly related to actual job performance. We need more fine-tuned evaluation of teachers, along with more fine-tuned methods of helping teachers become more effective."

A table in the Keystone report shows that the new teacher testing program does not have the characteristics of professional development programs that research shows work. Effective assessment and professional development involves the participation of teachers in planning, is focused on instruction and learning, and has the goal of getting teachers to continuously ask themselves whether their teaching methods are working. By contrast, the teacher testing program is top down, divorced from instruction and learning, and unlikely to stimulate teachers to continuously examine their teaching methods.

In place of standardized tests weakly tied to what teachers actually teach, Keystone recommends that Pennsylvania launch a Teacher Effectiveness Initiative shaped by what research shows to improve student achievement. "We need an initiative that would strengthen mentoring for new teachers and teamwork among experienced teachers," says Herzenberg.

"By overcoming teacher isolation, such an initiative would directly attack any tendency among teachers to use the same flawed approaches year after year. All teachers could learn from their most effective colleagues and the best teachers would become even better. These approaches are also effective at identifying cases where teachers’ knowledge of their subject needs to be improved."

By launching systemic initiatives along the lines Keystone recommends for Pennsylvania, the state of Connecticut has moved to the top of state rankings in student achievement – and close to the top in international rankings.

The text of the report released today will be available online at www.keystoneresearch.org. The Keystone Research Center is the leading source of independent analysis on Pennsylvania’s economy and public policy.

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