Now that there's a mania for evaluation processes, no one bothers to look at what they imply. It appears many of them simply assign principals to perpetual observations.
...what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers – including those she knows are excellent – sometimes to the detriment of her other duties.
Doesn't sound like such a swell job to me. Wasting the time of principals is hardly going to make our schools improve. Worse, the actual systems are untested and unproven. While we know already that value-added has wild margins of error, and results in dismissals of those who might indeed be very good teachers, we have no idea how, if at all, these systems will benefit anyone other than the corporatists who want to fire teachers.
The article discusses a video:
"At the very end, it shows a little kid on this airplane looking out and smiling," he says.
"But this system has not been tested, has not been tried. I'm not willing to put my kid on board this plane."
Yet corporatist pawn Arne Duncan has no issue whatsoever with it. He has no problem experimenting with your kids or mine. Barack Obama, enabler-in-chief, sends his kids to schools with small classes and few high-stakes tests. Apparently that's not suitable for us regular folk.
The people who control public education these days don't think it suits their own kids. If they cared so deeply about public education they'd put their money, their children, where their mouths were. It appears the only thing they care about is the support of their corporate overlords. That's a clear conflict of interest, a clear lack of integrity, and a clear danger to what remains of our fragile democracy.
Posts
