When Terry Grier was hired to run the San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- "value-added" -- sounded innocuous enough. But this novel number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
Rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and the worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all of them a passing grade.
In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.
There's more bullshit in the article about how "tenure" supposedly "protects" "ineffective" teachers.
What a crock of absolute, unmitigated bullshit.
The problem with schools isn't with the teachers--it's with administrators, who have almost IRONCLAD job security.
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