  Just returned home from a family get-together in Tifton, Georgia. No cable...no internet access...kinda relaxing. Now, back to some intermittent blogging (intermittent being the best I ever do...). The Tennessean has a lead story on the urlLink controversial nature of allowing teachers to use test scores to satisfy the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. The story is a bit choppy, but the gist is that some teachers want to use their students' improved test scores to reach the level of "highly qualified" under the Act, but still keep the results of the students connected with each teacher confidential.
Naturally, The Tennessean misses the point of the story. The point is not that some teachers want to use the scores, when favorable, to satisfy themselves as "highly qualified" under the federal law, but that they want to do so without releasing the scores to the general public. Anyone who knows me knows of my recurrent ranting against a general lack of accountability in education, but I can see some merit to not taking the scores associated with these teachers and dropping them on the street corner for all to persuse.
However, there are some individuals not employed by the education apparatus who do deserve to see the scores - the parents. Let me make a simple metaphor. Say you have a family, and you're interested in their safety. You are searching for a new car. You want a new car that has a lot of value for your dollar, but you also want to make sure that a large portion of that value can be found in enhanced safety features. Unfortunately, you can only get one rating for that car - "high value. " Unfortunately, you don't know if that's because the car has a really good engine, or whether it has enhanced side based air bags. The same problem exists here. It's terrible, I suppose, that some incompetent teachers be found out, their feelings hurt, and, God forbid, pressure is brought down upon them from parents to do a better job.
The point is clear. There is one quote in the article from an alarmingly clueless parent about how a teacher can be "highly qualified" based on other factors beside academic performance, such as "by how they interact with the kids. " I'll bet a dollar to a donut that most parents don't feel that way (but leave it to my illustrious Gannett ragged hometown paper to find the one). I don't care how the teacher interacts with the kids, as long as it's effective. One way to check on that is, despite the naysayers protests, test scores. If a teacher has been around for ten years, and the scores of that teacher's students is always below the median, we might want to do something about it. If my kid was going to have that teacher next Fall, I'd sure want to know. 
