Columbia Daily Tribune (Columbia, MO)
June 8, 2011
Headline: McCaskill's tour: Stopping off at Hickman

By Henry J Waters, III

Sen. Claire McCaskill recently took a tour of Missouri school districts and discovered educators think No Child Left Behind is flawed. Really.

Though political exigency must have helped drive her from border to border, when she ended her tour at her Hickman High School alma mater, she received a nugget educators should have understood and promoted long ago but never seem to mention out loud. Parkade Elementary second-grade teacher Brian Rehg said, "When looking at MAP test scores … it's important to look at the growth of each student, not whether or not they hit a certain mark. That's really important for low-income students. … I see that every day as a Title I school."

Two Hickman High School students in the audience agreed some of their peers, unable to keep up, become frustrated. Myah McCrary said, "In my opinion … after failing so many times, they give up in a way, and they don't feel like trying any longer."

Valuing progress made is not only a way to help bridge the famous achievement gap; it's a far better way to evaluate the quality of instruction being given and received. As noted here earlier to the point of irritating redundancy, a teacher who imparts significant improvement for a low achiever might be doing a better job than one whose academically advanced charges emerge from class still academically advanced and testing higher.

The aggregation of such results does more to measure school and district quality than do snapshots of student achievement levels.

I have the cynical hunch this value-added assessment model is slow getting off the ground because it provides more accountability for teachers and other academic officers. Measuring the progress made by every student every year is not hard, but it's challenging to educators.

McCaskill heard a number of other suggestions mostly requiring more money, but student growth assessment was the only one directly focused on teacher quality, the single factor most often cited by persuasive education experts for improving American K-12 education.

Value-added assessment by itself won't assuredly improve teacher performance but is a necessary step on the way. It will show how well teachers and schools are doing. It can show good as well as poor performance and do much to help teachers provide targeted help for struggling students.

My disappointing hunch is that, after McCaskill's visitations and other talk about what to do next to improve education, we will hear a lot more about scholarships, grants, appropriations, maintaining tenure and other costly fixes than improving teacher accountability and quality.

The best teachers should clamor for value-added testing across the board. So far, Brian Rehg is a chorus of one.