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Smart List: 60 People Shaping the Future of K-12 Education
Finally, the truth is coming out. For years, school administrators barely set foot in classrooms except maybe to tell the teacher that a parent was waiting in the office to take a child to the dentist. Almost every teacher received good reviews and tenure was granted without any kind of substantive evaluation. Of course this had nothing to do with unions that have no legal right to hire or fire. It was an administrative problem that was probably related to the economy. Until this recession, it was often so difficult to hire teachers for urban districts that the primary goal of administrators was to hire and retain teachers. The word “evaluation” was hardly mentioned.
The goal of the teachers’ union is to ensure due process for teachers and to protect them against arbitrary and capricious terminations. If tests are used to evaluate teachers, these tests must be designed to measure the SCHOOL progress of each child. Does anyone wish less for our teachers?
Follow-up on Millot:
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2010/02/oh-what-tangled-web-millot-russo-and.html
A little after 5 pm that day it was taken off the site by TWIE editor Alexander Russo. Russo informed me that he had been directed to do so by TWIEs sponsor, Scholastic as the result of a call from Andrew Rotherham to someone at the firm that Russo thought might be Rotherham’s friend.
Over the weekend Russo struggled mightily to fix the problem. He emailed me, “Please be assured that this isn’t really about you or the substance of your post.” I agreed to sit tight till Monday. Sometime around 10:15 Monday evening I was fired by Russo or, to be more precise, he activated TypePad software on TWIE prohibiting me from publishing. The act was in breech of a six-month contract giving me “complete editorial control” over my columns as well as the princely sum of $200 a month.
Where does due process for teachers optimally intersect with screening good teachers for children? It must involve comprehensive value-added metrics. Does anyone wish less for our children? There’s an unfortunate zero-sum game here… but children don’t have contracts.