Teachers Face Good Cops or Bad Cops in Push for Evaluations
Last week I wrote about the fairy dust of multiple measures that the Department of Education has been sprinkling on worthless Value Added Models, under the mistaken belief that this somehow renders them golden. Dept of Ed press secretary Justin Hamilton quoted Arne Duncan, who said, "here in the US teacher evaluation is all too often tied only to test scores which makes no sense." I replied "WHO uses test scores only? Can you name one district that evaluates this way?" The answer came last week, as newspapers in New York published the value added ratings of 18,000 teachers, and made teacher evaluation a public sport.
This news was accompanied by something rather strange - Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee both criticized the action, suggesting that these scores alone do not give a full picture of teacher performance. What we have here seems to be a classic case of good cop/bad cop, where Rupert Murdoch's New York Post plays the abusive bad cop, publishing the names of teachers, and singling out the city's "worst" teachers for public humiliation. And
