I stumbled out of the opening panel Thursday night at the Yale School of Management's seventh annual Education Leadership Conference and gazed blearily at a fellow New Jersey-ite. "Do you feel like you've entered an alternate universe? They're just so, so civil," I sputtered. Where's the drama? How can Connecticut's Commissioner of Education, the head of the New Haven teacher union, and a charter school leader courteously discuss the implementation of Conn.'s new teacher evaluation system, remarkably similar to New Jersey's own pilot? Can you imagine the scene if we put NJ's Comm. Cerf, NJEA head Barbara Keshishian, and NJ Charter School Association's Carlos Perez in the same room? (Flak jackets recommended.)Read the rest here.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Is Teacher Tenure Reform Possible without a Brawl?
Here's this week's post at WHYY's Newsworks:
This conference sounds like the education equivalent of Washington's CPAC echo chamber: no alternative opinions considered.
ReplyDeleteThe Connecticut and New Jersey laws are very similar because they were supplied by ALEC, America's favorite source of legislative Kool-Aid (so much for Teresa Ruiz as the intellectual driving force behind these changes).
From what I've seen so far, the implementation of the new evaluation protocols will be extremely time consuming (and thereby very expensive), produce muddy (and perhaps muddled) results and likely trigger legal push-back across the state.
Is this really the road to a system of thorough and efficient free public schools?