BALDACCI PLANS TO JOIN THE TEST TYRANTS BIG TIME

Maine Public Broadcasting - Gov. John Baldacci plans to introduce legislation in the coming weeks that would link teacher evaluations -- and possibly teacher pay -- to student performance. He outlined his proposal in his State of the State speech last night. . . State law currently bars school administrators from evaluating teachers based on how their students do on measurements such as test scores . . . The Baldacci administration wants to get rid of the prohibition to make it more competitive for federal grant money for education through the so-called Race to the Top program. . .

Says Mark Gray, executive director of the Maine Education Association, whose members are compensated by school districts based on their longevity and educational attainment. . . "If I'm a high school math teacher and I've got four, five sections of math, and I might have a couple of algebra 2 classes, I might also be teaching a calculus class. How does my effectiveness as a teacher get matched up to the fact that I'm teaching a large number of students and I'm teaching students at different levels? Is it an average of all of the test scores of all the students that I see during a semester or during a grading period?"