Jeff Bryant writes that test-based evaluation of teachers is going, going, and almost dead.

 

He says that the most interesting thing about Hillary Clinton’s derisive comments about evaluating teachers by test scores is that few, if any, of the reformer crowd rose up to disagree with her.

 

Hillary said recently that it didn’t make any sense to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students.

 

This policy was the jewel in the crown of Arne Duncan and President Obama’s Race to the Top. Duncan even saluted the Los Angeles Times for publishing its own ratings of thousands of teachers based on this fraudulent measure. He was silent when one of those teachers–Rigoberto Ruelas– committed suicide.  (See here and here and here.)

 

Bryant writes:

 

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently shook up the education policy world when she challenged one of the pillars of the education establishment for the last 10-15 years, that teachers’ job evaluations and pay should be linked to how students – even students they don’t teach – perform on standardized tests.

 

In an informal “roundtable” with president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten and a select audience of AFT members, Clinton stated, “I have for a very long time also been against the idea that you tie teacher evaluation and even teacher pay to test outcomes. There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence.”

 

“This is a direct shot at Obama’s education policy,” reported Vox the next day. “The Education Department pushed states to adopt policies that would link teachers’ professional evaluations in part to their students’ test scores.”

 

Echoing that accusation, The Washington Post reported Clinton was “dismissing a key feature of education policies promoted by the Obama administration.”

 

But the important story here isn’t that Clinton’s remark indicates what we can expect from her administration for education policy.

 

First, her statement wasn’t all that definitive. She followed the remark with a vague comment about linking tests to “school performance,” whatever that means, and she declared, “you’ve got to have something,” presumably meaning she would want to maintain annual testing favored by Obama.

 

Second, you can disagree with what Clinton said, or argue about the way she said it, but the reality is,  federal pressures to require teacher evaluations to include test score data are likely going away. That’s because in the latest version of new federal policy being negotiated in Congress, “there would be no role for the feds whatsoever in teacher evaluation,” Education Week reports.

 

But, the important story isn’t as much about what Clinton said as it is about the response it got from the establishment that’s been in charge of education policy for nearly three decades.

 

The response: Silence.

 

The Establishment is ready to go to the mat for charter schools, 93% of which are non-union. But, bye-bye, teacher evaluation based on test scores.