Whether students care to admit it or not, teachers perform an important key to the functioning of modern society, which is that of education. In a society based on technological progress for improvement, education stands as the method to impart knowledge into future members of the workforce to allow new innovations to be built on top of it. However, with this stance also comes endemic questions such as how educational “success” should be measured and what the best method to compensate those doing the teaching actually is.

The latest attempt to give ideological solvency to these issues comes in the form of Texas Senate Bill 893, which outlines a plan to remove the current minimum salary system for teachers that works off of years of veterancy and instead switches to a monthly salary- with some caveats. The new system requires the formation of a new teacher development framework that outlines how exactly school districts should evaluate teachers based in terms of teaching standards, discipline, and academic performance of the students, a factor which becomes much more relevant when it is considered that all teacher raises would then stem from this evaluation system.

Therein lies the problem with this suggested legislation. Under its framework, student academic performance becomes a driving factor for teacher pay, yet it remains uncertain exactly how this will be measured. The most obvious method would be standardized tests such as AP and the STAAR, and the Senate has already stipulated that they will be a factor (although not the only factor). Unfortunately, however, they may also be one of the most dangerous methods.

Standardized tests are wonderful at the state level. They make it incredibly easy to gauge a school’s overall academic performance in easily interpretable numbers and figure out where potential problem areas are. However, by no means do standardized tests cover everything that a student should learn over the course of a class, nor do they always accurately judge a student’s true knowledge on any subject. Thus, the fatal pitfall is revealed: because standardized tests are such an easy way to judge a school, they often become the definitive measure even though the test can often be very different from the class. The test, therefore, can become a one-shot, make-it-or-break-it event that determines whether a student, and, under the potential policy, the teacher by extension, has succeeded or failed.

This means that, under the proposed system, whether or not the students actually learned or retained anything in a class is irrelevant; all that matters is the test score. Consequently, the primary thing that can give teachers raises and boost them into levels that they can actually comfortably live on becomes the test scores. Therefore, the mass incentive then becomes to teach for the test, not for real life. Such an occurrence would likely then correlate into the education of a workforce that has not been trained to solve real-world application of concepts outside of contrived tests, resulting in the failure of the education system to complete its intended task.

This concept of teaching for the test not only diminishes the focus on learning, but it also further entrenches prioritization of test scores in teacher competence, a stance not entirely justified given that test scores often do not represent learning relative to starting point or economic advantage and just compare everybody as if they all had the same resources. Schools have different levels of funding, a measure which directly correlates to what resources a teacher has available and what options a student has to get additional help. The test scores judge every teacher on the same plane, an issue when teachers with less educational materials are penalized for lower scores than richer schools. While schools would be able to correct this in evaluation to some degree, they would still have to follow the state guidelines that would limit the potential of teachers to get raises.

There are also, of course, teachers who teach classes that do not have state or national standardized testing, who, in the bill, would likely be covered by the provisions of the teacher development framework. Without further specification of how each section of teachers would be evaluated in absence of testing, however, this could also lead to issues where teachers can no longer be evaluated on veterancy but aren’t presented with a clear alternative under the framework in the bill, representing a potential change without clearly defined guidelines.

This bill has already passed in the Senate chamber of the legislature. If the bill succeeds in passing through the House and gubernatorial signing, it would go into effect in September 2015 and change the funding system for teachers throughout the state.

Standardized testing needs to be a piece of the puzzle, but just a piece. They do serve as a form of basic evaluation of progress, but they cannot serve as the sole indicator of student learning or teacher ability because not everything important to be learned will be on one test. If academic success is to be defined more fully, there need to be other indicators that demonstrate other sides of learning besides just test-taking.