Gene Lyons is Right About Public Education

It is far better than the critics think it is, but states like Tennessee continue to try and put in "reforms" that are pathetic if they weren't destructive to teaching as a profession:

Dubbed “First to the Top” by Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Haslam, the plan reads like something from Joseph Heller’s satirical novel “Catch-22”—a bureaucratic morass so confounding as to invite disbelief.

Surely Winerip’s exaggerating. Anybody who thinks about it for 30 seconds can readily see problems in evaluating teachers according to their own students’ test scores. But basing tenure decisions and pay raises on how other people’s students perform? Yet that’s exactly what Tennessee’s doing.

In deference to the bureaucratic god of false objectivity, Tennessee demands hard numbers where none exist. Little kids have no standardized test scores. So kindergarten through third grade teachers there are evaluated by fifth graders’ results. Seriously.