It revealed just how bad education was and is in Atlanta and most likely most city schools. So bad that instead of removing bad teachers and administrators they simply cheated.
The sad part is that when attempts are made at fixing these problems all that is thrown back in the face of reformers are the accusations of racism and bigotry.
States should take control of all school systems within their borders and there should be no such thing as teacher's unions. Nepotism and union thuggery have doomed more children to middling educations if any than racism or bigotry.
NCLB like the follow ups by the current administration were handcuffed attempts to fix a broken system. The handcuffs were that you could not remove unions over teachers and you could not interfere in certain districts because of race
>Nepotism and union thuggery have doomed more children to middling educations if any than racism or bigotry.
Saying this shows an ignorance of the history of public education in the US. I don't think you're equipped to judge whether accusations of racism aimed at "reformers" are accurate.
I can't address the entire parent post, but I can address judging the current state of accusations of racism aimed at reformers in public schools, I was able to view it firsthand at a Philadelphia public school for years on end, where ANY data on an education gap (a widening one), both racial or economically divided, would be met with "you clearly hate black people", regardless of if that has any bearing on the discussion. This occurred during school board, PTO, UPG, and student teacher meetings. It was appalling to me how much racism/classism was thrown around as a reason to not apply any sort of response to the current broken state of education, and for how appalling it was, it was equally effective at stopping change. So in this at least, there is really no question as to the accuracy of whether these things occur and harm the students, for me. They do occur, they do harm students, and like other deep set prejudices and dogmatic belief, I have no idea where to punch that glacier to address the problem
Indeed, when the stats themselves say that between 1% to 14% of the students' mark was determined by the quality of the teacher. One has to wonder if as much time and effort was put into the other 86%. It brings back to mind a similarly minded statement made by my Uni stats professor; make sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
It seems very useful to know how much of the students' performance is up to the teacher.
If very little, than we don't need to worry about quality teachers, and just get the minimum level necessary to keep the peace in the classroom.
If a lot, then we should worry a lot about teacher quality, and work hard to make sure that we are only recruiting and keeping very effective teachers.
I know we love to harp on about teacher quality, but there are plenty of other factors that are just as important like access to the right learning programs, classroom mix and so on.
As a teacher I'll be the first to admit that for some students about the best we can hope for is to keep the peace until the mature or find something compelling that gives them a reason to succeed.
It's not as simple as "all teachers make $difference%".
I admit that I said that comment from a place of annoyance: during pay analysis, teacher quality matter a lot, and during results analysis, teacher quality doesn't matter.
But as you point out it's not uniform. It's reasonable that teachers make a big difference in some scenarios and not in others.
