Hey Governor- Here is $10 million dollars !

Governor Schwarzenegger proposes to brutal budget cuts to health care, state workers, and $5.2 billion to k-12 education and to borrow billions.
Well, here is $10 million per year you can have. It’s a free-bee.
In SB 2042 in 2000 the legislature created a system where the state must continually train new teachers to replace those driven out by inadequate working conditions. One element of 2042 required the development of high stakes performance assessment of California teachers (TPA) based upon the teacher performance expectations (TPE) to be developed by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
The problems with this are several. There is no evidence that TPA’s are valid measures of good teaching. To the contrary, our experience tells us that one-time all-or-nothing tests like the TPA are among the poorest possible ways to predict the likelihood that a test-taker will be an excellent California teacher.
This new test has no relationship to the crisis in school achievement of California’s failing schools. It does, however, provide career advancement for test writers and professors at Stanford and elsewhere, provide them with coffee, donuts and catered food while they meet, and keep them from having to work with real teachers in real classrooms to deal with the problems students in real schools.
It is a bridge to nowhere. A boondoggle. The state might as well fund research on developing rain forests in the Iowa prairie.
There are additional analysis of this foolish test on this blog. Just go to http://www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com and use the search engine.
Hey, a million here, a million there, pretty soon you add up to some real money.
Duane Campbell,
Sacramento