History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Value added is no magic: Assessing teacher effectiveness
- 08-24-2010
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Blog by John Rogers/Huffington Post
That old sorcerer has vanished/And for once has gone away!/Spirits called by him, now banished,/My commands shall soon obey.
In Goethe's classic, the apprentice uses a sorcerer's spell to ease
his daily chores. Chanting the master's words, he brings a broomstick
to life and tells it to fetch water to clean the workshop. The
broomstick obeys, only too well. It races between the well and back
until the workshop begins to flood. Although the apprentice had enough
knowledge to set magic in motion, he could not think ahead to what he
did not know. I worry about a similar flood of unintended consequences if the Los Angeles Times moves forward with its plans to publish a database that places 6,000 Los Angeles third- to fifth-grade teachers on a spectrum from "least effective" to "most effective." (more...)
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