Last Sunday’s New York Times had an article highlighting the implementation of the new teacher evaluation system being put in place in Tennessee. The system is part of the Race-to-the-Top attempt to drive education reform in the states by dangling federal cash for reforms.
As you read the article, you should begin to realize why “reform” fails and why many people in both the Government Education Complex and Education Transformation* movement find these rules so absurd.
There simply is no way that a federal bureaucracy (or any bureaucracy, for that matter) can devise a unified system of teacher evaluation. There are too many variables, and teachers are correct to be skeptical of this top-down approach to their craft.
For example, the first few paragraphs of the article expose the unworkable nature of the evaluation process.
Steve Ball, executive principal at the East Literature Magnet School in Nashville, arrived at an English class unannounced one day this month and spent 60 minutes taking copious notes as he watched the teacher introduce and explain the concept of irony. “It was a good lesson,” Mr. Ball said.
But under Tennessee’s new teacher-evaluation system, which is similar to systems being adopted around the country, Mr. Ball said he had to give the teacher a one — the lowest rating on a five-point scale — in one of 12 categories: breaking students into groups.** Even though Mr. Ball had seen the same teacher, a successful veteran he declined to identify, group students effectively on other occasions, he felt that he had no choice but to follow the strict guidelines of the state’s complicated rubric.
“It’s not an accurate reflection of her as a teacher,” Mr. Ball said.
What a shock. A principal knows his teachers better than the federalized check list. Wonders never cease.
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While at CPAC last week for The Heartland Institute, I met a lot of old friends, made some new ones, and heard some great speeches (the best I’ve heard from Rick Santorum; Sarah Palin was on fire; and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was excellent.) Speaking of Scott Walker, the Occupy Wall Street crowd and their union allies targeted him for a special protest.
First, let me say this: The Occupy Wall Street protests were a big dud. Yes, a few got into the hotel — and there was even a scuffle in the hallway. But every time they shouted their tired slogans, they were quickly drowned out by a combination of ridicule and chants of “USA! USA! USA!” by the CPAC attendees.
But as Walker entered the Wardman Park Marriott in DC, the Occupy folks were outside (in a rather small force) to express their displeasure at his reforms, which have probably saved the state from bankruptcy. So I moseyed on down with my iPhone in my pocket and took a couple of videos. A highlight of the juvenile street theater was the parading of a “golden toilet” down the sidewalk.
I’d say more, but the video speaks for itself.
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The recent “occupation” of Wall Street has shed light on what is becoming an unfortunate phenomenon in American society; the purposeless protest, the destructive demonstration, movements that serve only to draw attention to an issue without proposing any real degree of reform.
We saw it when unions occupied the Wisconsin capitol building, during the 2001 and 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas protests in Canada and Miami, the G-20 protest in Montreal in October 2000 and the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. Disaffected individuals are turning to increasingly violent, disruptive and thoroughly useless means of effecting change (presumably their goal).
Some seem aware of their lack of direction and, not surprisingly, seem to embrace it. Reuters quotes Jeremy Moss, a 41 Bronx native and mental health counselor who lived in Seattle during the WTO riots and feels the Wall Street protests are different, admitting,
“There’s a lot of naive idealism happening, what’s wrong with that?”
As Bill Buckley would say, “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive”. Naïve idealism is fine, but it has no business blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Politico has tracked the IP address of a website attacking former D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to the American Federation of Teachers.
The site, which refers to Rhee as “the Sarah Palin of education” among other things and is the main online source of attacks on Rhee, was launched in February. An tracking tool traces the IP address back to the AFT’s offices in D.C. The site has since jumped to several other IP addresses.
Coming on the heels of an accidentally released-and-then-pulled document explaining the AFT’s strategy to quash the Parent Trigger in Connecticut, we see a clear emerging pattern of aggressive, anti-reform and anti-family empowerment actions by a teachers union that purports to show a friendly hand to education reform.
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I’ve been carrying on conversations with family members in Wisconsin (yes, I’m a born-and-raised cheesehead) concerning Gov. Scott Walker’s budget reform measures. Most of my family agrees with what he did, but many are pretty dismayed by how he did it. And to a person, they remain unconvinced that the austerity measures, if you want to call them that, will have any positive effect on the state’s economy that they will notice. New jobs and tax cuts would be nice but nobody is holding their breath.
During one such conversation, I mentioned recent employment growth in Wisconsin — 9,500 new jobs in June alone. The figure is controversial – the feds count jobs differently than the state does — but that wasn’t the point during our conversation. The point at that time was, “these are not good-paying jobs.” Well, how to respond to that?
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The Washignton Examiner has a superb set of articles ug, discussing how the collective bargaining limits Gov. Walker implemented over wild union objection in Wisconsin are saving local budgets already, two days after the provisions went into effect.
The first, by investigative reporter Byron York, details how these curbs allowed one school district near Appleton (somewhat near my own hometown) to turn a $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus.
In the past, Kaukauna’s agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust — a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. “It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them,” says Arnoldussen. “Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor.” This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.
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In the aftermath of the union protests in Madison in February and March, some recent updates:
* About 90 matters, mostly death threats against state officials, were referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation of the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office. About a dozen remain open cases. About 30 of the 90 threats were directed at Democrats. About the same number were directed at Republicans.
Some of the most violent-sounding threats were directed at Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose budget repair bill provisions limiting collective bargaining for state employees and teachers to wages and requiring employee contributions to health care and pension benefits provoked union protests. Some threats out-of-state were investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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A few weeks ago Connecticut passed a budget containing $2.6 billion in tax hikes on alcohol, tobacco, hotels, sales, and estates. At that time Governor Dannel Malloy “demanded” $2 billion in concessions from the public employee unions. Fast forward to this week…On Tuesday it was announced that the Governor only got $1.6 billion in concessions spread over the next two years and has precariously locked state taxpayers into a sweetheart union agreement that will run until 2022.
In short, the state agreed to take more money from the pockets of state’s taxpayers in order to further protect government employees and the public union’s political coffers for years to come.
Union negotiator Dan Livingston was quoted in the Connecticut Post as saying that “the toughest concession, in terms of money coming directly out of workers’ pockets, is a two-year wage freeze worth $138.8 million in 2012 and $309.5 million in 2013. In return, Malloy agreed to three percent raises each of the following three years and a four-year, no-layoff guarantee for current SEBAC employees.”
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