I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. - Chris Christie, "An Open Letter to the Teachers of NJ" October, 2009

Saturday, October 30, 2010

More on the Teacher Evaluation Task Force

I posted about how unqualified Christie's appointees to the Education Effectiveness Task Force were; but, I made a HUGE omission:
"Whatever the current system is, it’s not working," said Derrell Bradford, executive director of Excellent Education for Everyone and a task force member. "The hurdles to evaluating someone effectively are so high."
Derrell Bradford. Is on a task force. That will look at evaluating teachers.

To extend my analogy, where I wondered what it would be like to have a task force on doctor evaluations where most of the members weren't practicing doctors:

Appointing Derrell Bradford is like appointing a homeopath.

His bio on Facebook:


About Me

Basic Info
Sex:Male

Hometown:Baltimore, Maryland

Education and Work

Employers

College

High School
Yeah, I guess being a nightlife editor gives you a unique perspective on teacher effectiveness.

Seriously, the fact that this guy is on this panel is an insult to teachers across this state. It turns the Task Force into a bad joke.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about a real live teacher!! Are there any on this taskforce?

calugg said...

This taskforce is beyond insulting. If the Governor was serious, the taskforce would be comprised of the top public school educators and scholars in evaluation in the state.

Instead, it's the flunky road show.

Five years from now, many NJ residents will bemoan the gutting of public education. THAT will drive people away faster than any supposed millionaires tax.

thinker said...

I particularly liked the choice of the woman who sends goody bags to our troops. Not that she isn't doing good work; I am all for anything that benefits our military in any way. I just fail to see how this qualifies her to serve on a task force that, if judging just by the amount of time our current administration has been paying to education, is obviously of critical importance.

One argument is that no teacher should serve on the task force because they cannot be objective since they obviously have a vested interest. I suppose then that we are to believe that the charter and private school administrators who were selected have no vested interest in the findings of this task force. Perhaps the government thinks that everyone who earns under a certain salary (say, somewhere below wall st. but above teacher salary) is just an idiot and that we wouldn't even notice that there was no public school teacher on the task force dedicated to finding the best way to evaluate teaching (primarily in public schools since I suspect charters and private schools probably won't be subject to these reforms). It just boggles the mind.

pleaseinvestigate said...

I would direct the readers to the website for E3 (Excellent Education for Everyone). I found a very interesting article by R. Giordano from the Philadelphia Inquirer from June 2010. Bret Schundler was the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony in Camden for the Community Education Resource Network(CERN), where Chris Christie visited twice while on the campaign trail. There were 370 graduates. However, "CERN graduates receive home-school diplomas, which are not endorsed by the state but allow students to enter trade schools and some community college programs." Also on the website for E3: "We are an Education Reform Non-Profit Organization. We were established out of a need to protect the children of this country from public school corruption." Am I mistaken, or is this stuff really plain disturbing?