Teacher Evaluation Reform~ January 15,2010

The article I chose to write on was published in the New York Times under the Opinion tab. This article was entitled “Walking the Walk on School Reform”. I chose this article because, being a future school teacher, I find that it is important to keep myself updated on new things in the school system so that I will be prepared for the job when the time comes.

“Walking the Walk on School Reform” states that the teacher union The American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten proposed a new reform in the school system by reforming teacher evaluations. She claims that the evaluations should be reformed because poorly trained evaluators go into classrooms all around the United States and spend an hour or less “evaluating” a teacher’s performance. However there is no way that spending an hour or less with a teacher can give an accurate reading on any teacher.

I agree with Ms. Weingarten’s new proposal to improve teacher evaluations. I believe that without this reform, students will continue to be set up for an unfair education in which teachers are not performing their job accurately. Setting student up with this approach will set them up for failure. By spelling out the professional teaching standards, each teacher will know specifically what their job requirements are and assures that they will carry out their duties.

Also, Obama shared with the nation before being elected into presidency that he wanted to give incentives to teachers whose students do the best with standardized tests. This approach is unfair to teachers across the board. Judging teachers mostly based off of the accuracy of their students is a poor test of what the teacher is doing in the classroom. While how students do on standardized test is defiantly one of the teacher’s main concerns with their students, it is not something that they should focus on solely. Some students are not great test takers, so why should great teachers be penalized for those students who don’t care about education?

That's all for now!

~Ali