Ravitch: New Evaluation System is ‘Madness’
The public schools may be closed all week for February Break, but critics and other writers are busy examining the new teacher evaluation agreement that was reached last week.
The education historian and writer, Diane Ravitch, paints a picture of the teacher evaluation system that offers a sobering contrast to the giddiness that greeted the announcement of the agreement with the city, state and teachers’ unions.
In The New York Review of Books blog, NYR, in a post titled “No Child Left Untested,” Ms. Ravitch calls it “madness” to rely on a system of teacher accountability based on student test scores.
The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent