Peter Greene said:
The new definition of “ineffective teacher” is “teacher whose students score poorly on test.”
Add to that the assumption that a student only scores low on a test because of the student had an ineffective teacher.
You have now created a perfect circular definition. And the beauty of this is that in order to generate the statistics tossed around in the poster above, you don’t even have to evaluate teachers!
…
As long as you don’t consider the possibility that low-income students do poorly on standardized tests because they go to schools with chaotic administrations, high staff turnover, crumbling facilities, lack of resources, dangerous neighborhoods, and backgrounds that do not fit them for culturally-biased standardized tests – as long as you don’t consider any of that, one thing remains certain…
Low-income students will always be taught by ineffective low-performing teachers.
If you define “bad teacher” as “whoever is standing in front of these low-testing students,” it doesn’t matter who stands there. Whoever it is, he’s ineffective.
via http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/06/ineffective-forever.html
Image credit: Front doors, ken fager
