New Jersey’s Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf has the good fortune to be leader of a state with some of the best schools and school districts in the nation. New Jersey also has some districts with high concentrations of poverty and racial segregation, where test scores are very low.

But New Jersey–inspired by the example of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top–will attempt to raise test scores by imposing a teacher evaluation program. Will this address the root cause of poor academic achievement? Of course not.

In theory, it will identify the “best” teachers and the “bad” teachers so that the latter may be fired.

In reality, such statistical models have not worked anywhere because there are so many confounding, unmeasurable, and unknown variables.

But Commissioner Cerf is quite certain this plan will work, despite all the pitfalls and lack of evidence.

Jersey Jazzman explains here in detail why Cerf’s certainty is faith-based.

What is predictable is that teachers will be demoralized as they see their profession turned into a testing game, teaching to the test will become the norm, and teachers will figure out how to game the system. In time, teachers will avoid the high-risk students to preserve their jobs.

This teacher-evaluation-by test-scores is junk science.

What we really need is a way to evaluate our policymakers and hold them accountable for the damage they inflict on students, teachers, schools, and communities.