A new way to evaluate teachers

Teacher education has been under siege in the last few years, the first line of attack in the growing criticism and more aggressive regulation of higher education, says Stanford University Education Profession Linda Darling-Hammond, who directs the Stanford University Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and was founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. Most recently, the U.S. Department of Education proposed — in a highly contentious negotiated rule-making exercise — to use test scores of graduates’ students to evaluate schools of education, despite the warnings of leading researchers that such scores are unstable and invalid for this purpose. Furthermore, in an unprecedented move, the department would limit eligibility for federal TEACH grants to prospective teachers from highly rated programs, denying aid to many deserving candidates while penalizing programs that prepare teachers for the most challenging teaching assignments. This was only the most recent example of how education reformers have made teachers and teacher education a punching bag, painting those in the entire field as having low standards and being unwilling to accept responsibility for the quality of their work…