Teacher unions in New York city are resisting publication of teacher performance rankings and scores, according to a recent column in National Review Online. This is an argument familiar to New Zealand parents forced to send their children to government schools. Here, too, teacher unions have conducted an implacable campaign against national testing of primary school children because of the suspicion that eventually it will lead to scoring and ranking teachers--and, worse, that the ranking information will be made available to parents.
This apparently is the teacher unions' worst nightmare in New York City.
Does the public have a right to know how effective public school teachers are?Not according to the New York City teachers’ union, which is fighting in court to forbid the New York City school district from releasing data on individual teachers’ performance. Five New York news organizations, including the New York Times, have requested the ratings for the 12,000 (out of 80,000 total) teachers whose effectiveness has been graded. The news organizations say that the Freedom of Information law gives them the right to see any government statistics; the United Federation of Teachers, which includes the New York City teachers union, is protesting that the ratings (based on how well a teacher’s students do on standardized tests and controlling for socioeconomic factors) are flawed and releasing them would embarrass teachers.
Note that this battle isn’t about whether teachers’ pay or tenure should be impacted by those ratings; it’s just about whether the public can see those ratings. That the unions view doing so as worth fighting in court is discouraging — and a sign of what school reformers are up against.Compulsory state education is a relatively recent innovation, historically considered. But it has proved remarkably successful as a medium of indoctrination of the children of the nation into the beliefs and values of secular humanism, which is the established religion of our day. Of course, parents were already believers, so it was not hard to force them to send their children to schools whose religious foundation and governing philosophies they fundamentally endorsed in the first place.
But there is a small problem. Because the Lord Jesus Christ governs the entire planet, insurgent rebellions against Him do not prosper. The ordinary means of their demise employed by our Lord is to allow them to succeed to incompetence and self-destruction. In this case, compulsory state secular education systems end up being so successful, so powerful and so pervasive they end up failing to educate. The system gets taken over by its employees, servants and officers. The primary object becomes protecting self-interest, not educating. The state madrassas increasingly become institutions for the furtherance of the interests of teachers and their unions; children and students become implicitly seen as captive objects to be exploited. Secular government, unable to criticise one of its most cherished idols, become complicit in the takeover, not wanting to be seen to be "anti-teacher" or "anti-school" or "anti-pupil". Besides politicians are always interested in getting support, both financial and electoral. Teacher unions make powerful electoral allies for those politicians who support their featherbedding and cronyism.
By the time parents discover that their idolatry has betrayed them, it is usually far too late into the night. The Scriptures declare that men become like the idols they worship--deaf and dumb. Secular humanism is dumb and dumber. Our Lord punishes those devoted to it by making their children illiterate, innumerate, and as dumb as their idols. Parents rightly feel betrayed--but the gods they trusted in the first place were lies and illusions, so what do they expect? Our Lord ensures that the law of unintended consequences gets them every time.
Meanwhile, the debate over ranking teachers goes on.
Privacy aside, the unions’ biggest argument is that test scores are a lousy way to judge a teacher’s effectiveness. But the preliminary results of study commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released today suggest that test scores are a good indicator of a teacher’s effectiveness.
“In every grade and subject we studied, a teacher’s past success in raising student achievement on state tests was one of the strongest predictors of his or her ability to do it again,” said Vicki Phillips, an education director for the Gates Foundation, according to the Washington Post.
Teachers should be embarrassed if year after year, they fail to teach their students what they need to know. The public deserves to know – and if the release of this data encourages a swelling of support for merit pay, so much the better.
Secular humanism asserts the ultimacy of brute chance, stochasticity, and randomness. It believes the world is fundamentally impersonal. It also argues that the universe is mechanistic and rule based and that matter is all that is. It holds that meaning and truth are human constructs and conventions superimposed upon matter. It holds all these things in its feeble hands without any sense of irony or of fundamental contradiction. Those who entrust their children to its madrassas deserve all that they get. If your children emerge out of the system able to read and write, think and reason, evaluate and argue coherently, and able to count and compute, consider yourself blessed far beyond what you deserve. It is unlikely that your grandchildren will be likewise blessed.
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