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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Schools Matter: Let's Have Performance Pay for Economists Who Muck Around in Education Issues

Schools Matter: Let's Have Performance Pay for Economists Who Muck Around in Education Issues

Let's Have Performance Pay for Economists Who Muck Around in Education Issues

The NYTimes blog, Economix, has a posting by Harvard economist, Edward Glaeser, on a recent conference in Cambridge to air some of the research on teacher pay based on test scores. The conference brought together the customary lineup of pro-corporate and pro-privatization forces, those described by Dr. Paul Peterson as the good against the evil (see Bush v. Holmes (Fl. Sup. Ct.) for some background on Peterson's self-described "small band of Jedi attackers, using their intellectual powers to fight the unified Death Star forces led by Darth Vader, whose intellectual capacity has been corrupted by the urge for complete hegemony”(p. 3).

This illustrious group of Jedi warriors are now ensconced at Harvard within The Program on Policy and Governance (PEPG), whose Advisory Committee is headed by Jeb Bush and whose members include the Who's Who of research chefs and ideologues who earn their bread by manufacturing reports to support the corporate vision of schooling.

Since there was no U. S. research presented at the conference to support the current plan to base tenure and pay on test scores, Glaeser focuses on a rehash of a study done ten years ago in Israel and a more recent one