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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> A major reason is the standardized testing (common core) where teachers are being measured on averages on these tests.

Common core has nothing to do with that (except perhaps that they different phenomena that share some very distant degree of common causation); you may be confusing Common Core (which is a set of curriculum standards) with No Child Left Behind (which is a national policy that, among its accountability provisions, includes testing with incentives similar to those you describe.)

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It does since there are (in NY at least) state tests to measure progress of the students and those results are never released to students or parents but used in "grading" teachers.

It seems very closely tied with the Common Core rollout. I get that employers (state governments) want to measure teacher performance but how do you do that realistically? Will it change anything if a teacher has poor performance? They are under union contracts these days anyhow and some are tenured.

State tests to grade schools are an accountability measure from NCLB. Most likely, tests to grade teachers are driven by that. Common core adoption may also be driven by the results of NCLB driven tests, if it's percieved as more effective in bringing the bottom up as NCLB focuses on.

But I don't see a casual relationship from Common Core to teacher-grading tests. Where's the link, beyond a temporal association.

All of the grading teachers tests started with Common Core, here in NY state at least which was an early adopter. Each state is probably implementing it differently.

These aren't tests to grade schools, these are testing the kids against Common Core curriculum that they haven't been taught yet to grade teachers on how they are doing.

It has nothing to do with NCLB. There is direct linkage to Common Core curriculum and rollout. I have teachers in my family and kids in the schools that this is happening in, do you actually have kids in school?

It also has nothing to do with NCLB. Without NCLB, teachers were not helping gifted students anyway.

It is a stupid political thing to blame NCLB or common core. People always have tons of excuses for being lazy. Of course there are good teachers way beyond average, but most teachers are like average person need incentive to make them work harder, especially when they are protected by teacher tenure which does not exist in most fields.

> Without NCLB, teachers were not helping gifted students anyway.

I've seen reports of several district cutting programs for gifted students and specifically citing state performance measures adopted in fulfillment of NCLB mandates, which strongly focus on bringing up performance at the bottom.

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