Schools & Youth
Little Rock Nine’s Jefferson Thomas Passes Away
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Sep 7th
We lost a part of American history this weekend. Jefferson Thomas, who was among the first group of nine black students to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, passed away on September 5. Thomas was 67.
As a high school freshman Thomas agreed to leave Dunbar Junior High to enter Little Rock Central High School as a sophomore and enforce Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court order to end racial segregation in public schools. It sparked the historic standoff between Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus and President Dwight Eisenhower; Faubus called in the National Guard to stop the black students from entering the schoolhouse on September 4, 1957, and Eisenhower responded by ordering the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort Thomas and his classmates inside.
The 101st Airborne Division only stayed for two weeks though, and once they were gone Thomas and his black classmates endured daily taunts and beatings from their white classmates. Tacks and broken glass and acid were favorite tools of their aggressors. Faubus would later close all Little Rock high schools for a year in a panicked attempt to stave off desegregation. Thomas stayed in school and when he left Central High in 1960 he was just one of the three original Little Rock Nine to graduate from that school.
After graduation, Thomas got involved with the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP and was active in the Progressive Baptist Youth Convention before he joined the military and served as an infrantry squad leader in Vietnam. He returned to Los Angeles, graduated from college and maintained a family business for much of his life while working for Mobil Oil and went on to work with the Department of Defense.
His classmates remembered him for his upbeat personality and sense of humor–like when Thomas publicly poked fun at himself for accidentally cheering for his classmates during a school pep rally. It turned out the white flag they were flying was not the school flag but the Confederate one, and they were singing “Dixie.“
Decades after Brown v. Board of Education and Thomas’ heroism, the fight to desegregate the nation’s schools continues. This April the Department of Justice ordered a Mississippi county to stop allowing residents to contribute to the re-segregation of the county’s high schools.
Thomas is the first of the Little Rock Nine to pass away. All nine received Congressional Medals of Honor in 1999 during the Clinton administration, and were invited to the White House again during President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Thomas passed away from complications related to pancreatic cancer, and is survived by his wife and a son from his first marriage.
Anti-Muslim Furor Spreads to College Reading Lists in Brooklyn
originally posted by Seth Freed Wessler for Colorlines [click here]
Sep 3rd
High profile anti-Muslim hates crimes and haters are making the front pages. But anti-Muslims bias, and the experience of being the target of that hate, is routine. In a strange twist, one of these quieter assaults is being waged over a book whose whole point is to explore the insidious ways that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias plays out.
The book is How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab in America by Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of at Brooklyn College. It was published at a time when many imagined the worst parts of post 9-11 hate were behind us. It’s clear now that this could not be further from the truth. As a result, Bayoumi’s book has never been more necessary.
The controversy emerged after the book was assigned as required reading to incoming first years at the school. When the reading list was sent out, a handful of alumni, emeritus and current faculty started yelling about it and its now made its way to conservative blogs. Abigail L. Rosenthal, a retired Brooklyn College professor wrote to the college President:
It smacks of indoctrination. It will intimidate incoming students who have a different point of view (or have formed no point of view), sending the message that only one side will be approved on this College campus. It can certainly intimidate untenured faculty as well.
It’s a claim that reeks with irony because the book is a very elegant attempt to remedy a very real kind of silencing and intimidation: the eclipse of everyday Arab voices from discussions that have everything to do with their lives. Over the phone Bayoumi told me, “it’s a weird contradiction where it seems that Muslims and Arabs are more visible than ever but they are muted at the same time.”
Bayoumi says he’s received a few emails from Muslim and Arab students who were assigned the reading. “They were all really excited to have the book and that somehow their experiences resonated with the book.”
Last year, Yasmine Farhang reviewed the book for Colorlines. Here’s some of what she wrote:
In his new book, How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, Moustafa Bayoumi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, introduces readers to seven young people in Brooklyn who are all too familiar with being defined by others.
From the story of Rasha’s family being detained in 2002 after the FBI identifies them as terrorists simply for being in immigration limbo to Sami’s experience in the marines where his commanding officers watch him like hawks to be sure he is not “too sympathetic” to the Iraqis, readers see each person attempt to come of age in an environment that has already decided who they are. As Bayoumi gets to know Rasha, Sami, Yasmin, Akram, Lina, Omar and Rami by spending time with them in their homes, workplaces and favorite hangouts, the theme of navigating simultaneous Arab, Muslim and American identities takes shape. Patterns become clear, such as facing law enforcement, being targeted by authority figures in different environments (teachers, military officers, employers) and–perhaps just as bad–the frustrating paranoia of constantly being unsure whether you are being targeted at all.
Bayoumi astutely observes that, “Arab and Muslim Americans are constantly talked about but almost never heard from… [yet] sometimes when you are everywhere, you are really nowhere.” Herein lies Bayoumi’s incentive for embarking on the project that culminated in this book. There is no doubt that Bayoumi has a central question, being “What is it like to be young and Arab in the age of terror?” Yet he is able to keep this question in his pocket and let the youth, for once, lead the way.
New York Tells Schools to Stop Harassing Immigrant Students
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Sep 1st
New York’s State Education Department issued a memo to its schools last week reminding them that they should not be forcing families to produce proof of their immigration status for their child’s enrollment in school.
Kirk Semple reports for the New York Times that the state distributed the memo after the New York Civil Liberties Union reported that at least 20 percent of the New York school districts were demanding children’s immigration papers before they could get into school. According to the NYCLU, they couldn’t find evidence that kids had been turned away if they were unable to produce paperwork–though even asking families for proof of their immigration status can often be threat enough that families may keep their kids out of school. The memo was sent out after months of pressure from the civil rights group.
New York’s Education Department takes the time to remind their educators about students’ basic civil rights, with a little history lesson:
Undocumented children, like U.S. citizen children, have the right to attend school full
time as long as they meet the age and residency requirements established by state law. In a 1982 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that children who are undocumented immigrants cannot be denied a free public education if they are, as a factual matter, district residents
It then reminds administrators that schools would do well to focus on educating their students rather than asking unnecessary, invasive questions. Well, actually the memo says: “[S]chools should avoid asking questions related to immigration status or that may reveal a child’s immigration status, such as asking for a Social Security number.”
The NYCLU says the written memo will only be useful if its backed up by enforcement, which the group promises it will monitor. Check out the memo here.
DOJ: Arizona’s Community Colleges Shut Out Immigrant Workers, Too
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 31st
Another week, another Department of Justice lawsuit against Arizona. On Monday the DOJ sued the state for the second time this summer. In this latest round, the federal government has charged that the state’s community colleges illegally forced non-citizen students to jump through more hoops to get jobs.
The federal government claims that between July 2008 and January 2010 at least 247 new non-citizen campus employees had to show more paperwork, including green cards, to be hired, a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Ten Maricopa Community Colleges that were sued have since stopped the practice, the Arizona Republic reports.
More from the Arizona Republic:
The suit says that Glendale Community College offered a part-time math teaching position to Zainul Singaporewalla in August 2008. He accepted and produced a Department of Homeland Security form proving his permanent legal status as well as a California driver’s license and Social Security card. The college then asked Singaporewalla to fill out a non-U.S. citizen employee tax data form, and to provide a permanent resident card, which staff told him was a federal requirement. When he questioned the validity of the request and was unable to produce the card, the job offer was rescinded.
Arizona is keeping the Department of Justice busy, what with their ongoing legal challenge to SB1070, and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s refusal to cooperate with the DOJ investigation of his office.
Did Charter Schools Save New Orleans After Katrina?
originally posted by Naima Ramos-Chapman for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 31st
Since Hurricane Katrina many public schools were dismantled and turned into private charters. Five years after this terrible storm, education overhaul has thrilled politicians and the media to the extent that some have chosen to call Katrina a “blessing” to the kids of New Orleans. Not only does this sort of congratulatory praise seem like a slap in the face for the thousands who perished in the storm but, as Brentin Mock writes at The Root, it’s also premature to call those charter schools a success.
In the article, Mock points to the selectivity that’s kept some of city’s neediest displaced children and their parents from returning to the Crescent city. Mock writes:
Today only 38,000 students are enrolled in New Orleans schools, compared with 65,000 in the year before Katrina. You simply cannot make the argument that test scores are improving without figuring in the fact that some 40 percent of students — a lot of them struggling with poverty and disabilities, the kinds of students who might well lower test scores — haven’t come back. One indicator that many poor families won’t be coming back is that, for the first time, New Orleans’ suburbs now have a higher number of low-income families than the city: 92,752 versus 67,861.
As for the growth in test scores often touted by the media as evidence of the charter schools’ cure-all abilities, Mock argued that test scores had been on the rise long before Katrina flooded New Orleans:
Between 2003 and 2005, fourth-grade math results grew by 9 percent. Between 2007 and 2009, those results grew by 9.5 percent. In eighth-grade math, the growth in the percentage of kids scoring above basic levels between 2003 and 2005 was greater than the gains between 2007 and 2009. There has been a slight improvement in eighth-grade English and in math at the high school graduate level, but in both categories, the improvement in test scores builds on progress that was already occurring before the mass chartering of New Orleans.
As Mock concludes, New Orleans needs special-needs-trained teachers now more than ever to care for the hundreds of children who may have survived the storm, but still carry the weight of emotional and mental trauma. It’s unclear whether the city’s love affair with charter schools is equipped to deal with that particular piece of the puzzle.
LA Times Forces Schools’ Hand
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 26th
The Los Angeles Times “Who’s Grading the Teachers?” database project is on the cusp of forcing the Los Angeles Unified School District to change policy to mirror the Obama administration education reform agenda.
The paper reports that LAUSD school chief Ramon Cortines addressed a crowd of administrators on Wednesday and announced that the district would adopt a “value added” system to track students’ test scores and therefore evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness over time. The method would then, Cortines hopes, comprise 30 percent of a teacher’s yearly job evaluations and possibly even determine their job security in the district.
The plan would have to be approved by L.A. teachers union before being implemented. When Cortines first raised the topic last week, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy hinted that the union was willing to open up a conversation on teacher evaluation issues, but has not indicated that they will approve the “value added” method.
It’s been a wild couple of weeks for Los Angeles teachers.
A quick recap: on August 15 the Los Angeles Times entered the national education debate by announcing a plan to publish the names and ranked scores of 6,000 third, fourth and fifth grade teachers later this month. The paper examined seven years of test scores for elementary school teachers using what’s called a “value added” analysis which tracks a student’s test scores through different grades.
The union president Duffy was furious. He called immediately for a boycott of the paper. While many teachers do back-of-the-envelope calculations of their students’ progress, teachers had never been shown actual statistical tabulations, and the district doesn’t incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations.
Last week Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised the newspaper for what it was doing–”What is there to hide?” he asked–and in a speech yesterday in Little Rock, Arkansas, he called out the city and praised the newspaper for joining the national education conversation. Duncan’s education reform platform has pushed for more strict measures for evaluating teachers. Duncan has advocated a model that allows districts to fire teachers if their students’ test scores do not improve satisfactorily.
In February, President Obama praised a Rhode Island district that fired every teacher in a high school that was deemed failing. (Those teachers were later allowed to keep their jobs through a concession deal.) In Washington, D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee fired 241 teachers this summer because more than half of them were not able to raise student test scores.
By Friday, the district had publicly announced that it would attempt to insert the “value-added” metric into teacher evaluations. Duffy responded by agreeing to a meeting, though he did not promise acquiescence.
Race to the Top’s Round 2 Winners, And Why They Matter
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 24th
After a flurry of leaked announcements this morning, the confirmed numbers from the Department of Education on today’s winners of Phase 2 of Race to the Top are in. They are:
- District of Columbia: $75 million. Score: 450.0
- Florida: $700 million. Score: 452.4
- Georgia: $400 million. Score: 446.4
- Hawaii: $75 million. Score: 462.4
- Maryland: $250 million. Score: 450.0
- Massachusetts: $250 million. Score: 471.0
- New York: $700 million. Score: 464.8
- North Carolina: $400 million. Score: 441.6
- Ohio: $400 million. Score: 440.8
- Rhode Island: $75 million. Score: 451.2
The winners and ranked points might not mean much from afar, but we’ll dig into those in a second. For a little background, these ten winners were pulled from a list of 19 finalists. All in all, 48 entries have been submitted to the Department of Education for its $4.35 billion competitive grants Race to the Top initiative. After Delaware and Tennessee were the sole winners of Phase 1 earlier this year, the Department of Education had $3.4 billion left to disburse to 36 Phase 2 applicants.
Money is awarded to states that show a strong commitment to the Obama administration brand of education reform, which includes adopting common standards and assessments; building data systems to measure and track student performance; strict teacher evaluation methods and a commitment to doing away with under-performing schools.
“Every state that applied has done the hard work of implementing a comprehensive education reform agenda,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on a press call with reporters. According to him, in this latest round of RTTT states saw an average of a 30-point jump from their Phase 1 scores, which Duncan took as a sign of improvement from the first round of competition.
Duncan praised all the entrants for their “tremendous courage and tremendous innovation” in the crafting of their applications. “We’ve unleashed the amazing creativity and innovation,” Duncan said. “I’ve always said, sometimes jokingly, the best ideas are never going to come from me and never going to come from anyone in Washington. They are always going to come from the local level.”
While his remarks may have been heartfelt, the reality of education reform right now is quite different. There is very little that is organic or even local about the current national movement to overhaul the public school system. The federal government has been able to aggressively drive education reform in a top-down fashion with the flagship Race to the Top program and in so doing, bypass interference from Congress.
In the education world, “innovation” and “creativity” are often code words for a state’s willingness to adopt the mainstream education reform agenda, which in the Obama adminstration’s expression calls for submission to specific policies about how teachers are evaluated and compensated.
Sean Cavanaugh at Education Week has a first-take at the results, and points out that there are some themes among the winners: Florida won $700 million, and was likely being awarded for passing a new set of teacher accountability provisions and for instituting stricter standards for how to restructure struggling schools. The Duncan model calls for failing schools to submit to one of four turnaround models which mandate some combination of mass firings of all teaching staff, restructuring, or a charter school takeover.
States are currently embroiled in debates over how teachers should be evaluated: many teachers, parents and activists feel that teacher evaluation mechanisms that tie a teacher’s job security to their students’ test scores only further cements the primacy of standardized test scores in the school systems. Unions disagree with provisions that allow districts to do away with tenure and fire teachers with no recourse in two years if their students’ test scores do not improve.
After losing out in Round 1 of RTTT, New York passed laws that raised the state cap on charter schools and planned “partnership zones” for failing schools. Both D.C. and Rhode Island adopted teacher evaluation policies that allow for a teacher to be judged in part on the performance of his or her students’ test scores. The ideas may be self-initiated, but states that don’t adopt the Obama-Duncan plan don’t win money.
“Education has to be non-political,” Duncan said. “All of us have to unite behind getting better results for children,” because the current state of American public education was “morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable.” “People have to be willing to challenge the status quo.”
And here again, a bit of parsing: any group found resisting Obama administration reforms is often accused of clinging to the undefined and much-maligned “status quo.” That the current education system is woefully broken is uncontroversial, but there is little consensus around the solutions. But those who opposes the mainstream education reform movement are often accused of stalling progress. This leaves little room in the debate for Race to the Top and Duncan education reform skeptics, of which there are many.
Race to the Top critics have said that forcing states to compete for money undermines the very basic civil right that all kids in America have to a quality education. The $3.4 billion disbursed in this second round of Race to the Top will only be shared by 13 million students around the country in nine states and Washington, D.C. The majority of the country will lose out on the much-needed funds. They also take issue with the policy demands states are forced to adopt.
“We ran out of money at ten,” Duncan said when asked about how the funding cut-off was decided. Duncan repeatedly worked some version of that refrain into his remarks in the course of the phone call. If he had more money at his disposal, he would have been glad to have given away more. It was his bid for Congress to fulfill his request for another $1.35 billion to renew Race to the Top for a third and fourth round. When pressed for details about how far down the list of other finalists he’d have gone, if he had as he wished, “five billion dollars by tomorrow,” Duncan chose not to elaborate.
Kids Still Shaken by Katrina
originally posted by Michelle Chen for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 24th
Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters haven’t stopped rippling through the minds of children on the Gulf Coast. Studies suggest that five years later, the accumulated stress of instability and poverty–and government neglect–has shown up in families’ emotional and mental health.
According to a long-term study by Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, about 37 percent of children “have received a clinical mental health diagnosis of depression, anxiety, or behavior disorder.” That means nearly four in 10 kids, according to their parents’ reports, have spent much of their first years wading through deep emotional and mental crises.
The researchers discovered that “children exposed to Hurricane Katrina were nearly 5 times as likely as a pre-Katrina cohort to exhibit serious emotional disturbance,” which is often fueled by other forms of household or family stress. The study reinforces previous research that has shown the ways in which the stressors of poverty show up in both physical and mental health.
According to the Columbia study, Katrina kids’ mental health problems are tied to stressors like “unstable housing, lost income post-Katrina, the financial stressor of insufficient money for household food, and poor family functioning.” Concentrated poverty helps undermine the “family functioning” as parents wrestle with their own emotional pressures. The study noted, “More than 13% of parents report that they are not coping well with the daily demands of parenting, compared with the national average of 3%.”
While all of this ties into race, the exact role of racial difference isn’t clear; some forms of emotional disturbance seemed significantly less prevalent among blacks compared to whites. But a 2009 article by sociologist Francis Adeola of the University of New Orleans highlighted evidence that black people are in fact at much higher risk of psychological crisis:
African Americans are found with higher levels of psychosocial problems including trouble sleeping, having feelings of depression, anxiety, and worrying about immediate and nearest futures than their White counterparts. They also have a higher score on reported difficulties in family relationships.
The devastation could be especially acute for mothers who gave birth around the time of the disaster. A Tulane University study of post-Katrina postpartum mental health found that, “Black women and women with less education were more likely to have had a serious experience of the hurricane,” and “Overall, two or more severe experiences of the storm was associated with an increased risk for both depression… and PTSD.”
Meanwhile, all of this may be compounded by years of earned distrust of the health care system–the people most in need of care may be most likely to avoid it. In a 2005 NPR report on post-Katrina mental health and race, Dr. Harold Neighbors of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, explained that widely circulated stories of bad experiences with institutions led many black residents to seek emotional support from family and church rather than professionals:
It seems that everybody has a story about an acquaintance, an aunt or an uncle or a cousin, who was either taken away involuntarily, committed; typically it might be a story about an interaction with the police. And those stories tend to circulate and contribute to a lot of reluctance to seek help for mental health problems.
Of course, while Katrina’s vestigial wounds still fester, an ugly second disaster has assaulted Gulf Coast survivors: Recent surveys by the Columbia Center for Disaster Preparedness reveal that the BP oil spill has unleashed another wave of anxiety, with disparate impacts on poor households as well as black children.
Back-to-School Day In Arizona, But Not for Border Crossing Kids
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 23rd
Anti-immigrant diva Tom Horne has a primary to win tomorrow, and he’s going to do whatever he has to do to become attorney general. Even if it means stomping on a couple dozen kids to get there.
It’s back-to-school day in the small border town of Ajo, Arizona (population: 4,300), but not if you can’t prove you’re an American resident. That’s the rule Arizona school chief Horne has decided to enforce as kids get ready to head back to class.
The Arizona Republic reports that Horne won’t let kids get on the school bus if they can’t prove their primary residence is north of the border; Ajo is 40 miles from the border and one of the stops on the school bus’ 36-mile route takes it right up to the border at Lukeville. According to the Arizona Republic it was a common, longstanding custom that kids in Mexico could cross through to Lukeville, get on the bus and go to Ajo for school for the day. Now, students will need certificates to get on the bus.
Horne, who’s running for state attorney general, was tipped off by a 2004 report from the paper and CNN. In May Horne’s office decided to sue the Ajo Unified School District for $1.2 million for educating a whopping 105 students since 2007–except more than half of that batch actually were legal residents of Arizona. The town’s school district has been unable to confirm the home addresses for a couple dozen other students, and offered to settle the matter for $300,000, which the Arizona Department of Education has declined.
The Arizona Republic reports that the issue is not about illegal immigration but about residence; Arizona law makes room for undocumented children to attend school, as long as they live in the state. But legal fine print aside, the border debate is always centered around what rights people are allowed to claim–or have swiped away from them at the whim of opportunistic political candidates–depending on where they happen to have been born, and which side of the border they happen to be standing on when new walls are erected and laws announced.
Horne made headlines earlier this year for pushing HB 2281, the new state law that bans ethnic studies in Arizona. He took to the airwaves and called ethnic studies courses in Arizona divisive; according to Horne they pushed a separatist, radical agenda that promoted “ethnic chauvinism.” That new policy, signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer (who’s got a primary of her own coming up tomorrow) is set to go into effect on December 31.
Managing The LA Times Teacher List Fallout
originally posted by Julianne Hing for Colorlines [click here]
Aug 20th
On Sunday the Los Angeles Times announced that it will publicize the ranked names of 6,000 Los Angeles public school teachers alongside their students’ test scores. According to the Times’ reporters Jason Felch and Jason Song, the project was done in the name of in the name of transparency. Felch and Song say that they evaluated data that the Los Angeles Unified School District keeps but does not use. But many disagree over the move to put these numbers in the paper.
So far as everyone can tell, the project is the first one of its kind; most districts compile, evaluate and rank data privately, even if school-wide test scores are published. And never are teachers’ names attached to those test scores. Predictably, an immediate uproar rose from every side of the education debate, and one Los Angeles teachers’ union demanded a boycott of the paper.
The database of third, fourth and fifth grade teachers’ scores hasn’t even been published yet–the LA Times says people can expect that by the end of the month–but the fallout is already here.
Nearly every aspect, from the data to the methodology and ethics, has been debated. At issue is a basic matter of privacy: does a city paper have the right to publish the names of teachers and grade their performance publicly–especially when most teachers have never been taught how to read data or evaluate their own performance with such methods? And, how reliable and sound is the number-crunching apparatus that the LA Times based its research on?
The LA Times project was done on a “value-added” analysis that tracks a student’s progress against their previous years’ test scores. The paper’s reporters say this is supposed to help control for mitigating factors like poverty, a student’s limited English ability or tumultuous home life. Research geeks have ripped into the methodology, but also said that a teacher’s performance cannot be divorced from the socioeconomic factors that influence a student’s life. On that, Felch and Song say that both stellar and disappointing teachers can be found at the poorest and the richest schools.
Southern California Public Radio reports the American Federation of Teachers’ head Randi Weingarten told a crowd in Watts this week: “Ultimately what this is, is some flawed methodology that’s not ready for prime time, which is single measure, which everybody agrees should not be the sole measure but effectively because of the way the LA Times has done it, it is indicting teachers based upon some flawed methodology.” The LA Times reports that Weingarten believes the data should be made available to teachers–many who had never seen their scores before–and parents, but not to the general public.
The move from the LA Times reflects a national sentiment that it’s teachers who are the crucial linchpins, and therefore the prime culprits, in the grand scheme of the education system. Teacher evaluation has become a central part of the education reform debate: states who have won or advanced in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top federal grants program have passed laws that tie a teacher’s job security to their students’ test scores. In many states, as much as 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation can be based on how well their students perform, and a teacher can be fired with no recourse in two years if their students underperform. Washington, D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee used this evaluation method to fire 241 teachers this summer.
Even though Felch and Song acknowledge that a teacher is much more than just their students’ test scores, they still clearly agree using the scores to measure teacher performance. When they sat down for an online chat with readers this week, Felch defended their project as one of altruism:
The question is: how do the legitimate concerns of teachers weigh against the concern of parents and children who are being assigned to ineffective teachers? And what about all of those incredible teachers who, like one we featured in the story, are eating lunch in their classrooms, unrecognized and unstudied? In the end, we came down on the side of publication.
The reporters say they have plans to also publish middle school and high school teachers’ scores in the future.