I'll say this, the only true measure is how does a student progress from the start to the end of the year in several areas. Artificial benchmarks ignored social-economical variables and the damage prior teachers may have done. Whats more impressive, a 6th grade teacher who gets a student from the sixth grade reading level to the seventh, or a teacher 6th who gets students at the fourth grade level and gets them to the sixth? Under NCLB it would be the former.