Reply to "Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

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[quote=Anonymous]
More background from the paper:

[quote]When the Obama administration came into
office, the ground shifted. The overall design
of the No Child Left Behind legislation
had been discredited. Some states were on
a path to having all their schools declared
to be failing under the terms of the law.
Everyone understood by then that, among
the law’s fatal flaws, it contained strong
incentives for states to lower their student
achievement standards rather than raise
them. But Congress could not agree on a
fix for these and other problems. So the
Obama administration stepped into the
breach, using a feature of the law never
intended for this purpose to grant waivers
from the law’s punitive provisions if the
states applying for those waivers would agree
to certain requirements posed by the Obama
administration. Prominent among those
features was one asking the states to include
in their reform plans a plan for evaluating 
their teachers and to base that evaluation to
a significant degree on calculations of the
value added by individual teachers to the
achievement of their students. It was clear in
the context that the administration expected
the states to offer plans that would use these
value-added methods of teacher evaluation
as an important input into a process that
the state would use to identify and fire their
worst teachers.

This was a momentous shift in public policy,
from a clear focus on school accountability
based on “adequate yearly progress” toward
a fixed standard at a fixed time, to a very
tough-minded version of test-based teacher
accountability.
I can easily understand how emotionally
satisfying it must have been for policymakers
responsible for No Child Left Behind to
stick it to an education establishment that
appeared to have taken federal funds for
years without perceptible result, and it is just
as easy to see how emotionally satisfying it
must have for the Obama administration a
few years later to stick it to the worst of our
teachers—people they must have perceived
as having burnt out years earlier, just putting
in their time, waiting for the day when they
could make maximum retirement so they
could walk out the door.

What these accountability schemes have
in common is their unstated presumption
that our schools would be functioning at
much higher levels if the nation could only
find ways to provide stiff penalties for nonperforming
schools and teachers, identify the
non-performers and, if threats do not make
them perform, get rid of them, by closing
down the schools and firing the teachers.
They threaten poor performing schools with
public shaming, takeover and closure and
poor performing individuals with public
shaming and the loss of their jobs and
livelihood. The introduction of these policies
was not accompanied by policies designed
to improve the supply of highly qualified
new teachers by making teaching a more
attractive option for our most successful high
school students—a key component of policy
in the top performing countries. There is a
lot of federal money available for training
and professional development for teachers
but no systematic federal strategy that I can
discern for turning that money into systems
of the kind top performing countries use to
support long-term, steady improvements in
teachers’ professional practice. I conclude
that policymakers have placed their bet on
teacher evaluation, not to identify the needs
of teachers for development, but to identify
teachers who need to be dismissed from
the service. And, further, that the way to
motivate school staff to work harder and
more efficiently is to threaten them with
public shame and the loss of their job. [/quote][/quote]

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