GradHacker is a collaborative blog and bootcamp program that spans universities and programs. It is written by graduate students from a variety of universities, departments, and stages in their careers and for the entire range of graduate and professional students.
Practicing evidence-based management isn't easy given our various human flaws. But we sure could save a lot of money, a lot of heartache, and make people's lives a lot better if we all tried a lot harder to do it. There are plenty of outcomes in life that are impossible to predict. Unfortunately, what happened in New York was completely predictable, even if people with blind faith in linking test scores to financial rewards for schools and teachers remain unwilling to believe this well-established truth now.
Why are we so against reading the research and applying it? Truth is that this is completely absurd - merit pay does not work in education. The commodity we work with as educators is human and by all rights unpredictable. Measuring the students annually on a standards based assessment is but one indicator of that students performance. This is such a shame - wasted tax payer dollars and lots of disappointment.
To point out the obvious: These are excuses. In fact, they are the very same excuses for failure that the education-reform movement was founded to oppose. (If early reformers believed in anything, it was that every student is an apple.) And not only are they excuses; they aren't even particularly persuasive ones.
In this Machiavellian masterpiece, we see Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children infamy (list of donors here) describe in great detail how great wads of hedge-fund and other corporate cash came to bear on the last legislative election in Illinois, how all the best lobbyists were bought up by Deform (including minority ones), how unions were outspent and how politicians followed the money, how teacher unions were lured to the table and how they were totally manhandled by the best lawyers and negotiators that money can buy, how union leaders became complicit, scared, weak, groveling.
