On teacher evaluation: the responsibility of the media to dig a little deeper
The mainstream media has contributed heavily to the rampant public confusion over the teacher evaluation debate in recent weeks. Most recently, on Sunday the NY Times featured two superficial accounts of this issue.
The first, by Nick Kristof, told a familiar if touching story about an Arkansas school librarian named Mildred Grady, who bought some books by a favored author and slipped them onto the shelves to appeal to one particular at-risk student who later became a judge--to prove the notion that good teachers can change lives. This story was apparently first told in a Story Corps 2009 piece on NPR radio.
Kristof concludes that this example reveals how “we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.”
Not so fast. The so-called “rigorous” system currently being promoted by the