By Bob Gibson

States from Maryland to Florida and beyond are studying how to base teacher pay in part on the test scores of students.

This is an idea worth looking into and probably worth rejecting as unfair to teachers, students and the learning process.

Americans have a long history of misusing standardized tests, including IQ tests, and should be careful about using these as a measure to determine teacher pay.

The tests have some value in measuring student performance, especially if they show sequential progress for individual students, but scores for pupils can be unfair, inaccurate measures of teacher performance.

Today’s standardized tests are not as pernicious as previous instruments of intelligence and achievement measurement, but their use in the hands of school officials making budget decisions ought to scare teachers whose value in the classroom should never be measured through the lens of sleepy, lazy, dopey, sneezy, bashful or uninspired test-takers.

Testing in American schools already limits and defines how teachers spend their classroom and after-school time.

Adding the burden of having test scores help define teacher pay could lead to the upside-down logic of rewarding bad teachers who are teaching to tests while limiting pay of those teaching the disadvantaged. Good teachers might flock to schools in which test scores are shown to improve and away from challenged classrooms, resulting in a poorer incentive to help those who most need the biggest boost.

The history of tying test scores to teacher pay, as is now being suggested in several states, including Maryland, is spotty and its value unproven. For generations, the standard tools of sorting students, especially IQ testing and tracking, have left minority students, particularly black students, mired in lower tracks.

My interest in the idea is sparked by an excellent course I am taking at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, the History of American Education.

In one of our readings, one critic of tying student scores to teacher pay, Diane Ravitch, said the idea discounts credentials and experience in favor of judging teachers by their students’ scores despite studies by economists that demostrate “that this particular measure of effectiveness is highly unstable.

Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education under the first President Bush, also said American educators in the first half of the 20th Century widely believed that immigrant children “lacked the intellect for academic studies.“

Alfie Kohn, another education critic, said the more educators “allow themselves to be turned into accountants, the more trivial their teaching becomes and the more their assessments miss.“ He notes that norm-referenced tests, including the Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, were designed “so that only about half the test-takers will respond correctly to most items. The main objective of these tests is to rank, not to rate; to spread out the scores, not to gauge the quality of a given student or school.“

Kohn argues that over use of testing can hurt students as “the more that students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to become with what they’re doing.“

Politicians are going ahead with such plans, which poll as popular. In Florida under a new statute signed into law March 24 teachers are now going to receive pay increases based on student test scores. The law sets up an evaluation system that will rely heavily on student test score data to judge teacher quality.

There is much to be wary of in the entire history of turning children into data. Testing has been touted for steering gifted and talented students into math and science in greater numbers, yet our national ranking in these subjects declined during the past 50 years as rhetoric about educational excellence soared much higher than academic attainments.

We owe it to our teachers and our children not to base teacher pay on a social science of widely extrapolated test uses whose acceptance by educators and the public may be here today and gone tomorrow.