Rating Secretaries of Education the way Education Reformers do Teachers

[yurbud]

The choice of data points seems unfair, but are about as fair as those used to evaluate K-12 teachers and are beginning to be used to evaluate community colleges and their instructors.

These standards will never be used to rate Secretaries of Education because the only standard that matters in Washington is whether politicians and bureaucrats funnel public money into the pockets of the already wealthy.

Teachers have been waiting for years for education policymakers and bureaucrats--those who are paid hefty salaries to theoretically improve educational outcomes for American children--to join them on the front lines of punitive data-driven accountability. Last July, one school administrator at the Save Our Schools march in Washington, DC, asked officials this question: "Why don't you...join me in the crucible of accountability?" Many front-line educators find it disconcerting and demoralizing when this nation's educator-in-chief urges the states to pass out labels to teachers but goes out of his way to avoid any label for his own efforts. While teachers are "objectively" rated by independent auditors using "scientific" formulas, personnel at the DoEd are content to have their actions judged subjectively on the basis of breathless press releases and heavily-massaged conclusions drawn from carefully selected data.

In the absence of any sort of effort on the part of Duncan or his staff to develop a means of legitimately holding themselves publicly accountable for positive student outcomes, a group calling itself Educators for Shared Accountability (ESA) has stepped into the gap. Their "Outcomes-Based, Value-Added Measurement of US Secretaries of Education" weighs every US Secretary of Education in the history of the department by comparing data at the beginning of each of their terms with data from the end of their terms. The data used to measure the effectiveness of each secretary includes two "student quality of life" data points and two data points based on student performance on academic tests. These four data points reflect improvement (or lack thereof) in the following areas during a secretary's term:

1. Student employability
2. Student pregnancy rates
3. Math performance
4. Reading performance



***

On a sad note, the data indicates that five out of the nine secretaries of education we have had actually reduced value for their students, forcing researchers at ESA to conclude that the nation would have been better off with no education secretary at all during their terms{including Arne Duncan}.

FULL TEXT

[msongs]

1. odd that politicans do not have to take any tests to qualify as candidates nt

[yurbud]

2. A combination of drug test, STD's, forensic accounting and polygraph would filter out 99% of

the corrupt garbage in elected office.

[Doctor_J]

3. word

post of the week on DU

[cbrer]

4. Yup... nt

[Scuba]

5. K&R

[lexx21]

6. Lamar Alexander = Superior?

[duffyduff]

7. That was oddball

So was Bennett being in the middle of the pack though he was deemed "ineffective" and Arne not being at the very bottom.

[caraher]

8. It's all based on numbers

and illustrates the absurdity of that kind of reductionism

[yurbud]

10. and by any measure, Duncan belongs on K Street where at least it would be clear who he's serving

[yurbud]

9. the whole thing is meant to show how absurd a purely numbers based analysis is