NEA & Teacher Evaluations

The Wall Street Journal:

Congratulations to the National Education Association, whose members have taken the extraordinary, remarkable, unprecedented move of conceding that teachers should be evaluated, at least a little bit, on how well their students learn.

Imagine that.

On Monday, an assembly in Chicago representing the 3.2 million-member teachers union voted for a policy statement that student scores on standardized tests could be a "limited" part of a broader set of teacher performance indicators. So far, no existing student test appears to meet the NEA's standards as an appropriate indicator. But hey, the union's previous standard had been something closer to rewarding teachers merely for showing up and time served, a la Woody Allen's famous quip about 90% of life. The union also voted to give failing teachers one year, instead of the usual two, to shape up.

Credit here goes less to the NEA than to the laws of political gravity. Teachers unions have never been in such bad odor with the public. More than a dozen states are incorporating test scores in teacher evaluations as part of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program.

Posted by jimz at July 5, 2011 6:36 PM
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