Running through my morning Tweets over coffee I came across this one from Diane Ravitch.
DianeRavitch @KennethLibby These are all very conservative groups. Is he a Democrat for Ed Reform? In what sense of the word?
Interesting. So I went to Ken’s tweet.
KennethLibby ERN’s $50k from Ravenel Curry (III). Also gives to CER, Cato, Alliance for School Choice: http://is.gd/ePWyp Also likes Man. Institute, AEI
Translation into standard English:
Ravenel Curry III is a major funding source for Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is an influential so-called Reform lobby group for charters, KIPP, TFA and is rabidly anti-union. Libby points out that the ubber-WASPY named Ravenel Curry III also contributes heavily to such right-wing organizations as the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
Ravitch therefore asks an excellent question. What exactly is a Democrat for education reform if you can’t tell it or them apart from the most conservative think tanks in America?
And why is their agenda so much like that of the present Democratic administration?
The LA Times decision to use a value added assessment method to look at LA teachers and then publish a ranking of teachers by name in their newspaper has created clarity and confusion.
That alone is not surprising.
What is surprising is who is clear and who is confused.
Over on the political right a dispute has erupted between Ricky Hess of the far right-wing American Enterprise Institute and the wing-nut Fordham’s Liam Julian.
Hess likes the use of the questionable value added approach but thought the LA Times crossed some lines in publishing individual teacher names. Julian likes value added but thinks teachers should be marched through the public square with dunce caps on if their students don’t score well.
Then there is the national education czar, Arne Duncan. He likes the test. He likes the publication of teacher names. The goof just loves it all. So Duncan and Fordham are on the same page. This guy isn’t just bad. When a Democratic president has a Secretary of Education who is to the right of the American Enterprise Institute…
Today it was AFT President Rand Weingarten’s turn to comment.
Let’s start with the good news first.
Weingarten has problems with using a value added assessment unless it is part of a more robust evaluation process.
Such data should be considered only as part of a well-rounded evaluation of a teacher’s performance, Randi Weingarten said, and then should be available only to the teacher, his or her principal, and individual parents. It is wrong, she said, to make such information widely available to the public.
Weingarten criticized the LA Times for publishing the names of teachers and their ranking.
The head of the American Federation of Teachers said Wednesday that she believed parents have a right to know how well their children’s teachers are rated on employee evaluations, but strongly disagreed with The Times’ decision to publish data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students.
I’m not sure what this means.
“Parents have a right to know,” sounds simple enough.
But, no it isn’t so simple. And Weingarten knows that. Or should.
How should parents know? Should each parent be given a copy of the teacher’s evaluation? The raw data? By request only? All of their professional evals? Or only last year’s?
Has the situation with teacher-bashing gotten to the point where even the head on one of our unions can’t bring herself to say that this is a question that needs some thinking?
You’re probably one of those misguided people who think that smaller class sizes are a good thing.
Oh, you silly boy and girl!
You probably think that the loss of thousands of teaching jobs and the resulting increase in class size is bad.
That’s because you probably don’t work for a think tank, dummy.
AEI’s Fred Hess can explain that the over six thousand teachers that may be laid off in the New York public school system is a golden opportunity. It’s a feature, not a glitch.
But not only would the layoffs of thousands of teachers not mean the sky is falling. If the layoffs are done right, it could mean the sun shines even brighter for the city’s students. For while parents have a natural affinity for smaller classes, smaller classes generally don’t boost achievement – it’s teacher quality that does. And smaller classes actually make it tougher to boost teacher quality.
Stupid parents. Having a natural affinity for small class sizes.
Fred Klonsky 