03.02.07
Edumacation
Or: My town still stinks
Bosse HS has the worst test scores and lowest proportion of students going to college in Evansville. When I lived there, very few people were impressed with Bosse, and a lot of students would try to transfer to another public HS if they could.
Bosse recently fired a chemistry teacher who had started teaching chemistry after a long career in chemistry research. He said that he decided to teach because of the declining quality of his interview candidates, especially in their ability to analyze and solve problems. By his own admission, he wanted to shake things up with his class, because he believed kids were being taught to “to pass a test and then move on to the next chapter.”
Bosse students have voiced very strong support for this teacher - they feel engaged and motivated in his course. Unfortunately, I suspect that the guy probably isn’t following the NCLB-geared curriculum that is being deployed in Evansville, since he specifically mentioned his distaste for teaching to tests.
It’s strange, how at odds NCLB seems to be with legitimate educational interests all over this country. The use of statistical methods to measure teacher quality may seem like a cool toy, but I think that there are too many qualitative factors in whether one is well-educated to ever measure them with a standardized test. NCLB assumes that principals and school districts are not competent to assess and measure their school performance independently, and must submit to an over-generalized stat monster. It’s sad to see another teacher bite the dust because of it.