How Moral Crusading Makes Us Stupid
by Frederick M. Hess • Mar 24, 2011 at 8:56 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareOne of my least favorite things about education is how eagerly we turn sensible discussions into bizarrely polarizing moral crusades. Aided by competing, mindless invocations of "it's for the kids," we manage to turn otherwise sensible discussions about school accountability, teacher evaluation and pay, school choice, or tracking into incoherent, hysterical morality plays.
So, today, I'm just going to vent for a bit. I hope you don't mind.
For instance, it strikes me that it's obviously smart, in a 21st century labor market, to pay good educators more than bad ones--and to steer dollars in ways that recognize and reward scarce talents, valuable expertise, and productivity. It also strikes me as obvious that iron-clad job protections ought to be revisited. But it seems equally self-evident to me that none of this should be used to justify clumsy efforts to impose crude one-size-fits-all mandates when it comes to teacher evaluation or pay.
Yet our teacher evaluation and pay debates are fought between two bizarre poles. One camp insists that
