Opinion Exchange

What other PROFESSION has its membership’s evaluations by their superiors made public? Doctors? Lawyers? Nurses? Engineers?

Although teachers are paid through taxpayers money, so are troopers, sheriff, health department employees, public works employees etc. Do their evaluations get published for people to see?

Ok… I’m sold. Let’s rank EVERYONE on a 100 point scale and publish their names in the Times next to their scores. We’ll base it on how much “value” they add to their respective professions.

Teachers – How many of your students did well on standardized state tests?
Doctors – How many patients in your care survived and how fast did they recover?
Judges – How many criminals did you lock up?
Police Officers – How many arrests did you make that led to convictions?
EMTs – How many people didn’t die on the way to the hospital?
Bankers – How many predatory loans did you sell?
Firefighters – How many houses didn’t burn down on your watch?
Politicians – How many jobs did you create?
etc…

Now, don’t tell me it’s overly simplistic and inaccurate. What matters is the DATA! Now, every 2 years we can fire the people scoring in the lowest 10%. I don’t care that in your office all of the Doctors are pretty good. I want the lowest 10% gone! To make it even better, lets make sure the statistical margin of error spans 53 percentiles. Nice! Now we have true accountability!

Obviously, publishing the names and ranks of professionals is unfair and is a colossal mistake! Furthermore it will have nasty side-effects. First, in schools, it will encourage teaching to the test! We need graduates who can think critically, creatively, and who are able to work in groups to solve non-standard problems. A nation of mind-numbed test-prepped children will do nothing to make America competitive. Second, a standardized test is a snap-shot of what a child did one day. It is not an accurate measure of what that student knows or can do. I imagine we’ll see a backlash to all of this teacher bashing pretty soon.

Politicians ought to worry about growing the economy and getting more people to work. Why do they feel that they must micro-manage schools and attack what is left of the middle-class? Maybe they don’t know how to do what we elected them to do (get America back to work) and they are just trying to distract us. What do you think?

I usually do not drop a ton of comments, however i did a
few searching and wound up here Editorial Board poll: Making teacher evaluations public – Opinion
Exchange. And I do have some questions for you if
you usually do not mind. Could it be just me or does
it look as if like some of the responses appear as if they are left by brain dead folks?
And, if you are posting on other online social sites, I’d like to follow everything fresh you have to post. Could you list of the complete urls of your social sites like your twitter feed, Facebook page or linkedin profile?