Notes on the Alliance for Education Teacher Quality Survey

Melissa Westbrook:

just finally got around to looking over the Alliance for Education survey called “Teaching Quality Community Survey”. What were they thinking? (Sorry to be a little late to this party but I was out of town last week.) I’m not going to even provide a link. I answered every question “don’t know” so I could read through the whole thing.
Just from a survey standpoint, it’s a mess. There are multiple values in questions starting with the very first one. It’s about (1) redesigning the salary schedule AND (2) eliminating coursework incentives AND (3) “reallocating pay to target the district’s challenges and priorities.” What?!? You can’t write a survey question like that.
Question two has a classic “leading the reader” form using phrases like “redouble efforts” and “as attempted by the current superintendent”. How does the reader know this actually DID happen? Also, the “latest” negotiations haven’t even formally started; is the district showing its hand here?
And it goes on and on. “Gather teacher data so that teachers are equitably distributed among schools.” So elsewhere they want to eliminate pay for more education for teachers but at the same time in this question they want to spread the number of teachers who do have more education more equitably among the schools?