>Teachers’ unions: all for accountability … in theory
By Bob Bowdon
In 1984, the Ministry of Plenty handled rationing. The Ministry of Love
was in charge of torture. And in the summer of 2011, life imitated art
when the National Education Association announced it supports the use of
student performance in teacher evaluations. So says the group’s latest position paper on the subject. Sometimes, you see, organizations say the opposite of what they mean.
The New York Times took the bait, using the headline
“Union shifts position on teacher evaluations.” The casual
headline-skimmer might be led to wonder, have bona fide education
reformers infiltrated the NEA Politburo? Then you come across this
Orwellian head fake of a phrase in The Times’s coverage:
“But blunting the policy’s potential impact, the union also made
clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test
scores to judge teachers, a core part of the federally backed teacher
evaluation overhauls already under way in at least 15 states.”
