California desperately needs common sense
I wanted to follow up on Ben's post last week with one more thought on the subject. Clearly, it is awful that California- completely cash-strapped and cutting billions from it's schools- isn't even eligible to apply for the $4 billion of federal money for states leading innovations in public education.
Beyond that issue, the reason we aren't eligible- California explicitly bans using student performance data when evaluating teachers- is a horrible policy which we should be changing anyways! Leading progressive blogger Matt Yglesias says it better than I ever could:
You certainly could imagine a scheme to use student performance data in compensation or tenure decisions that wasn't a good idea. But the idea that all such schemes should be categorically prohibited is nuts. The research is pretty unambiguous that some teachers produce much better students achievement than others. Insofar as schools are able to find ways to identify the highly effective teachers and give them incentive to stay, while declining to tenure the ineffective teachers, the quality of school performance should get substantially better over time.
Unfortunately, developing good systems for gathering and analyzing data isn't all that easy. But we desperately need to be working on ways to do that job better, not throwing new roadblocks in the way.
I think that's exactly right. To explicitly ban even the possibility of making teacher's accountability for student performance is bad public policy. To do it at the potential cost of billions of dollars, for a state that's broke- I think that might be the definition of insanity. Let's hope our representatives in Sacramento come to their senses- fast.
