Opinion: Statistics and liars

Barth Keck is an English teacher and assistant football coach who also teaches courses in journalism and media literacy at Haddam-Killingworth High School. Email Barth here

California’s teacher tenure laws were invalidated recently by Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu because the “statutes made it so onerous to fire bad teachers that they all but guaranteed needy kids would be stuck in classrooms with incompetent instructors.”

We’ve all heard “bad teacher” stories before. Critics often use the “bad teacher” scenario as Exhibit 1 in the Case Against Public Schools. Unfortunately, this focus on “bad teachers” and the tenure laws that supposedly prevent their dismissal have become a smokescreen for an even bigger problem: the blind worship of educational statistics.

Treu, for example, reinforced his decision by quoting the expert-witness account of Arizona State University professor David Berliner who testified that “1 to 3 percent of California teachers are grossly ineffective. Given that the evidence showed roughly 275,000 active teachers in the state, the extrapolated number of grossly ineffective teachers ranges from 2,750 to 8,250.”

Sounds horrific. It also sounds imprecise. What’s the source of these statistics?

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.