The Education Wars II

Arne Duncan keeps peddling his losing policies to skeptical teachers, who have every right to be skeptical of his nonsensical "Race to the Top" bribery scheme.

He's a stupid shit, the stereotypical dumb jock.

On the subject of tying teacher effectiveness to student testing, Duncan said multiple measures should be looked at, but stressed the connection between scores and teacher performance. “To say there’s no correlation there, or there shouldn’t be a correlation there, defies logic.” Duncan added, “I’ve said repeatedly you have to look at multiple measures. One of those measures has to be student achievement.”

According to Duncan, only Louisiana is currently tracking student gains back to teachers and to the education schools that trained those teachers. Duncan said he cannot understand why this kind of holistic tracking is only happening in one state. “It is not a miracle of technology,” Duncan explained, but rather about connecting student outcomes back to teacher preparedness, which he called a “healthy” process. “Changes are being made by tracking these things,” he added.

Not one fucking word about principal competence. The districts are full of assholes and incompetents as principals (I had both as my last two supervisors), but that's okay with Duncan and his ilk.