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Saturday, February 25, 2012

Jersey Jazzman: The Continuing Humiliation of Teachers

Jersey Jazzman: The Continuing Humiliation of Teachers:

The Continuing Humiliation of Teachers

First, it was LA; now, it's NYC. So why, exactly, do we need to release teacher evaluation data that's out of date, error-prone (53% margin of error?!?!), and can't be used by the public to do anything anyway? What the hell is the point?

Well, let's go back to the LA Times, which led the way in releasing this dreck. What was their justification for releasing (really bad) teacher ratings back in 2010?
Critics, and especially union leaders, railed against The Times' decision to release this information, saying that it unfairly casts teachers as good or bad. They predicted that parents would throng local schools demanding that their children be assigned to one teacher or another based on scores that are at best an incomplete measure of a teacher's effectiveness.

Test scores are indeed just one indicator of a teacher's performance. It's too early to