Common Ground Will Improve Teacher Quality and Student Achievement
I was encouraged to see Joel Klein's recent opinion piece ("What the School Reform Debate Misses About Teachers," Sunday, March 13, 2011) in theWashington Post.
While he ignored the proposals the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has advanced in the last 14 months (A Continuous Improvement Model for Teacher Evaluation and A Framework for Addressing Allegations of Teacher Wrongdoing) and the progress we have made to improve teacher quality, I believe we share some common ground with what Mr. Klein outlines.
The AFT has long focused on good teaching and the critical role it plays in student achievement. We differ with Mr. Klein and others on a very fundamental point: We believe you can't make a thorough and objective decision about a teacher's qualifications without a valid evaluation system. They believe those decisions can be made by the arbitrary and subjective judgment of administrators. In most school districts, teacher evaluations are done -- if they're done at all -- in an uneven way that fails on almost every level. The current evaluation process does not