From Sandra's story:

So, research on the trusty Internet turned up the Broad Center where Knox County (Boston, Houston and a few other urban systems) have turned for innovative leadership.

Actually, Newsweek reported last spring that the Broad Foundation has now placed 43 urban school superintendents in the U. S., which would appear to be about half of them.

Elsewhere, I have read that Broad is placing 2/3 of all urban school superintendents--at Broad's site, I thought, although I didn't immediately find the stat there just now.

Truly, it's much more than "a few other urban systems" that are drinking the Broad Foundation Kool-Aid.

And neither are those systems' school boards seeking out Broadies.

By and large, it is the urban mayors in locales where mayoral control of schools has taken root who are seeking out Broadies.

(Apologies for so few links to back these assertions, but I'm in a bit of a rush. Please Google any of these, though, to confirm their accuracy.)

McIntyre and his enablers on the school board can parrot the corporate Broad rhetoric ad nauseum, but it does not mean they are correct. If TEAM was intended to measure individual growth from a standard (e.g., criterion referenced assessment) their scoring metric would not result in a static score continuum with extreme scores on either end (1's or 5's) and the preponderance of scores falling in the middle (e.g.,3's.) That scoring system, by definition is predicated on a theoretical normal distribution (e.g., bell curve).

Further, McIntyre's non-educator boss Kevin Huffman said publicly that there were too many high scores in the previous evaluation system. That MEANS teacher's scores were not distributed according to a normal distribution. (Aside from the fact Huffman et al. are ignorant of the previous evaluation system which was an actual criterion referenced assessment that measured teachers to individualized benchmark standards.)

It's long past time for the community and the media to find out where the millions of dollars of taxpayer money is going for TEAM. We paid ex-wall street fraudsters for a system without evaluating it's efficacy in identifying teacher quality. Zero of Milken's (NIET) white papers claiming success have been subjected to external peer review. It was created in 1999 which is long enough for other independent researchers to have examined the validity of their sales pitch.

McIntyre has told parents and the public that this evaluation system will improve student learning. If his and the school board's experiment does not work, as measured by an increase in student standardized test scores, (their chosen standard for teacher, principal, and school improvement) will they be held accountable?

And again, there's also this small peculiarity in the evaluation system (per the NYT):

Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers — kindergarten to third-grade teachers (whose students do not take the TCAP exam); art, music and vocational teachers — the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules. Math specialists can be evaluated by their school’s English scores, music teachers by the school’s writing scores.

For the life of me, I just cannot believe that an administrator's decision to fire a band director due to the language arts teacher's "failure" to boost standardized test scores can stand up in a court of law.

Of course, I cannot believe that such a language arts teacher's "failure" to boost standardized test scores can always stand up in a court of law, either, dependent on just how many crack cocaine babies landed in her classroom.

These observations are, of course, independent of any flaws in the standardized test itself.

Two quick clarifications on this:

Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers — kindergarten to third-grade teachers (whose students do not take the TCAP exam); art, music and vocational teachers — the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules.

1) Unless it's changed in very recent years, I'm pretty sure TN students take their first TCAP in their second grade year, not their third? Anybody?

2) Also, that paranthetical insert was mine, and I was unclear on the subject of second graders (or third graders, if the NYT story is correct), who do in fact take the TCAP for the first time that year.

Their test results therefore constitute only a "baseline" against which their subsequent years' test results may be compared.

By definition, though, these "baseline" scores cannot be used in any way to gauge either students' AYP or their teachers' "proficiency."

Carry on.

Thanks for posting this information.

There's LOTS of bad juju going on behind the scenes in Knox County schools.