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Conservative national education expert opposes Florida’s teacher merit pay plan

daveweber on April, 5 2010 2:06 PM

Diane Ravitch , an education research professor at New York University, has credentials that should impress the most conservative political conservative.

She was an undersecretary for education research and improvement for President H.W. Bush. She was a founding member of the conservative Hoover Institution’s Koret task force on education. She helped conservative buddy Checker Finn (another Daddy Bush education department member) set up his conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. She’s a grande dame of educational research and writing.

And she is outspokenly against the the proposed teacher merit pay plan that has been rapidly moving through the Florida Legislature.

In a letter to state legislators, Ravitch urges them simply to not pass the merit pay bill, which already has been approved by the Senate and is up for House consideration this week. One committee is discussing it today.

So why has Ravitch apparently gone rogue on teacher merit pay, a mainstay of the conservative philosophy?

It’s misguided and won’t work, she says.

Among fatal flaws, she says, is the theory that the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or other student exams will reflect how well teachers taught students.

“Test scores do not identify the most effective teachers,” Ravitch says in the letter, which the Florida Education Association, number one opponent of the proposed merit pay plan, has been quick to spread to the winds.

“I strongly believe that this bill will have very negative consequences for the children of the state of Florida. I believe it will dumb down their education. I believe that it will cause many of your best teachers to leave the profession or the state because this legislation is so profoundly disrespectful towards the education profession,” Ravitch says.

Ravitch makes a number of arguments against basing teacher evaluations and pay on student performance, including that teachers are only partially responsible for student achievement. Home life, study habits, etc, etc all figure in.

What’s worse, she says, the state will become even more test oriented, all of its goals targeted toward test results.

“The students may learn test taking skills, but they don’t learn how to generalize what they have learned to new situations,” she said. “Thus, even when state reading scores go up in response to intensive coaching, national test scores remain flat.”

These arguments have all been made by the teacher union, school boards, other education experts and opponents in the Legislature, but so far have been discounted amid the tidal wave of support coming from influential quarters such as former Gov. Jeb Bush and the Florida Chamber of Commerce....