By Kathleen Nugent, New Jersey State Director
The good news is right now there’s a raging national debate about the U.S. public school system. Two key points of the debate are remaining competitive globally and, importantly, making sure every student – regardless of income or demographic – has access to an excellent education. The potential of this collective attention is huge.
Yet we often seem to get in our own way with next steps. Suddenly, there are sides to take. Who knew there could be sides when talking about what’s best for kids? Even worse, extreme views create false bogeymen. Extremism – defined here as projecting impossible realities in the face of proposed change -obscures facts, misleads the majority, and forms the basis of our “insanity.” President Obama and Jon Stewart are among the many issuing calls to end this bad and potentially harmful communication. We have to be better than this.
As the education reform debate continues, so does the insanity and ensuing hysteria. Here are a few examples and some counterpoints:
Insanity #1: Adding student achievement to teacher evaluations will make a teacher’s employment contingent on one high stakes test, one proficiency score, and/or the whim of a principal on any given day.
Some sanity: No state or district has proposed a teacher evaluation metric that places full weight on test scores. At most, student achievement – consisting of multiple measures – makes up to half of the evaluation. To be sure, no one claims to have designed the perfect teacher evaluation system with the perfect formula either. Evaluating teacher effectiveness is extremely complicated and smart minds across the country are working to improve what exists. But just because there’s no one clear answer does not mean we shouldn’t try to improve the current system, which most often doesn’t consider teacher impact at all.