"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plans to use student test scores in the ranking and firing of New York City teachers pits teachers against students to cut the state budget (front page, Nov. 26).
Moreover, we take issue with his analogy regarding cardiac surgery and teacher performance. What has most improved cardiac surgery outcomes is collaborative effort among teams of cardiac surgeons to learn best practices from one another, and not a punitive quest to fire outliers."
Student learning, like patient experience, is multifactorial and multidimensional. The quest for better quality is not about teaching to the test, nor avoiding the sickest patients or the most disadvantaged students.
Improving quality means finding ways for doctors and patients, students and teachers and their communities to openly identify areas of weakness that are most fruitful for improvement, not creating incentives to hide or paper over.
To excel, teachers, like students and schools in need of improvement, need support, not threats.
Gordon D. Schiff
Virginia Casper
The writers are, respectively, and a physician and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School; and a teacher educator on the graduate faculty at the Bank Street College of Education.