A Call to Ignore Exam Results When Evaluating Educators (3) article

In New York, a year after the state department introduced a new standardized test that resulted in passing grades to drop, Politicians called on the legislature to stop using those grades as a reflection of teacher performance. In other words, they don't want the results of the student's standardized test to be a benchmark for teachers. The current law is that the student's grade on these tests counts for 20% of their teacher's evaluation. If a teacher receives a low mark two years in a row it is called "ineffective." Which means they at risk of losing their jobs. Since these tests are only a year old, the legislatures think that teacher evaluations shouldn't be connected to the test scores for at least two years.  

The subject of standardized tests being linked with teacher evaluation has been highlighted a lot in the past few years. I think that the reasoning behind the standardized test has moved from research and student evaluation and onto analyzing teachers. This definitely has negative effects. Performance will probably drop because students just dont care anymore. With that being said, if these scores and being compared with teacher performance, the teachers are at a disadvantage. I don't think it is fair that teachers are at risk of losing their jobs just because students dont preform well on a state exam. Especially since the test is new to the students so they may not do as well as they did on the older one. If anything, waiting a couple of years to evaluate teachers based on test scores is the best idea.