Saturday, December 3, 2011

Jersey Jazzman: Hubris Of the Incompetent

Jersey Jazzman: Hubris Of the Incompetent:

Hubris Of the Incompetent

Let's leave aside Jersey for a sec and mix things up a bit.

Down in Tennessee, the ruling elite have been waging a war on teachers, funded in large part by disgraced junk bond king Michael Milken. As regular visiter to this site "jcg" has pointed out in comments, the evaluation tool Tennessee uses assumes a standard distribution of scores; if the actual scores don't fit, they game the system to make it fit. Would you like your job performance evaluated this way?

As Michael Winerip has reported in the NY Times, teachers in Tennessee who teach subjects where students don't take standardized tests now have to play a game where they pick and choose the test results in other subjects that become a mandatory part of their evaluation; in other words, the art teacher has to decide whether she wants her evaluation to include the school's results in reading, writing, or math as part of her rating. No, I'm not kidding.

So, what do the overlords of Tennessee's business community think about this massive exercise in stupidity?
The business community strongly supports these education