Teacher Test

“Teacher evaluation in this country is fundamentally broken,” says Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, in an interview in Boston. “We don’t live in Lake Wobegon [where everyone is “above average”], but we have a system that pretends that we do. It hurts adults and it hurts children. It means, by definition, that the great teachers don’t get recognized and don’t get rewarded, and we don’t learn from them. The teachers in the middle don’t get the support they need to improve, and the teachers at the bottom — who, frankly, need to find another profession — don’t get moved out. For us to continue to do what we’re doing, or to just tinker around the edges, is crazy.”

In Commonwealthmagazine,

http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/News-and-Features/Features/2009/Fall/Teacher-test.aspx