August 27, 2014--Off the Hook

At the heart of Barack Obama's education reform initiative, Race to the Top, are various ways to hold school districts, administrators, and especially teachers accountable for student learning. This approach is actually an extension of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind.

From day one, back in Bush's day, teachers unions offered lip service support for these efforts, feeling that though their main agenda is protecting teachers' jobs, even incompetent ones, they could not publicly oppose approaches designed to enhance student learning, especially those that address the achievement gap that separates minority students from more affluence white students.

But first with NCLB and more recently with Race, the unions quietly and increasingly more openly have been chipping away at the accountability provisions of both programs.

Most recently they have criticized the results of high-stakes academic achievement testing as the primary way to measure teacher performance, claiming that with the introduction of the new Common Core curriculum in nearly 40 states, a product of the National Governors Association, there has not been enough time for teachers to be orientated to carrying it out effectively.

Until just recently the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been holding the line, saying there in fact has been enough time for states and school districts to help teachers master the new content and the use of testing would continue to be used when evaluating individual schools and individual teachers.

This is quite a big deal because not only can there be consequences for low-performing teachers (they might not get tenure or, rare, even be let go) but also federal education dollars to states and districts are largely contingent on how schools and districts perform.

Under considerable pressure from teachers unions that historically have provided significant support for Democratic candidates, and because in June Duncan stepped into the current teacher tenure debate, offering his strong endorsement for a judge's decision to dramatically limit tenure in California, Duncan last week said that the DoE would allow another year to pass before using student test scores when evaluating teachers.

He said, "I believe testing issues are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools" and thus teachers needed more time to adapt to the new standards and the tests pegged to those standards.

What he might have said is that oxygen is being sucked out of schools because students in unacceptable numbers are not learning and teachers and school administrators must be held accountable for that. Not in another year, but now.