Top Education Officials Spar Over Teacher Reform, Student Success

August 29, 2010— -- With classrooms in crisis around the country, the Obama administration is attempting the most ambitious school reform in a generation. But the Obama agenda, backed by $100 billion in stimulus money, has sparked controversy with teachers' unions over accountability and merit-based pay. This morning in an exclusive "This Week" education debate, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, faced off on the controversy surrounding the use of student test scores to evaluate America's teachers.

Today the Los Angeles Times released data on 6,000 individual teachers, ranking them according to their effectiveness in raising students' test scores. Duncan is encouraging schools to use this kind of data to evaluate teachers.

"Teachers want to get better. It shouldn't take a newspaper to give them that data. The district, the union, the education stakeholders have to work together to empower teachers. This should be a piece of how teachers are evaluated," he said.

Weingarten, however, said these types of assessments are unfair.

"What the L.A. Times did is they used this data, which is unreliable and is basically a prediction and an assumption, they used it in isolation of everything else. And so we said, let the teachers see it, let them use it. In fact, they are starting to do that in L.A., but don't publish it in this way," she said.

With 25 percent of American students failing to graduate on time, the need for reform is urgent. In one generation the U.S. has dropped from leading the world in college completion rates to being 12th internationally.

Washington D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who also participated in the "This Week" debate, has led the District to adopt one of the nation's most ambitious teacher evaluation systems. In conjunction with the local union, Rhee has revamped how the city administers, compensates and removes teachers from their jobs.