Question

Debate on teachers vs polititians

Answer 1

The people who spout such statistics apparently think that every “effective” teacher succeeds in getting all of her students to be able to read, write, and do math at grade level, while every “ineffective” teacher fails entirely at that task. Thus, all we need to do is to find the two-thirds of the teachers who are teaching the two-thirds of the students who are struggling, fire those teachers, and replace them with better teachers, right? But why would anyone think that those two percentages—the percentage of teachers rated ineffective, and the percentage of students who are non-proficient—should be even roughly equal to each other? Even to ask that question is to expose the absurdity of the premise, yet supposedly smart people with good intentions buy into such nonsense.

Beyond that strange use of statistics, moreover, the very idea that there must be something wrong with teacher evaluation systems simply because many children are underperforming on standardized tests is bizarre. For one thing, if the claim is that New York’s schools are uniquely bad—because they use this supposedly overly permissive teacher evaluation system, which is unique to New York—then that is simply false. As a recent report indicated, New York has been performing slightly above the middle of the national rankings for decades, and there is no evidence that the state’s students or teachers are getting better or worse. Certainly, there is nothing resembling a crisis.