The MacArthur Foundation just announced their “genius” awards, and one of the winners was Raj Chetty, a researcher who co-authored a study being used by by school reformers to — and I can’t think of any other way to put it — bash teachers.
On top of that, he did nothing to indicate he was opposed to that interpretation by several public comments he made about the study (see “let some of the players with lower batting averages go” and “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later”).
They really couldn’t find anyone else in the education field who might have been more worthy?
Raj is an economist what does he know about trying to teacher a first grader to read? Not to mention with the new Common Core Curriculum we are going to have to teach that same first grader to read at a third grade level, next year. We have so many students who have never been read to by the time they start school. Yet we are supposed to test and be evaluated on these same students’ test scores. There is a real lack of common sense in American education today. I would like to see everyone who is writing, criticizing, analyzing and commenting on education spend just one day, yes just one day as a first grade substitute teacher, and you all know what I mean by that!
“I think the main message of our study is that standardized-test score impacts can be a useful input into evaluating teachers, but by no means are we saying that test scores are the end-all and be-all of how teachers should be evaluated,” Chetty said on the PBS NewsHour. “We think that they’re one aspect of what should factor into the formula. One would also want to use things like principal evaluations or maybe even student evaluations or other measures of teacher quality. But I think there’s some useful data here that could be very useful in improving teacher quality.”
That was from the Harvard Magazine article found here – http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/chetty-and-friedman-release-education-study
Am I missing someting, Larry?
If you go to the link in this post, you’ll see the entire transcript of that interview and, yes, you’ll see what you are missing…