Teachers Unions Fear Accountabilty : Common Core Seriously Flawed For All

That teacher unions object to being the target of student failure comes as no surprise. And that they want to rewrite the law to make sure everything in the bill suits their agenda. The fact that the bill itself is terribly flawed is of no importance, it's all about shielding the union and it's members from accountability, and the money that is the mother milk of power the unions cannot survive without it.

Look no further then Wisconsin and Governor Scott Walker's Act 10 bill for proof that has brought back some sense of accountability to the unions. Now that Act 10 has given the responsibility  of the survival of unions is in the hands of the teachers themselves, they have opted out.

Who knew?

Teachers Unions Oppose Teacher Accountability Standards in Common Core
Source: Helm MacNeil Dobbins and Lloyd Bentsen, "A Hidden Cost of Common Core: Teacher Accountability," National Center for Policy Analysis, November 12, 2014.  

November 12, 2014

Proposed reforms to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) threaten teacher accountability, argue Research Associate Helm MacNeil Dobbins and Senior Research Fellow Lloyd Bentsen in a report from the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Common Core is a set of national standards that individual states can adopt, outlining what students should know at the end of each grade. While the vast majority of states have adopted the standards, Indiana and Pennsylvania made headlines after withdrawing from the program. Alabama and Arizona are currently trying to withdraw, and Texas, Alaska, Nebraska and Virginia have not adopted the standards at all.

The CCSS are controversial for a number of reasons, including allegations that the program is a product of federal overreach. But lately, opposition to the CCSS has come from teachers' unions, who are trying to remove its teacher accountability provisions. As Dobbins and Bentsen explain, teacher evaluations are tied to student outcomes on CCSS exams, and those whose students do not succeed on the exams can be rated "ineffective." Student performance is responsible for 40 percent of a teacher's rating, while the other 60 percent comes from classroom observations. Unions have objected to these accountability standards:

• At their national convention, the American Federation of Teachers argued for rewriting the standards and removing the testing measurements that link teacher accountability to student performance.
• President of the National Education Association Eskelsen Garcia has called value-added measures the "mark of the devil."
• Tennessee union leaders have objected to the teacher evaluation portion of the CCSS and have filed a lawsuit on those grounds.

Dobbins and Bentsen contend that student performance and teacher accountability should be linked, writing that removing value-added accountability measures will only hurt students.