On Jan 13, 2012, at 1:37 AM, michael perelman <michael.perelman3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Teaching is impossible to measure. I have students who will tell you
> that I am the best teacher in the world. Others will say I am the
> worst. Different teaching styles connect with different people.
> Besides, most students will have a different idea about what
> constitutes good teaching years after they graduate.
>
> Tests are an even less accurate measurement of teaching.
This is pretty much my position. I have for years now taken as my motto, "let a thousand pedagogies bloom." which I understand as the antithesis (not in a technically hegelian sense, of course :) of the education department quest for the holy grail of the one right way to teach.
Thanks to Joanna, Alan, Michael, mike, and others for reminding me why I need to stay in touch with this list more regularly. it reminds me how easy it is to get sucked into fighting the wrong battles, even (or maybe especially) when you can win them, and especially when I have no f2f community of people who think of themselves as leftists (or not very much, anyway).
I'm feeling pretty good in retrospect about my initial reaction against this study. I'm happy with what I lit on. There's this sort of implicit inference that if the kids who do well on the tests do well in other areas of life, that validates the test. So it skips right over the question of whether the tests are valid measures of anything but an ability to perform well on tests you've been prepared to take. And if the study doesn't even address the question of socioeconomic factors, well, . . .
J