Teacher Evaluations: Common Sense and Randi's Nonsense

Once a month in the NYT Week in Review, the UFT pays to publish an article by Randi Weingarten. Today's is entitled "Using Student Test Scores to Evaulate Teachers: Common Sense or Nonsense?" (see www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/UsingStudentTestScores.pdf)

She's very smart and clever -- and leaves the reader with a VERY misleading picture of reality. She makes some good points about how hard it is to fairly evaluate teachers and rails against those who would do so based solely on test scores -- but fails to say who these people are! I don't know any. Every sensible proposal I've heard endorses the "multiple measures" that Randi calls for.

Randi, however, is noticeably silent on the key evaluators, namely principals. Principals MUST have the power to control their staff, which means the ability to evaluate, hire and fire all staff in their building, most importantly teachers. Without this power, how can they be held accountable for improving the school?

What Randi fails to address is that the great majority of the time EVERYONE -- the principal, other teachers, parents and students -- knows who the great teachers are -- and who the bad apples are.

In this article, Randi sounds very reasonable and one might even think she and her union were in favor of a robust evaluation system, with rewards for the best people and penalties for the worst, but the reality is precisely the opposite. She and her union fight tooth and nail against ANY evaluation system whatsoever, so that even the very worst teachers are protected (and even the very best teachers get little or no extra reward). She and her union want to maintain the status quo, in which everything is driven by seniority and certificates, NOT the only thing that matters: student learning and achievement.