"Are you aware that no high-performing nation in the world judges teachers by student test scores?"
I replied:
"I am not proposing that. However, tests or some other quantifiable performance-measures need to be part of the evaluation-process in some subject-areas, such as in language-arts and in math. Furthermore, subjective measures of teacher-performance should be done by strangers who are carefully trained for the purpose in the given subject-area and who are themselves tested and constantly re-evaluated so that those evaluations will be as objective as possible. To the fullest extent possible, personal prejudices and personal relationships should be left out of the process. The whole institution of k-12 education needs to be restructured so as to serve the needs of the children, focused only on that. Of course, it ought to be fully funded via broad-based taxes, and there should be no public subsidization of any education that is not being provided by the government. Privatization is poison. Mussolini introduced it; Hitler then took it up. Then, finally, Reagan championed it. That's for fascisms, not for democracies.
It needs to be made totally fair, especially because nature itself is the opposite."
Another reader commented:
"Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!"
I replied:
"Mine too, which is the reason why the system that I have proposed removes the existing system's incentives for teachers to seek and be especially high-paid for employment in rich school districts with few if any disabled or low-functioning kids. Improving from a score of only 25 to a score of 35 is the same 40% increase as is improving from a score of 50 to a score of 70. The disincentive for having low-performing students in your school is gone. Suddenly, the most rational response of both the teachers and the administrators becomes to devote equal educational resources to each and every student. Disabled or 'retarded' students might qualify for public assistance on other (not specifically 'educational') criteria. But the system of education would be incentivized to devote equal expenditures to each student, 'gifted,' 'normal,' or 'retarded.' They are all equally worthy, and all equally served by the educational system, as I have proposed.
You are defending a system that's anything but equalitarian -- that is, in fact, highly prejudiced in favor of star students and rich parents."
If an educational system is going to move toward a more-quantitative and thus less-prejudiced system for assessing the effectiveness of teachers, then the only way to do it without making things even worse than they already are in education is to switch from measuring performance, to measuring improvement in performance, because that's what a teacher is supposed to be conveying to students: improvement. It's similar to the distinction between speed versus acceleration. Nobody evaluates automobile engines for their speed, but instead they're rated for their acceleration, such as zero to 60 in five seconds. Thinking about education has still not yet reached the stage of development that Galileo reached for physics: he introduced the concept of acceleration. Theory in the field of education is still that primitive: pre-scientific. This is the reason why the existing measures that are used for determining the performance of teachers are wrong: we have to look at their students' acceleration not their speed, look at their improvement not their performance. Only then can accountability of teachers be measured truthfully.
Ravitch's blog is the leading edge of the intellectual school-reform movement. She should be held accountable for any fundamental misrepresentations that she makes there. It can't happen if the interested public simply 'behaves properly.' Martin Luther King 'misbehaved.' Sometimes, it's necessary. The public is invited here to this intellectual protest against the Establishment counter-Establishment regarding K-12 education.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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