Reblogged from CURMUDGUCATION
…Enforcement of teacher standards will still be up to administrators– the same people who don’t take the necessary steps to remove the worst teachers under tenure rules (and of course those policies existed, because tenure was never, ever, a “job for life”) will continue to not take those steps under the new set of rules.
…Here is another crux of the problem. Connecting quality on the job to teacher employment might be great– if we knew how to measure quality on the job. We don’t.
…Do we really want to set the bar so incredibly low? Do we want to say, “I don’t care what else you do in that classroom as long as the standardized test scores are good.”
If not (and how could it be otherwise) how will we measure all the rest? Teachers are not opposed to evaluations or feedback, but every evaluative measure on the table right now is, to be blunt, crap. VAM and all of its variations have been debunked repeatedly. We welcome meaningful, helpful evaluation, but we do not welcome having our careers linked to instruments no more precise and valid than tea leaves or a roll of the dice.