You always know just what to say | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

You always know just what to say | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:

You always know just what to say

by Gary Rubinstein

 Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a change in strategy in the way many ‘reformers’ have been presenting themselves publicly.  It seems that they have begun to realize, especially with the release of the new Ravitch book, that the public is wising up to their antics and starting to get very frustrated by the arrogance and complete lack of any willingness to engage in an authentic discussion about what is and isn’t working.

An example of this is a recent Michael Petrilli column about teacher evaluations in which he wrote:

No, future historians are far likelier to wonder about the motivation behind the evaluation obsession. Was this a policy designed to identify, and remove, America’s least effective teachers? Or was it a kinder-and-gentler effort to provide critical feedback to instructors so they could improve their craft?

If the latter, as some reformers now claim, historians will wonder why we were so insistent on attaching high stakes to these evaluations—determined to “make human-resource decisions” based on the results, as the parlance goes.

And if the former, historians will ask: What the heck were they thinking? Did they really believe that teacher evaluations alone would be enough to push bad instructors out of the classroom?

People who don’t know a lot about me might be puzzled by the zeal with which I write about