For several days, I have been writing about the movement to standardize the curriculum, indeed, to develop a single set of standards for the entire nation—15,000 school districts. So far, Achieve.org has written the Common Core Standards in Mathematics and Reading, and by next year will have completed the New Generation of Science Standards. This will be followed by a battery of achievement tests to be used to “measure” student achievement. Achievement test results will become a major factor in assessing teacher performance. So far, this seems straightforward and logical, doesn’t it. Well, maybe not.

When we look at what is going on with the movement to standardize curriculum, measure student learning, and assess teacher performance, we discover a very old, historic, traditional, and conservative model of learning undergirding these. It is essentially an input-output model, one that assumes a limited number of factors that might effect student learning. The standards define what students must learn at each grade level, and what teachers must teach to help student achieve in math, reading, and science.

Some powerful corporate leaders, who provide a good deal of financing for organizations that have written the standards, and create the tests, believe that you can measure the achievement level of each student in a class at the beginning of a course, measure it at the end, and use the difference in scores to “measure” how much the students improved as a result of a teacher’s performance.

There is no discussion of student motivation, and how student motivation might impact this model of assessment. It’s assumed in this model that student achievement is the direct result of teacher performance. No other factors are figured in to this measurement system. Factors such as student motivation, parental influence, income level of the parents, peers, social events—none of these are considered.

Although I don’t think teaching is a simple dichotomous model of teacher-centered (traditional) vs student-centered (progressive), the current movement shines a light on the teacher-centered model, and assumes that teachers’ performance is the cause of what students learn in math or science, or any other subject. And if students don’t learn, or are not motivated, it’s mainly the fault of the school, or the teacher. The more control that is shifted from the local school to the federal level, the more this traditional model will be assumed to be an tenable model of learning, and teacher assessment.

At the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, Bill Gates was interviewed by Walter Isaacson, and talked about a range of topics from health care, to PCs, to education. The full interview is embedded here for you to see, but it was one question that Mr. Isaacson asked Mr. Gates that relates to this post. The question was How can technology help us with teacher assessment? I’ve included the transcript here of Mr. Gates reply to this question.

MR. ISAACSON: How can technology help us with teacher assessment?

MR. GATES: Well, the — in an area like math, the most straightforward assessment is to take the math scores of the kids coming in and the scores of the kids going out and say “did they improve.”

And we can correlate that to other metrics. If you go to the students and you just ask them two questions — does your teacher use class time well, and when you’re confused does your teacher help you out — if you ask those two questions, you get a result that correlates perfectly the test results. And the students know who the good teachers are. It’s different than who they like. There’s a lot of the good teachers they don’t like, but they’re not kidding about what’s going to happen when you go into that room, whether anything interesting — if the class is going to be calmed down, if you’re not paying attention the teacher will notice they’re not paying attention.

And that when you visit a charter school, that I encourage everyone to do, that’s what you see that’s just so phenomenal is the teacher is really tracking everybody in the room. And it’s not that they’re small class sizes. There is 30 to 35 people in that room. They’ve learned techniques which is not a natural thing. You know the book, Work Hard. Be Nice. Levin and Feinberg, talk about how they had to learn how to be great teachers. There wasn’t anything that showed them, and they found some exemplars and ok different pieces of what they’d done.

Well now, the high-performance charters are doing that in a systematic way. They’re bringing the teachers in. They do team teaching with huge numbers of students and make that work. So it can be done. We also take the webcam results. We take — we survey the parents. We survey the other teachers. All of these indicators line up. And so for reading, math, you know, you’ve got very strong data that are constant. And we think the teachers who are involved in these things will be willing to tell the other teachers, hey, this was not high overhead, it worked well, it helped me identify where I needed to improve. Yes, a few teachers may not have measured up to this, but you know, we care about educating the kids, so this is good system. That’s the goal.

If we don’t get the teachers out of the our districts evangelizing this measurement system — which does use webcams and electronic surveys and things like that — but if we don’t get them evangelizing it, then we’re had, because you can’t change this without bringing teachers as a whole along and being — a majority being enthusiastic about what you’re up to.

As you look back at this conversation you can see that Mr. Gates supports pre-post testing as a way to measure improvement. Also note that it is charter schools, and indeed “high performance charter schools” that are singled out as examples of schools that perform well.

The interview between Isaacson and Gates is about an hour long, but you can scroll through the video, and you can find the interview on assessment as “chapter 7” of the interview. I think you will find the interview interesting, and informative.

If you click on Watch the Full Video, it will take to FORA.tv and you will be able to select individual chapters. Click on Chapter 7 to listen to Bill Gates discuss teacher assessment.