Thomas Kane On Educational Reform
You might recall from a prior post, the name of Thomas Kane, an economics professor from Harvard University who also directed the $45 million worth of Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) studies for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Not surprisingly as a VAM advocate, he advanced then, and continues to advance now, a series of highly false claims about the wonderful potentials of VAMs.
As highlighted in the piece Kane wrote, and Brookings released on its website on “The Case for Combining Teacher Evaluation and the Common Core,” Kane continues to advance a series of highly false claims and assumptions in terms of how “better teacher evaluation systems will be vital for any broad [educational] reform effort, such as implementing the Common Core.” Exerting series of “heroic assumptions” without evidence seems to be a recurring theme, which I cannot myself figure out knowing Kane’s an academic and quite honestly should know better.
Here are some examples of what I speak (and protest):
- Educational reform is “a massive adult behavior change exercise…[U]nless we change what adults do every day inside their classrooms, we cannot expect student outcomes to improve.” Enter teachers as the new and popular (thanks to folks like Kane) sources of blame. We are to accept Kane’s assumption, here, that teachers have not been motivated prior to change their adult behaviors and teach their students well, help their students learn, improve their students’ outcomes, and the like.
- Hence, when “current attempts to implement new teacher evaluations fall short—as they certainly will, given the long history of box-checking—we must improve them.” We are to accept Kane’s assumption here, despite the fact that little to no research evidence exists supporting that teacher evaluation systems improve much of anything including “improved student outcomes,” that new teacher evaluation systems based on carrot and stick measures are going to do this.
- Positioning new and improved teacher evaluation systems against another Thomas Kane On Educational Reform |: