Alan Stewart Carl gives a thumbs up to President Barack Obama’s first major presidential speech on education today. The former college instructor outlined his support for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance, expanding charter schools, and l…

Optimizing the calendar is a sensible step. And I support both charter schools and some form of merit pay, as long as there’s flexibility built in for teachers so that they are not given motivation to “outsource” poor achievers for the sake of making their performance look good.

In general, I support measuring student performance and improvement and then regarding that as a reflection of teacher performance. However, I do see some problem where those outside education lack familiarity with the tools, mechanics and dynamics of education. This is the only way I can account for what I see as somewhat unrealistic expectations when it comes to assessment. Student assessment is indeed crucially important, but even the best tools are flawed and limited, and so any plans tied to assessment ought to be crafted by folks who truly understand assessment. This would, for example, lead to favoring a fair amount of assessment of a form that is more expensive and individualized, as opposed to standardized. The more rote and mechanical and easily gradeable the assessment are, the more incomplete the measurement of aptitude is, IMO. It’s a REAL problem.

Further, any merit pay system has to find a reasonable way to account for differences in the nature of the student body that each teacher must work with. Many teachers of low income student populations with high turnover rates face unique challenges that put a substantial component of the outcomes of their students well beyond their control, at least currently. Reform must address that.

One thing that I think would be useful on this count would be the development of some sort of standardized national tracking of students so that every student has a standard easily digestible report that summarizes his or her strengths and weaknesses and tracks the progress made addressing the weaknesses. I also think the establishment of some sort of national assessment wiki would go a long way in helping educators themselves contribute to the development of both teaching content and assessment materials.