Weingarten Was Horrible On "This Week"

Jesus, she's not even trying to push back against the test score nonsense.

Somebody stop her.

Please.

She goes on these programs with Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan and allows them to frame the issue as "Bad Teachers Won't Allow Themselves To Be Fired" rather than by pushing back with the kind of critique Valerie Strauss at the Answer Sheet posted today:

Student standardized test scores are not reliable indicators of how effective any teacher is in the classroom, not even with the addition of new “value-added” methods, according to a study released today. It calls on policymakers and educators to stop using test scores as a central factor in holding teachers accountable.

“Value-added modeling” is indeed all the rage in teacher evaluation: The Obama administration supports it, and the Los Angeles Times used it to grade more than 6,000 California teachers in a controversial project. States are changing laws in order to make standardized tests an important part of teacher evaluation.

Unfortunately, this rush is being done without evidence that it works well. The study, by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit think tank based in Washington, concludes that heavy reliance on VAM methods should not dominate high-stakes decisions about teacher evaluation and pay.

Value-added measures use test scores to track the growth of individual students as they progress through the grades and see how much “value” a teacher has added. They do not include other factors that affect students, and can skew results by giving better scores to teachers who “teach to the test” and lesser scores to teachers who are assigned students with the greatest educational needs.

As much as we’d like a simple way to identify and remove bad teachers, the study concludes that “there is simply no shortcut.”

The authors of the study, called, “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers,” give it unusual credibility: It was written by four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association; two former presidents of the National Council on Measurement in Education; the current and two former chairs of the Board of Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences; the president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management; the former director of the Educational Testing Service’s Policy Information Center; a former associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; a former assistant U.S. secretary of education; a member of the National Assessment Governing Board; and the vice president, a former president, and three other members of the National Academy of Education.

Read the whole post.

Using this kind of study to push back against the crap Rhee/Duncan/Obama/Bloomberg/Klein/Gates are pushing would be SO MUCH MORE effective than than the shit Randi mumbles.

But then again, as my friend Norm from Ed Notes always says, that would mean Randi would actually WANT to push back against the test score nonsense.

And of course she doesn't.

She wants to be feted on shows Like This Week by Arne Duncan.

She wants to be kissed by Joel Klein at press conferences after she sells her membership down the river.

Oh, and I think she wants to replace Whoopi on The View.