Mercedes Schneider has been reviewing the board of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
NCTQ gives grades to teacher training institutions and has positioned itself as a nonpartisan voice on the subject of teacher quality.
But what Dr. Schneider finds presents a different picture.
Read her earlier commentaries on NCTQ, which have been posted daily since January 30.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Dr. Schneider,
Thank you for writing, researching and pulling this all together for us to read.
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Nctq is all about wanting to discredit teacher education programs so that their cronies can start for-profit ones. That’s it. No loftier goals. Yet they managed to rope in us news.
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Mr. Hanushek testified in a Denver courtroom regarding a law to gut statewide school funding, arguing that this could be accomplished through the implementation of the usual “reforms”.
During his handsomely compensated testimony, Hanushek pushed all the same swill:
1) we should raise class sizes because small class sizes don’t matter;
2) years of classroom teaching experience don’t matter so we should not pay teachers based on years of experience, and fire most or all of them after five years;
3) bachelor’s & master’s degrees are useless and don’t lead to higher achievement, so we should not pay more for teachers who have spent years earning them, and basically ignore such degrees totally when making personnel or compensations decisions;
4) we should pay and fire teachers based on test scores;
and the infamous, idiotic,
5) “we should fire the bottom 10% of teachers with the lowest test scores every years, and if a few years, the U.S. would outdo every other country in the world in educational outcomes.”
The judge, however, would have none of it. (Perhaps she was a former teacher, or a parent, or someone with teachers in her family… or perhaps she was just someone whose powers of reason were not divorced from basic logic.)
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DENVER POST: “A key witness for the state was Eric Hanushek, a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who testified that repeated studies have shown no consistent relationship between levels of funding and achievement. He also testified that average funding per pupil in the United States quadrupled from 1960 to 2007, while performance essentially stayed flat.
“Rappaport blistered Hanushek several times throughout her ruling.
“JUDGE RAPPOPORT: ‘ Dr. Hanushek’s analysis that there is not much relationship in Colorado between spending and achievement contradicts testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators in the state, defies logic, and is statistically flawed,’ ”
“The judge said, pointing to cases in which courts in other states ‘found him to lack credibility.’ ”
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Here’s a link to the DENVER POST article:
http://www.denverpost.com/legislature/ci_19520710
Here’s Jersey Jazzman’s article on this:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2011/12/americas-best-judge.html
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Any time I see Hanushek’s name on anything, I dump it. Same flawed reasoning & assumptions, same conclusion. At least he’s consistent, but that’s about the only polite thing I can say.
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Consistency is no virtue when you are wrong. His economics are also inaccurate. Many economists no longer take him seriously in his chosen area of study. These people just do not understand that people are too variable, they do not yield to quality control measures, and they are not widgets.
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