Dear Editor:
Anyone in the public eye with any credibility would be regarded as outrageous, even judged a con man, to make a devastating conclusion based on very flimsy, even suspect data, as that postulated Wednesday by Mayor Bloomberg in the Daily News.
Should we base an evaluation of a football player on his missing one ball passed to him? Likewise, can we reliably say that a teacher’s rating as a professional should be determined (with all its implications) by what her students accomplished on one standardized test!? This borders on preposterous and is akin to the outrageously false propaganda of a power-hungry dictator.
Bloomberg’s statement that “parents are knowledgeable enough to look at the numbers and make decisions about them” borders on a flimflam, a sleight of hand of the lowest order. How many parents are aware that the “ratings,” if we can honestly call them that, don’t take in any of all the many other factors that go into making a successful teacher?
And, to say the least, comparing charter schools to public schools, for a variety of reasons, is like comparing the Yankees to a Mets farm team. There’s a lot going on with the Yankees that enables them to acquire a higher caliber of player. The same can be said for charter schools. Their classes are smaller, they have more highly motivated kids to work with, and they appear to get better educational tools to work with!
A true test, as someone wrote in a Daily News Voicer’s letter, would be to put the so called “best teachers” in the worst-performing schools and the lowest-rating teachers in the “best” schools.
It is also a given that on any team, highly talented motivated players can make even a moderately talented coach look good. (And winning or losing one game does not permit anyone with common sense to rate someone on such very limited and incomplete information!)
Welcome to the discussion.
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