To Try and Run Schools on Business Models

will fail because of the peculiar nature of public education and its hierarchy, to say nothing of the fact kids are not "objects" that can be manipulated to create "data" in which to evaluate teachers.

Not to mention the fact principals aren't held to any kind of accountability, much less their "superiors" in the front office. As I've said numerous times, the reason teachers are treated like garbage and are easily fired or "asked" to "resign" (forced out) is because nobody is watching their supervisors, most of whom NEED to be either closely supervised or not allowed to be supervising others in the first place.

Educator and commentator Alfie Kohn describes the sheer stupidity of the neoliberal-influenced Los Angeles Times and Newsweek for peddling anti-teacher trash which is of course laughably ignorant.

Of course this rhetoric dovetails perfectly with what our "Democratic" president wants.

Kohn:

Unfortunately, the people who know the most about the subject tend to work in the field of education, which means their protests can be dismissed. Educational theorists and researchers are just "educationists" with axes to grind, hopelessly out of touch with real classrooms. And the people who spend their days in real classrooms, teaching our children -- well, they're just afraid of being held accountable, aren't they? (Actually, proponents of corporate-style school reform find it tricky to attack teachers, per se, so they train their fire instead on the unions that represent them.) Once the people who do the educating have been excluded from a conversation about how to fix education, we end up hearing mostly from politicians, corporate executives, and journalists.

This type of reform consists of several interlocking parts, powered by a determination to "test kids until they beg for mercy," as the late Ted Sizer once put it. Test scores are accepted on faith as a proxy for quality, which means we can evaluate teachers on the basis of how much value they've added -- "value" meaning nothing more than higher scores. That, in turn, paves the way for manipulation by rewards and punishments: Dangle more money in front of the good teachers (with some kind of pay-for-performance scheme) and shame or fire the bad ones. Kids, too, can be paid for jumping through hoops. (It's not a coincidence that this incentive-driven model is favored by economists, who have a growing influence on educational matters and who still tend to accept a behaviorist paradigm that most of psychology left behind ages ago.)