The Problem With the Evaluation Release: Both Sides Agree With It

"Education is inherently political" stated Richard Brody of The New Yorker last Friday. Brody goes on to note Socrates as the first successful challenger of the teachers' unions. Socrates seems to have set the tone for today's political agenda, wherein seemingly everyone but the teachers' union themselves were in favor of the public release of personal evaluation data on New York teachers.

The consensus that seems to have crystallized around the issue...is disturbing. It’s one of my political rules of thumb that, when liberals and conservatives advocate the same policy, it’s a harbinger of disaster, because they agree on a course of action for different reasons and neither faction poses serious questions regarding the other side’s logic.

The Liberal argument for linking teachers' pay to the performance of their students, is that it transcends racial and economic lines and provides greater opportunity for educational equality. The free-market rewards system and weakening of union benefits is what appeals to Conservatives. The result according to Brody:

And if the point of education really is the production of abstractly and measurably skillful people who don’t necessarily know anything in particular, it’s a vision (maybe a chilling one) that, at least, should be articulated for parents—and voters—to decide on. It may turn out that the substance and style of teaching and learning that they want schools to cultivate is exactly the kind that resists easy reduction to standardized testing. They may resist the paradox of an increasingly rigid and normative educational system that aims at fostering freedom of thought.

From Mike Bloomberg's defense of empowering the choices of parents to Rick Santorum's fear of Liberal education and "indoctrination", the problem with the direction of our education system is the debate around the motivations behind it.