As a result of class schedule conflicts, I didn’t get the opportunity to attend a board meeting this semester. For my alternative assignment, I kept myself up-to-date with current events on education, particularly focusing on Indiana education. While reading about current education news in Indiana, I focused on the question “Who are the people outside of my classroom who influence what happens inside my classroom?”
Tony Bennett, the Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, certainly holds a spot as one of the people who greatly affects the classroom from outside of it. As the Superintendent, Bennett makes decisions that affect schools, teachers, and students. Bennett, along with Governor Mitch Daniels, has been pushing for merit pay since August of this year. On December 8th, the Education Roundtable of Indiana—a group of twenty-four Hoosier leaders—approved of the changes that Bennett wants to make for how teachers get paid.
According to Bennett’s new plan, teachers are going to be “graded” and paid based on their content knowledge, instructional skills, and—most controversially—students’ academic achievement. In an interview with the Tribune Star of Terre Haute, Bennett says that he doesn’t think it is fair to grade teachers based on how many of their students pass the ISTEP, but that he doesn’t see a problem with grading them based on their students’ level of improvement.
Personally, I don’t think this is a valid or valuable way to judge teachers’ impact on students. When I took the ISTEP tests, I always passed them. However, if I were to guess, I would say that my level of improvement probably didn’t increase all that much, simply because I didn’t have much space to better my previous score. It seems that under this new law, children with high mathematical or linguistical intelligences (or those who are good test takers), will be left behind. Teachers will be encouraged to focus on the students who can improve the most, because that will look best on their end-of-the-year assessments. It seems to me that this unbalanced focus will push teachers too much to teach to the test. Not only will students miss out on other types of learning (hands-on, science, history, social activities), but some students may miss out on learning altogether as teachers struggle to improve low ISTEP performers’ test scores and teach to the level of more advanced students.
Is this really, as Bennett said, ensuring “student learning as our highest priority?”
