Joel Klein’s Bad Faith Argument: The Contours Of Ideological Thinking
(This is the second of two posts written in response to Joel Klein’s manifesto, The Failure of American Schools, which was published in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly. In the first post, I addressed Klein’s attribution of an apocryphal anti-union quote to the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker.)
The defining characteristic of a bad faith argument is not that it is wrong, although it certainly is that, but that the person wielding it knows that it is wrong, or with a minimal exercise of due diligence, would discover that it is wrong. Klein’s Atlantic essay is replete with bad faith arguments, so many that it would require a small pamphlet to respond to every such argument. Consequently, I will restrict myself to analyzing a number of the more central propositions he puts forward.
Using Value-Added ‘Teacher Data Reports’ To Evaluate Teachers
Klein declares that he is “still shocked” that the UFT opposed his efforts to use the value-added ‘teacher data reports’ he had developed for high stakes decisions on tenure and discontinuance. “As a result, even when making a lifetime tenure commitment,” Klein writes, “under New York law you could not consider a teacher’s impact on student learning. The Kafkaesque outcome demonstrates precisely the way the system is run: for the