NYC Educator: The Seat at the Table

NYC Educator: The Seat at the Table:

The Seat at the Table

This is something our leadership always appears to want. And it's certainly true that it pays to talk to everyone. I'm not a big fan of Bill Gates, but you never know. Maybe one day, even someone as impervious to fact and science as he is may decide to listen. But since there's little evidence to support that supposition, it's best not to bet the farm on it.

For example, there was the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and we participated. Basically, this study wanted to determine what teachers could do to get better test scores. At my school Gates reps pretty much confused everyone, and gave us mixed messages on what they were trying to do. Fast forward to 2014, and we're being evaluated by test scores. The underlying assumption of the Gates study was that teacher effectiveness could be determined by test scores, despite no evidence to support it.

There's a lot of talk about how we could opt for portfolios, projects, or whatever. Unfortunately there's no evidence to support the assumption that any of these determine teacher effectiveness either. The mania to quantify teacher effectiveness may be something worth addressing, but until we can do so with some degree of confidence or accuracy, we ought not to be accepting of (let alone directly negotiating) abject nonsense.

To show our good faith, we allowed Gates to keynote an AFT convention. In gratitude, Gates turned around and trashed teacher pensions the