Imo, universities measuring applicants mainly by test scores is a bad thing, done only because they can't find a better way to do it, but I'd hardly want to subordinate all of education to that. K-12 education should teach kids useful stuff, meta-learning habits, civic information, attempt to inspire them, etc., not solely aim to maximize their SAT scores. To the extent I found K-12 education useful at all, it was only the parts that weren't narrowly aiming at maximizing my test scores, so it'd be a shame to declare those irrelevant and ditch them.
Plus, universities do take some other things into account. I got significant credit on my university applications for an open-source project I worked on in high school, and a website I maintained (in the late 90s websites weren't exactly rare, but it wasn't yet to the "everyone has a blog" level of pervasiveness). Will a teacher who successfully inspires kids to do that sort of extracurricular stuff get credit in these evaluation schemes?
Alternatively, if you consider preparing kids for college to be the sole purpose of K-12 education, why not just measure it directly? For 2nd-grade teachers it would be difficult to measure due to the large time lag, but it'd be possible for high-school teachers. Instead of the state inventing its own tests, just use the % of students who go on to college as the metric, and then do some statistical analysis over a 5-year window to estimate the effect a particular teacher had on that rate. There are a lot of variables and each student is influenced by many teachers, but over a window you can make an estimate of whether a particular teacher had any influence (positive or negative) on college-admission rates, compared to a hypothetical average teacher of the same subject and of a hypothetically equivalent set of students (according to whatever demographic/etc. variables). A teacher version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player, basically.
> K-12 education should teach kids useful stuff, meta-learning habits, civic information, attempt to inspire them, etc., not solely aim to maximize their SAT scores
I agree AND I'm willing to pay for that to happen.
However, I'm not willing to pay for teachers who don't teach that stuff. Are you?
So, how do you propose determining whether we're getting what we're paying for?
Note - if your answer is "trust us", my response is "not with my money".
Plus, universities do take some other things into account. I got significant credit on my university applications for an open-source project I worked on in high school, and a website I maintained (in the late 90s websites weren't exactly rare, but it wasn't yet to the "everyone has a blog" level of pervasiveness). Will a teacher who successfully inspires kids to do that sort of extracurricular stuff get credit in these evaluation schemes?
Alternatively, if you consider preparing kids for college to be the sole purpose of K-12 education, why not just measure it directly? For 2nd-grade teachers it would be difficult to measure due to the large time lag, but it'd be possible for high-school teachers. Instead of the state inventing its own tests, just use the % of students who go on to college as the metric, and then do some statistical analysis over a 5-year window to estimate the effect a particular teacher had on that rate. There are a lot of variables and each student is influenced by many teachers, but over a window you can make an estimate of whether a particular teacher had any influence (positive or negative) on college-admission rates, compared to a hypothetical average teacher of the same subject and of a hypothetically equivalent set of students (according to whatever demographic/etc. variables). A teacher version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player, basically.