Theres some really important stuff going on in the worlds of the department of education and teachers unions. --- The way Duncan typically sums it up: for less than 1 percent of what the federal government spends annually on K-12 education, the grants encouraged states to adopt a range of reforms. States lifted caps on charter schools, adopted the Common Core state standards, and agreed to link teachers evaluations — and in some cases their pay — to student test scores and classroom observations. Teachers unions found little to like in this approach. They dont like the concept of competitive grants, which pick winners and losers among states and can be seen as unfairly penalizing students in states that dont get the money. The Obama administration has reused the competitive grant concept to encourage everything from per-kindergarten expansion to higher education innovation. Nor did they like the reforms themselves. The competitive grants led to bad, inappropriate, and short-sighted state policy, the NEA said in its 13-point condemnation of Duncan. In the past two years, the opposition has, if anything, increased. Teachers unions are skeptical of a range of policies the Obama administration has embraced, including charter schools and competitive grants. But the red-hot center of the debate is whether teachers should be judged in part based on students standardized test scores. Value-added measures use complex statistical modeling to try to put an exact number on the difference a teacher makes in a students education. Newspapers in some cities have released individual teachers scores with names attached, which drew attention to the scores and made them far more controversial. The Obama administration has encouraged states to use value-added scores, as well as other measurements, when evaluating teachers. Its hard to overstate how much union leaders dislike them. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, once endorsed contracts that rely on the measures, but now calls them a sham. The new leader of the NEA went even further, calling the scores the mark of the devil.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 17:58:53 +0000