Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Does your teacher measure up?

Teachers have been all the rage in the news lately. First, the Los Angeles Times got their hands on data ranking teachers based on their students' standardized test improvement from the beginning to the end of the year. Then they announced that they were going to publish those results for everyone to see, and what a controversy that caused! The head of the AFT said the rankings should be published, but teachers across the country disagreed.

Since the ratings came out, there has been a flurry of commentary(example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4) of which this post is just one more example.

This was all followed by last week's Time Magazine, which had a cover story on education (which I have, in case you are interested in reading it - they don't post full articles on their site). Discussions in the spread included what make good schools, how to recruit and keep quality teachers, the new documentary by Davis Guggenheim (of An Inconvenient Truth fame) called Waiting for "Superman", and Race to the Top, among others. It's quite a read.

This is really more of an informational post than an insightful one, if for no other reason than that I've been too busy to come up with my own original thoughts lately (hence the general lack of posts). But if anyone (K?) has any comments, I'd be interested in hearing them.

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