Florida’s Superintendents Have Officially “Lost Confidence” in the State’s Teacher and School Evaluation System
In an article written by Valerie Strauss and featured yesterday in The Washington Post, school superintendents throughout the state of Florida have officially declared to the state that they have “lost confidence” in Florida’s teacher and school evaluation system (clickhere for the original article). More specifically, state school superintendents submitted a letter to the state asserting that “they ‘have lost confidence’ in the system’s accuracy and are calling for a suspension and a review of the system” (click here also for their original letter).
This is the evaluation model instituted by Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush, whom we all also identify as the brother of former President George W. Bush and son of former President George H. W. Bush. Former President GW Bush was also the architect of what most now agree is the failed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, that former President GW Bush put forth as federal policy given his “educational reforms” in the state of Texas in the late 1990s. Beyond this brotherly association, however, Jeb is also currently a running candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and via his campaign he is also (like his brother, pre-NCLB) touting his “educational reforms” in the state of Florida, hoping to take these reforms also to the White House.
It is Jeb Bush’s “educational reforms” that, without research evidence in support, also became models of “educational reform” for other states around the country, including states like New Mexico. In New Mexico, the state in which its current evaluation system, as based on the Florida model, is at the core of a potentially significant lawsuit (see prior posts about this lawsuit here, here, here, and here). Not surprisingly, one of Jeb Bush’s protégés – Hanna Skandera, who is currently the state of New Mexico’s Secretary of its Public Education Department (PED) – took Bush’s model to even more of an extreme, making this particular model one of the most arbitrary and capricious of all such models currently in place throughout the U.S. (as also defined and detailed more fully here).
Hence, it should certainly be of interest to those in New Mexico (and other states) that the teacher and school evaluation model upon which their state model was built, is now apparently falling apart, at least for now.
“The superintendents [in Florida] are calling for the state to suspend the system for a year Florida’s Superintendents Have Officially “Lost Confidence” in the State’s Teacher and School Evaluation System | VAMboozled!: