A Dark Day for New York
Dear Deborah,
In New York, the politicians, the union leaders, and the media are all exchanging high fives over last week'sagreement about teacher evaluation. Gov. Andrew Cuomo took credit for forcing the parties to settle. But it's a dark day when politicians impose an untested scheme on educators, despite a wealth of evidence that these schemes are inaccurate, unstable, and have negative consequences and no evidence that they improve education. See this and this. If we were serious about improving education for all children, we would take abroader view of the causes of and remedies for low achievement.
But the politicians have decided to solve our education problems not by looking at root causes but by firing teachers. We feel certain that we can fire our way to the top. In 2010, New York won a Race to the Top award of $700 million. To obtain this money—very little, if any, of which will ever reach any classroom or student—New York said it would devise a teacher evaluation plan that was based in part on student test scores. Although this idea finds little support among testing experts, it is an obsession with the current U.S. Department of Education
