Deflating the Rhetoric in the Evaluation Debate
This blog post started out as a series of comments I offered in response to a blog post by Educators 4 Excellence Executive Director Ama Nyamekye; she argues that the amended version of Assembly Bill 5,currently headed to the state Senate, will weaken teacher evaluation in California by requiring districts to bargain with unions if there is to be any use of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. Her prediction is that unions will prevent that from happening, thus endangering the prospects for better evaluation. I hope her prediction about union resistance to bad ideas is correct, and I couldn’t disagree more about the appropriateness of that fight.
Ama, like you I’ve spent considerable time working with teachers on the question of how to improve evaluations. I respect your experience and the fact that your work has led you to different observations and conclusions. However, I have problems with your generalizations about teachers’ attitudes, and your framing of the issues
Ama, like you I’ve spent considerable time working with teachers on the question of how to improve evaluations. I respect your experience and the fact that your work has led you to different observations and conclusions. However, I have problems with your generalizations about teachers’ attitudes, and your framing of the issues