I usually ignore editorials and opinion articles about education in the tabloids of New York City because 99% say the same things: public schools are bad, public school teachers are awful or criminal or should be fired, and charter schools are all great. (By contrast, both the New York Post and the New York Daily News have excellent reporters, and the Daily News have the amazing Juan Gonzalez, who has done great investigative journalism.)
Today, however, someone on Twitter asked me about an opinion piece in the Daily News. I read it and discovered it was written by someone who said he was the father of twin daughters in kindergarten in Brooklyn. The girls were in different classes. The father is upset because he can tell that one teacher is great and the other is not. He insists that the city and the union quickly agree to the state evaluation system so one teacher can be paid more than the other.
How does he know which one is better? She assigned homework every day after Hurricane Sandy and the other one didn’t.
At the end of the article, I noted that the father belongs to a group that is part of StudentsFirst. Why was I not surprised?
A New York City blogger dissected the article, noting that the writer is a NYC Department of Health employee. The South Bronx blogger wondered what evaluation system ranks employees in that city department.
Question: why does he think the proposed evaluation system will agree with what he thinks?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The most bizarre thing about the oped is that the father was complaining that his 5 year old daughter got no homework during one week after the storm hit. Shocking. Can you imagine? No homework for a five year old. meanwhile the president of France is going to ban all homework for elementary and middle school students.
Leonie Haimson Class Size Matters Sent from IPad so please excuse typos
This writer should consider the sometimes intersecting but often divergent goals of teachers vs conditions in the students’ homes. Congrats on being able to take the time after the hurricane to oversee and measure homework. There might have been kids whose after school family schedule were consumed by more pressing concerns than what the teacher wanted little boys and girls to do between 4PM and bed time.
Part of being a teaching is having an understanding of your students and community, and implementing instruction and assessments based on that. If there is some “quantity of homework”=”quality of teaching” formula, I haven’t seen it. Forgive my sarcasm, but I’m up at 3AM to grade papers and prepare for the coming benchmark/assessment/data collection portion of my students’ school yr.
Please register and sign this petition to end the over-reliance on standardized tests
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-harmful-public-education-policies-relying-standardized-testing/w8ZrZwVT?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl
Try “alleged” father. I seriously doubt this guy (if it is a guy) even is a father at all, certainly not of five-year-old twins in the hardest hit borough of New York. No parent complains about their five-year-old not getting homework while they’re still airing out their furniture and replacing their drywall. Fake, fake, fake!
In NH the public gets to vote on teacher’s contracts and discuss their merits (and demerits) at public hearings in advance of the vote. Invariably someone would decry the lack of merit pay…. and just as invariably one of the professors at a local college would rise and share an anecdote about his two daughters’ experiences at our local high school, describing one daughter’s favorite teacher who clearly deserved merit pay and the other teacher’s least favorite teacher who, based on the account he shared, should have been dismissed before earning a continuing contract. The punch line: it was the same individual. Outstanding teacher’s don’t connect with every student and bad teachers are beloved by others…. oh…. and in our district, where all the students score in at least the 90th percentile on the State standardized test, NONE of our teachers achieved a high VAM score.
I was thinking something very similar. Sixth grade in our local elementary was team taught by Mr. and Mrs. H. My older brother had them first and to hear him talk, Mrs. was the next Golden Apple winner while Mr. should be jailed for abusiveness. My parents were just thrilled about how he came to life academically under Mrs.’s tutelage that year, but were highly concerned about Mr. When I started the same class three years later I was assigned to Mr.’s homeroom and I was just sick about it. Until I got to know them and, I’m sorry, but my brother had it exactly backwards. Mr. was the most exciting teacher I’d had yet, and Mrs. was just a petty b—- who picked on me for every little thing.
Of course, I’m sure both of them were probably just decent, human teachers with their own unique personalities who clicked, or not, with different students. Of course, with all this rheeform going on, unique personalities will soon be a thing of the past….
And what makes him think by paying one teacher more she would automatically become a better teacher? That thinking is so flawed I don’t even know where to start commenting on it.
Why is it with education that everyone is an expert? The card is priceless. I’ve clipped it to post on my FB page. Nice takedown South Bronx!
And what leads him to think that paying the bad teacher less will make him better? And does he imagine that a good merit system will insure that no teacher is better than any other, even if we had such a measure? Odd logic. Robots would be the only solution.
What about better/worse fathers or mothers–should we pay them less in order to help their offspring? Or fire them? And who do we propose should make the decisions about their parenting skill?
Duncan et. al, think that education is a basketball game. Wow…we have a not so good basketball player as Sec. of Ed. Sad. Plus he has no clue about educating anyone.
Did you see the statement issued by Students’ First regarding Newton??? It ends with a zinger!!!!