Trey Czar of the JPEF pads resume and bashes teachers

In the Times Union today when talking about teacher evaluations, he said, “as a former principal, it is a real learning experience for us.

The thing is Mr. Czar was never a principal, he was a vice principal (after just two years of Teach for America experience my bet that happened at a KIPP school) for two years at a KIPP charter school in New Orleans. Why did he pad his resume, well saying he was a principal gives him the appearance of legitimacy because if anybody knew his actual education experience they probably wouldn’t give his opinion the time of day.

His point then was as dubious as his resume. He said we need to figure out how to make evaluations qualitative data, the observation, match up with the quantitative data, the test score results. I guess he can’t fathom how teachers can get good evaluations at schools that do poorly on standardized tests.

The thing is most of these teachers are amazing, their students come from broken homes or ones wracked with poverty, they are often hungry and have safety issues. Some come from families that don’t value education or who have to concentrate all their energies just to keep the lights on or food on the table.

Instead of trying to figure out why their observations don’t match up with test scores, Trey Czar and the rest of us should get down on our knees and thank them because their students would undoubtedly be a lot worse off with out them.   

To see Czar’s resume, click the link: http://www.jaxpef.org/about-us/staff-directory.aspx

And in case the link doesn't work, here it is: Trey Csar has been the President of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund since May 2009. Before coming to the Jacksonville Public Education Fund, Trey worked as a youth organizer in San Francisco, working to involve students throughout California in advocating for better educational opportunities for their fellow students. He taught in an inner-city elementary school in Houston with Teach For America and served as an assistant principal at KIPP New Orleans West (NOW), a school set up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to work with low-income students who evacuated to Houston from the New Orleans area. Trey has a master's degree in education policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and bachelor's degrees from theUniversity of Florida in Journalism and Business Administration.