Comments for Shreveport magnet school highlights flaws in teacher evals at http://www.theind.com , comment 1 to 1 out of 1 comments http://www.theind.com Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:00:55 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.theind.com/news/indreporter/11665-shreveport-magnet-school-highlights-flaws-in-teacher-evals#comment-27298 The real flaw that is highlighted here lies in Seaburgh's idea that all you need to know about how well a teacher performs is how well their students test. It seems obvious to Seaburgh that if the students have high test scores that they must have good teachers. That is an embarrassingly poorly thought-out idea. Of course there are poor teachers of good students. Always have been, always will be. What Seaburgh is actually offended by, of course, is that one of his "good" schools is getting caught in the grinder. A school where all the best people go! That was not the plan, Seaburgh thinks. The plan was to punish all those bad schools with the worst people in them and make them available for some educational profiteer to take over and relieve the public of as much as possible of the price of educating "those people." To be fair though, Seaburgh et al. were actively mislead; Jindal and White do leave everyone with the impression that somehow their reforms are intended to only fix the poor schools (in both senses of the term poor) when in actuality their program is an assault on public schooling and teachers in general. The fact that we in Louisiana have a disproportionally large share of students who are poor (academically) is directly tied to the fact that we have a larger share of students who are poor (financially). Nobody is willing to deal with that; everyone wants to pretend that it is _teachers_ and then somehow _schools_ that are failing. NO. Really, no. Anyone who troubles themselves to read the national statistics will immediately find that Louisiana is right at the national average when income is taken out of the equation. So-called failing schools in this state are one whose parents are making less money than schools that are "succeeding." Local researchers have amply demonstrated that—so well that the state department of education no longer wants to release the numbers. There is a real issue, which Seaburgh does not think hard enough to notice, with students who are effectively at the top of what their context and native capabilities make easily achievable. Yes, good (well-off) students who are trying hard and have had good teachers will not be able to uniformly show the big advances every year that the foolish teacher assessment demands. It isn't fair. But by the very same reasoning poor (fiscally) students with the continuing challenges that their out-of-school context have made and continue to make every year will find it hard to put out the well-focused effort to make the big advances every year that the silly teacher assessment demands. In both cases teachers are being punished for the extraordinary circumstances under which their students labor. I work with teachers at both ends of the struggle: one who teach financially poor elementary students and ones that work with highly-motivated at least middle class students at a successful tech-themed magnet. Both groups will be unfairly injured by the current teacher assessment tools. And both know it. And they are increasingly bitter about it. The combination of hypocrisy on the part of the state promoters and blindness on the part of the public is toxic and is no track to destroy the public school system both from the top down by delegitimating schools and from within by destroying the morale of the teacher corp. A real and valuable social resource is being destroyed. Seaburgh—and all of us—should be embarrassed. And ashamed. - John St. Julien Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:05:45 +0100