CURMUDGUCATION: CAP: Muddled Teacher Eval Thoughts

CURMUDGUCATION: CAP: Muddled Teacher Eval Thoughts:
CAP: Muddled Teacher Eval Thoughts

 The Center for American Progress wants to get its two cents in on the Vergara appeal, and their thoughts are... confused. Catherine Brown is CAP's vp of Education Policy after previously serving as vice president of policy at Teach for America, policy adviser to senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and senior education policy adviser for the House Committee on Education and Labor. Brown is in US News making her pitch for life over and above Vergara.


As is typical with CAP, we're a little short on actual facts or serious data, which leads Brown down the garden path and into verbal weeds like these-

Teachers largely view their performance based in part on the impact they have on student learning.

I am largely impressed in part by this sentence's attempt to assert something that is largely unsupportable while in part maintaining largely deniable language. In part. This sentence goes into my reformster gibberish hall of fame. Congratulations, Ms. Brown. Your statuette is largely in part on its way.

It's not all nonsense; Brown makes a largely unreformstery point in part with this thought:

Our collective policy goal shouldn't be to eliminate teacher protections like last-in-first-out and tenure based on seniority, but rather to render them unnecessary. We should aim to build schools with such high-performing cultures that eliminating incompetence isn't the most pressing issue, spreading excellence is.

That is not stupid (regular readers know what high praise that largely in part is). The stupid comes later, when reformsters start talking about how to build such schools and spread such excellence, CURMUDGUCATION: CAP: Muddled Teacher Eval Thoughts: