Excerpts From a Letter Submitted by President Fuhrman to the New York Times | Press Room @ Teachers College

Excerpts From a Letter Submitted by President Fuhrman to the New York Times | Press Room @ Teachers College: "Value-added measures also fail to capture or to take into account a multitude of other factors that drive student performance, such as the effect of prior-year teachers on students’ test scores, or the different content of many tests from one grade to the next. Nor do these measures account either for classrooms with high turnover, which frequently have an adverse impact on students’ test scores, or for small classes in which a few students’ scores can distort the size of overall gains.

Until we can evaluate teachers with better measures of their actual classroom work, it simply is bad policy to rely too heavily on the blunt instrument of standardized test results to assess a teacher’s effectiveness, particularly when individual reputations and livelihoods are so clearly at stake.

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