In the latest iteration from our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan declared that
"But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score."
Given the fact that we don't really judge sports teams by the box scores (hello, it only matters who wins!), let's think about the whole highly questionable idea of framing education endeavors around a sports analogy.
I know that there are always a lot of lame sports analogies in our culture:
* sports as a formula for success in business (yeah right, who "won" in our current financial debacle?)
* sports as a framework for personal fulfillment (go ahead, try using "winning" as a productive framework for personal relationships)
* sports as an analytical argument for politics (currently being vigorously applied in the MSM with awful consequences for the rest of the country)
But in what way is sports really analogous to schooling? Should schools and teachers really "compete"? Don't we want everyone to "win"? Is there really a direct relationship of teacher behaviors to student achievement, or isn't there a lot of influence on student achievement that is outside the teacher's control (research says there is)?
But perhaps even more frustrating than the overly simplistic argument that determining success in schooling is somehow analogous to determining success in sports is the indescribable vagueness of what Herr Duncan is maintaining, which is that teachers "be judged on student performance, though not solely on test scores," without ever giving a clue as to what else is involved in his private criteria for evaluation.
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