After Years of Bitter Opposition

Sunday 16 May 2010 - Filed under Education

Jennifer Medina via The New York Times:

The State Education Department and New York’s teachers’ unions have reached a deal to overhaul teacher evaluations and tie them to student test scores, brokering a compromise on an issue the unions had bitterly opposed for years. (Emphasis mine)

It’s nice to know that the teachers of New York have finally given up on the notion that the one aspect of their job which defines their abilities as a teacher, how well they can teach their students, isn’t applicable in defining their usefulness as teachers.

Oh wait.  Maybe not.

Officials at the New York City Department of Education privately had hoped for more changes in the evaluation system, like giving even more weight to student test scores. The city would now have to try to win those changes during contract negotiations with the union, which are at an impasse.

I’m not here to argue that test scores are the best way to evaluate the intelligence or progress of students, much less to evaluate how good teachers are.  But it’s clear that we need to find some objective way to evaluate teachers on how well they perform in the classroom¹ so that we might either 1) reward them for a job well done, or 2) get rid of them and replace them with teachers who will do an effective job.

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1.  As a note, the “self-evaluation” proposed by the unions is most definitely not the way.  That only sets up more opaqueness in a system run by evaluators with rubber stamps.  Transparency is the key.  And you can’t have transparency when you have union teachers judging other teahcers in the same union.  There is a clear conflict of interest.

2010-05-16  »  madlibertarianguy