When reforms collide

Great Neck, New York teacher Sheri Lederman was an early believer in the Common Core, writes Amanda Fairbanks in The Atlantic Monthly. She was drawn to the idea that students across states could develop similar knowledge bases and skill sets for subject areas. That changed with the concurrent rollout of new standards on top of harder tests and a stringent new state teacher-evaluation system based on test outcomes. In the span of a year, Lederman's evaluation score dropped 13 percentage points, demoting her to "ineffective." In October, she filed suit against the state's education department, alleging the new evaluations punish teachers. Her lawsuit is part of a major backlash nationally against both teacher evaluations and the Common Core. Essentially, two groups of reformers -- for new standards and for teacher evaluations -- pressed their agenda at exactly the same time, ignoring what counterparts were doing. The collision may ultimately derail both ideas. Some supporters of the Common Core have blamed the Obama administration for stepping in with its own ambitious initiatives, sowing further confusion. The federal Race to the Top, for instance, incentivized states to attempt a mix of reforms simultaneously. The fallout has been an indefinite delay to accountability efforts in some states, and a re-examination of using student outcomes in teacher evaluations. More

Source:  Public Education News Blast

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