Assessing teachers without fetishizing test-based reforms
This was written by Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and director of the National Education Policy Center. He can be reached at welner@colorado.edu. By Kevin G. Welner Remember how “the soft bigotry of low expectations” beautifully encapsulated a serious equity issue and then led to a destructive No Child Left Behind law that has narrowed the curriculum and forced educators to over-test students and teach to tests? We are, I fear, now at the same point with teacher quality. Lost within the ongoing craziness of leaders using teacher and principal dismissal as a primary strategy to fix public schools (along with the echo chamber of irresponsible punditry and filmmaking) are some important truths about teacher quality.
