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| November 3, 2006 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Revenge of the third-party nerds
I heard an activist once say he seems to be spending all his time battling bad ideas. “There’s no end to them,” he complained. There is, however, a way to ensure some relief: third party academic appraisals. Consider a new teacher “incentive” program that will give teachers cash if their students get higher test scores. The brain(less) child of Frank Murkowski and his underlings in the Department of Education, the program will cost the state $5.8 million. It will encourage some teachers (those who care more about money than kids) to “teach to the test” in an effort to raise scores. The three-year pilot program is so obviously flawed that NEA-Alaska, the state’s teacher union, urged lawmakers to delete it in its entirety. Besides rewarding poor teaching, the program undermines the idea of student achievement, places emphasis on a shallow test to measure learning, and elicits harmful competition among staff and between schools. The “incentive” in the program may also be an incentive for teachers, hungry for a $2,500 to $5,500 cash award, to help students cheat on standardized tests to bring up scores. Newsweek reported that a study in Chicago found school staff helped students cheat in 4 to 5 percent of classrooms. The amount of cheating increased by 30 percent after Chicago schools raised testing stakes, the study found. “Just how much damage will this damn program do?” I asked myself the other day. Unfortunately, no one will know. In three years, a legislative committee will conduct a financial audit. But the law requires no academic review. Another new controversial education program, mislabeled “Performance Reviews,” requires an applicant to submit a videotape of him/herself teaching prior to gaining certification by the state. Again, there is no “performance review” of the “Performance Review.” Is this program working? Are teachers staging classroom lessons to land a certificate? Who is watching the videotape and what are biases of the evaluators? We’ll never know. Policies like these are just infected cavities in the Department of Education. What about fisheries, the bigoted game board, the Department of Commerce? There is no end in sight to the slew of ill-conceived policy decision concocted during the Frank Murkowski administration. We can expect more bad ideas. Alaska’s next governor will, no doubt, be the woman who told Juneau residents she wished she could drive to the capital and has hinted at moving the seat of government to the state’s armpit in sprawling Wasilla. This time, let’s persuade lawmakers to attach third-party reviews onto some of these mad schemes. Then we can at least know the amount of harm that will be done. Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. |
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