Most important things, including teaching, are complicated. If we squelch every attempt to understand such things and act on that knowledge, we'll be left knowing very little about very little, which more or less describes the state of knowledge about teacher effectiveness today. Indeed, most teacher policy failures are a function of privileging easily measurable unimportant things, like master's degrees and state certification, over difficult-to-measure important things, like effectiveness in boosting test scores.
Ed Notes also offers the "it hasn't been tested" argument, i.e. the chicken-and-egg theory of policy obstructionism: it can't be tried because it hasn't been proven; it can't be proven because it hasn't been tried.
Meanwhile, some unknown person who claims to be a social scientist but isn't willing to offer any credentials to prove it labels all critiques of the union's role in legally banning evidence of student learning from judgments of teacher effectiveness as "union bashing." Because if you criticize unions, ipso facto, you're a union basher--as is, apparently, the famously conservative, union-hating New York Times editorial page, which said:
The ban is so nonsensical that lawmakers clearly decided that the only way to get it passed was to keep it hidden deep in the budget documents. Nobody in Albany would say who is behind this language. The driving force, however, is the powerful teachers’ union that gives lots of money and time to state campaigns.I'd always been under the impression that "science," and thus "social science," involved certain values of empiricism, evidence, and transparency of information., as opposed to endorsing late-night money- and power-driven legislative skullduggery that's antithetical to those things. But maybe "science" means something different wherever they hand out anonymous, theoretical social science degrees, I don't know.
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