Bill Gates: Making Teacher Evaluations Public 'Not Conducive To Openness' : The Two-Way : NPR

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Bill Gates: Making Teacher Evaluations Public 'Not Conducive To Openness' : The Two-Way : NPR:

And more to the point, making the data public won't actually educate the public. Most readers will not understand context -- the evaluations never show demographics including economics/class and race of the students, the level of support of the students' parents, the working environment, the legislative pressures of a system that legislators do not understand, the quality of texts and other materials, and even the level of experience of the teacher.

Still, in a neoliberial economic world, legislators will insist on something called "accountability" to show that they themselves are accountable to an ideology that has engulfed their entire world view, one that cannot reflect or project what real learning is, and how successful schools in other countries actually operate.

What we don't see, of course, is some kind of legislature evaluations, such as time-on-task, time-with-lobbyists, sources-of-influence, time-with-constituents, time-with-ALEC, etc. Their own attitudes about evals might change if they were under the same public scrutiny, accessible by database search, by a curious public.


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