Today, President Obama wades in to a controversy that threatens to split one of the Democratic Party's most generous source of donations and activists, the teacher unions, from the whole. The dispute is about teacher performance, narrowly, and about government's distribution of common goods more generally.
Obama wants more accountability for teachers. The teachers unions contend that there is no universal metric that can reliably assess teacher performance, particularly in poor neighborhoods where students experience intense social dislocation. Part of the problem is that nothing seems to work: not charter schools, not tying teachers to student performance, not throwing money at schools, not even curricula reform. There are blips -- a voucher program works here, a charter school works there. Nothing seems to work everywhere. Performance measured in the short term doesn't tell people much about anything, but people grab on to numbers, and the government rewards states who show progress on the numbers, so... states do everything they can to get their numbers up.
The Education Secretary does not have a magical faith in any particular intervention, but his Race to the Top grant program is designed to reward innovation that state and local laboratories come up with. The teachers unions note that when states are pushed to show that numbers go up, the burden and the blame invariably falls upon teachers collectively. It is as if the competition, which awards $3.4 billion, forces states to pick certain reforms over others in order to satisfy a ranking system that rewards local control and higher test scores over, say, more money for professional teacher development. Both Obama and the unions seem to have the same end goal: they want states and teacher collectives to work collaboratively. But unions, and many civil rights groups, think that the incentives in Race to the Top are perverse in a recession and hurt those who need help the most. So today, addressing the National Urban League, Obama responds. He is not terribly diplomatic, asserting that part of the opposition "reflects a general resistance to change; a comfort with the status quo." But "there have also been criticisms, including from some folks in the civil rights community, about particular elements of Race to the Top."---
Source: The Atlantic | Marc Ambinder
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