Lately I have been extremely busy moving and working on training a new puppy. Or is she training me? I guess that remains to be seen. What I am getting at is the fact that I have not had time, or the motivation, to blog lately. Everyday I tell myself that tomorrow I will post something. Is that called blog burnout, laziness, or what?

I’ve been keeping abreast of the news as always and have been hearing a lot about Ohio’s standing as a finalist once again in President Obama’s education initiative, Race For the Top.

Through Race to the Top, we are asking States to advance reforms around four specific areas:

• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
• Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
• Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.

That doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?   Who among us does not what to reach these goals?  The devil though, as they say, is in the details.  One of the major goals of this initiative is to award schools for closing the achievement gap.  They would like to do this through merit pay.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this to be honest.  I do believe that job performance should be tied more closely to the ability of an educator to maintain her/his own job.  But how do we make this fair?  Is it fair for one teacher to be given a full schedule of honors courses while another is working with kids with learning disabilities?  Does the teacher that has been awarded with students that naturally will score highly on these assessments deserve more praise, and worse, a raise?

There are so many factors that influence the extent to which a student will score highly on a standardized test that it seems difficult to judge.  What about parenting?  Let’s not get started there.

I think my biggest complaint is the silence of our teaching unions, both local and national, when it comes to this Obama initiative.  After all, isn’t this just No Child Left Behind with more funding behind it?  But our education associations sit by silently and continue to play their partisan games while a now democrat president seeks to strengthen the same types of initiatives that they screamed about when proposed by a republican in that same office.