Whitney Tilson Embarrasses Himself Yet Again!

Ugh. Whitney stuff tonight. I just can't help it, especially when he emails contradictory, convoluted, half baked, foot in his mouth blabbering diatribes. If you have not yet subscribed to Whitney Tilson's newsletter or listserv or whatever you wish to call it, I suggest you do. Mention SBSB in the request email and you win a prize!

So Whitney wrote today;

The issue of teacher evaluations has come to the forefront all over the country. Everyone – even the unions at least pay lip service to it – agrees that there are huge differences among teachers that have an enormous impact on students, so it’s critically important to attract, train, and retain talented teachers – and improve or get rid of ineffective teachers. To do so, there needs to be a robust, fair system of evaluating teachers, which is REALLY hard to do. Many smart people are working hard on this – a task made more difficult by the unions, who have effectively taken the position that if an evaluation system is unfair to even one teacher, then it’s unacceptable.


Yep, the unions are paying lip service to it because we know it is flawed, unproven, stupid, and a myriad of other reasons. But as usual, we shall take Whitney's words and show how ignorant and ill informed he always is.

there are huge differences among teachers that have an enormous impact on students,

Yes, I agree. There are huge differences between teachers. A teacher who is teaching for the first time is way different than a veteran teacher. A male teacher can have a different type of impact on male students than a female teacher can. Some teachers really suck up good and are favorite pets. Some teachers have class sizes over 35 kids in a 5th grade class and have about half a dozen serious behavior problems that consistently takes away from any education process going on. And when that teacher asks for support from the administration, the collective administrative heads plop into the sand. Or maybe one teacher has many ELL students. Or students living in shelters. Or students that are abused. So yes, there are differences. Differences that no matter how bad we wish to control, we are unable to control.