Sunday links.
Following the LA Times added value testing drama, in which they printed the names of teachers who have students who don’t test well, the Times is reporting that LA Unified School District has announced it will include value added data in teacher evaluations. They claim no union permission is required.
The same Times story reports that AFT President Randi Weingarten is pressuring the UTLA and its President AJ Duffy to include value added data to union agreed upon evaluation procedures.
The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy spends lots of column inches explaining why value added is a bad idea. Then ends up going with the theory of it’s better than nothing, a pathetic defense.
New Jersey’s Governor Christie is so hateful of teachers that some wonder whether he is seeking to get back at some teacher he had as a kid. His former, now retired, teachers say they are innocent.
The Washington Post writes an editorial opposing the Obama administration’s plans to expand consumer protection with regard to so-called career colleges. The Post begins their editorial admitting they have a conflict of interest, since they own the troubled for-profit Kaplan University.
Although as far as I can tell, nobody actually asked him his opinion, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn joined the side of the the anti-Islamic crusaders in opposing the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan. While his right-wing opponent Bill Brady limited his comments to saying the construction of the center was insensitive, Quinn compared it to building a Christian center next to Auschwitz. By the way, Pat. The Christian center was built next to Auschwitz.
Roger Clemens is about as popular in baseball circles as jock itch. The man is such a pariah, he makes Barry Bonds look like Justin Bieber. Yet we should hold the cheers over the recent news that Clemens has been indicted on perjury charges for lying in front of Congress on questions related his much-denied steroid use.
However, the real question here is: Why Clemens was dragged in front of Congress in the first place? We can ask the same of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and all the players who have been put under the congressional hot lights. To put it bluntly, why have players, and not team owners, been given the third degree? Not one owner has ever been called to account for the steroid era in Major League Baseball. Not one person who has called an owner’s box home has had to answer questions about steroid use.
Dave Zirin
Maybe I’m slow, but the whole value-added discussion has me mystified. First of all, if there’s no validity to it as a measure for assessing teachers, why is it better that schemes to use it bear union seals of approval? And if it only counts for 40% rather than 50%, is there anyone who really believes scores of principals won’t simply use it for 100% and pull the rest out of their hind quarters? Especially when these results become public, with the power of the editorial boards behind them, how many principals will stand up and defend teachers with unfavorable statistics?
It seems to me that “value added “is one dicussion, and publishing anything about individual teachers., their names, where they work etc. is a whole other can of worms. This not only opens up an employee up to public scrutiny and ridicule, but it’s dangerous, as people are often stalked now on the Intenet (complete with satellite pictures of their homes). As it is, many of us don’t publish our names in the phone books for a host of reasons.
Unions need to take a stand quickly, and be clear on this issue. Principals rate teachers , and to the best of my knowledge, if a parent wants to see me or the principal about their child, they make an appointment. TEACHERS, please do NOT simply wave away this issue, while dealing with content of evaluations, as you’re giving up all of your personal privacy rights.
NYC Ed, you are right as rain. The union stand is that no student score on a test or a series of tests can ethically be used to evaluate a teacher. And the union stand is that any sharing of an individual teacher evaluation or performance review whether with a newspaper or a parent will skew the review and make it worthless.