Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

NYC Educator: Teacher Evaluation Will Show Whether Biden Is Friend or Foe

NYC Educator: Teacher Evaluation Will Show Whether Biden Is Friend or Foe
Teacher Evaluation Will Show Whether Biden Is Friend or Foe




For a while, I was wondering why we would even bother negotiating an observation system with the city. I mean, here we are, all of us, doing a job none of us had trained for or even conceived. How can our supervisors come in and determine exactly how much we suck at these jobs? For one thing, they've never attempted them themselves. I mean, sure, they have a lot of experience telling teachers they suck and exactly why, but supposedly they themselves were teachers at some point. 

In my school, supervisors don't teach at all anymore. That's too bad, You'd hope they'd be out there setting an example of best practices for us, rather than simply talking about it. 

However, even if they were doing that, I don't know a single supervisor with experience teaching online. I don't know a supervisor with experience teaching masked students who are socially distanced either. Maybe in other schools supervisors teach, and maybe some of them have as much experience as we do, i.e, very little.

Who on earth is qualified to design a system to rate those of us doing these new things? I'd argue not even we are, let alone our non-teaching supervisors. If you've been doing this work for less than a year, unless your soul is frozen colder than Mitch McConnell's heart, you're still on a steep learning curve.

Of course, that was no impediment to Charlotte Danielson, who's actually conjured up a Framework for Remote CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Teacher Evaluation Will Show Whether Biden Is Friend or Foe