A link to another school reform bullshit? Whenever I read this kind of work, I look up the sponsoring agency. In the above case it was The Joyce Foundation. So I wiki-ed them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Foundation
http://www.joycefdn.org/content.cfm/advanceillinoisperformancecounts?pagep=programs%2Deducation
``In mid-April the Illinois State Senate passed Senate Bill 7, commonly referred to as Performance Counts, putting in place a series of changes that align with the Joyce Foundation's education program priorities. Joyce grantee Advance Illinois played a key role in the passage of the bill, educating lawmakers and advancing the education reform agenda.
The landmark legislation is the fruit of months of collaboration among lawmakers, teachers' unions, the Illinois State Board of Education, and education reform groups. Policy changes included in the Bill are:
Performance included as a factor when making hiringlayoff, and dismissal decisions
Ensuring tenure rewards effective teachers with strong performance records
Changing the nature of union negotiations to place students' well-being at the center''
Now the above is the domesticated pig DLC version of the great wild pig version I listened to this morning on Doug's show from Terry Moe:
``Terry M. Moe senior fellow member of the k-12 education task force
Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 education, and the William Bennett Munro Professor of political science at Stanford University.
He is an expert on educational policy, U.S. political institutions, and organization theory. His current research projects are concerned with school choice, public bureaucracy, and the presidency.''
Doug's show was definitely worth listening too, because it gives you insight into how these pigs think. Their greatest vulnerability is found when they try to justify their ideas with empirical studies and data that show this or that. It often turns out that either the study didn't show what they said, or the study was gerry-rigged by some other think tank ideologue to show what it shows. This is even bad academic work, since the latter studies come from non-peer reviewed work that isn't published in a regular social science journals.
In other words they engage in a pseudo-science sounding justifications i.e. they are lying.