Our National Crisis!

A bunch of education writers are meeting in Chicago as I write this. Apparently, according to the Twitter machine, they're all talking about teacher evaluations. And a very serious concern is getting evaluations right for art, music, and PE teachers.

See, there are hordes of these bad specialist teachers roaming our schools' hallways, making kids step off the wrong foot when they throw or endorsing bad color combinations or screwing up their embouchures. Obviously, they are directly responsible for the mess we are in:

This is a national crisis and it must be stopped at all costs. We know scads of these bad teachers exist because we've been told so by think-tanky types who aren't actually educators or researchers, but publish easy-to-read reports.

The solution is to tie PE teacher evaluations to writing scores for their school and have their principals wear x-ray specs, because that is obviously much better than the status quo. And to those of you teachers who think maybe I've lost perspective here: obviously, you care more about adults than kids and you should lose your job protections immediately.

We simply can't treat these teachers like professionals and let them police themselves like every other profession. We must beat Finland! Where they treat teachers like professionals. And don't bombard kids with standardized tests.

Uh...