Squaring the Circle
Charles Barone over at Swift & Change Able examines the logical fallacies behind AFT President Randi Weingarten’s argument that New York is eligible for Race to the Top funds even when it’s clear that state law and the U.S. Department of Education guidelines are contradictory.
NEA has to come up with even a bigger workaround. As Barone notes, the Race to the Top guidelines state:
“to be eligible under this program, a State must not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.”
NEA, of course, has gently mentioned its objection to teachers being evaluated with student test scores, but just as with its policies on performance pay, the union’s beliefs about teacher evaluation are much more circumscribed than its public statements might lead you to believe.
The relevant paragraph from NEA Resolution D-20 reads:
“The Association also believes that the use of student achievement measures such as standardized test scores or grades to determine the competency, quality, or effectiveness of any professional educator is inappropriate and is not a valid measure.”
We can argue till we’re blue in the face about whether and how teachers should be evaluated based on student achievement, but the immediate issue is the Obama administration insists on such a linkage for Race to the Top funding eligibility and NEA’s official policy is to oppose such a linkage. Sherman Dorn thinks NEA may take the opportunity to ”increase the leverage of state affiliates, not to eliminate the requirement on linkability of teachers to student data.”
That would be sensible, and preferable to a dogfight with Obama and Duncan, but NEA dislikes taking the federalist approach, and allowing state affiliates to work out their own arrangements could lead to internal friction (ref. Denver and performance pay, Wisconsin and charter schools, Minnesota and merger, et al.).
I don’t have a crystal ball, but experience tells me NEA will devote itself to finding language vague and amorphous enough to allow its affiliates to get the funds without any explicit backtracking on its opposition to evaluating teachers with student achievement measures. The union can be very creative with semantics and I’m guessing they will succeed.
