Chapter 5: Charms Talismanic: Testing Teachers for the Improvement of American Education

Correlating Teacher Self-Assessment Score With Student Achievement in English and Mathematics

“…The research indicates that strong content knowledge of a teacher is positively associated with student learning, especially in Mathematics (Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005;Wenglinsky, 2002). Others found that subject matter knowledge shows small, statistically insignificant relationships with student achievement (Ashton & Crocker, 1987;Haney, Madaus, & Kreitzer, 1987).…”

Knowing What Teachers Know

“…Coupled with these changing ideas about what teachers need to know has been the educational authority’s interest in assessing and warranting teachers’ and prospective teachers’ knowledge. Thirty years ago, in the last explicit treatment of teacher testing in Review of Research in Education , Haney, Madaus, and Kreitzer (1987) provided accounts of teacher assessments that were introduced as early as colonial times. The chapter remains an important critique of teacher testing by focusing on the use and social implications of such tests and on the ways in which teacher assessment might be improved.…”

“…Although some of the concerns that Haney et al (1987) raised 30 years ago are still germane today, there have been substantial changes as well. Not only have assessments that serve a regulatory function (e.g., licensure) evolved, but an intensive scholarly focus, during the last 30 years in particular, has produced a broad literature that attempts to conceptualize and empirically examine the knowledge base of teachers (e.g., Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008; Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992; Shulman, 1987).…”

“…Haney et al (1987) note that from colonial times through the first half of the 19th century, examinations of teachers were essentially oral interviews that were conducted by local officials and that focused on moral fitness, classroom/student management, and fundamental literacies. Over the course of the 19th century, counties and states attempted to impose more control on localities, partly due to the finding that those conducting the interviews were often ill-equipped to evaluate the examinees’ responses and partly because of increasing state interest in public education.…”

“…In the 1930s, the Cooperative Test Service, an agency of the American Council on Education (ACE), developed objective tests in more than 40 subject areas at the senior high school and junior college levels. It was these tests that largely formed the basis for the development by the ACE of the National Teacher Examination (NTE)—the first national assessment for teachers (Haney et al, 1987). Given the national scope of these assessments and the fact that these were the first tests for teachers with any significant research base and scholarly record, it is at this point in time that we begin to focus the current analysis.…”