Should teacher evaluations be linked to student test scores?

Following news that 11 former public school educators in Atlanta, Georgia, were convicted of falsifying test scores to meet annual targets and secure certain rewards, our son, Akhil, had several questions for me.

"Have you ever falsified test scores?" "What about marks you submit as internal assessment for the IB and IGCSE examinations?" That was easy. No, I have never done that.

"How do you feel about what those educators did?" Now, that was a little more difficult.

Although one cannot condone what the teachers did by way of altering and fabricating test answer sheets, it raises a larger question: should our teacher evaluations be linked to student achievement, as in the United States? In Hong Kong, both in the international and the local school sector, exam scores are generally not used as an indicator to measure teacher effectiveness.

Or are we a little more subtle here, and do we follow a more circuitous route in making the same connection? Parents certainly apply to send their children to schools that have good track records on external examinations. If students are considered to perform better with more effective and experienced teachers, then aren't exam scores linked to teacher effectiveness here, too?

"Using test scores to measure teacher effectiveness fosters a tendency to focus not on learning but on improving test scores," says Randi Weingarten, a lawyer and president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation's most powerful teachers' unions. Weingarten says teaching is too complex to be measured by a test score alone.