Next week the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) will be releasing results from a poll regarding ongoing contract negotiations with the District of Columbia Public Schools. I was able to get a look at the survey instrument (.doc), and it's what you might kindly call "one-sided."
When asking about the general conditions in DC public schools, it unnecessarily includes the phrase "facing teachers," as if the conditions were bad enough to require "facing" and that teachers are the only ones doing so. Question ten asks respondents to identify which of two, and only two, approaches would best help turn around failing schools: "using student test scores and other measures of teacher performance to evaluate teachers and making it easier to dismiss teachers who are not measure up, or offering more professional development opportunities for teachers and providing additional training, peer support, and mentoring for teachers who need to improve." (Given only these two options, I wonder which one teachers would choose.) Questions 13 and 15 attempt to be parallel but mix up their pronouns, but these are all minor fouls.
Unfortunately it gets worse. Chancellor Rhee's proposal gets a cursory 271 word description, about one-fourth of the 1,033 nice words devoted to WTU's. Overall, the survey gives a laundry list of 20 positive things the WTU contract would provide teachers (compared to zero listed for Rhee's), and only then gets to the main point of the survey--do teachers prefer the WTU contract proposal or Chancellor Rhee's.
When the results of this survey are announced next week, I hope the media and other stakeholders recognize how the results were achieved.
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4 comments:
I posted about the exact same thing on my blog, as I was polled! Gah it made me mad...we'll see if people actually buy it.
Ah, how to lie with statistics.
BTW I think something is broken with your RSS -- I typically read in Google Reader, and when I click on the >> next to the title to see the post in the context of your blog, I get taken to a comment link rather than the post view (and the comment view doesn't even include the initial post or an obvious way to get to it) -- makes it hard to interact. (I only now realize that the post I had *meant* to comment on was the previous one -- I am deeply ambivalent about the SAT for very similar reasons, and will be dispatching the library gnomes to find that book for me now; how I love online catalogs and ILL).
DC Teacher Chic had good coverage of this survey as well:
http://dcteacherchic.blogspot.com/2009/04/propaganda-brainwashing-misinformation.html
I want to second what Andromeda mentioned. I subscribe to your RSS via Firefox and it jumps right to the comments as well.
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