Month: August 2010

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How would a journalist “race to the top”?

In “Continue the Race” (August 29, 2010) the editors of the New York Times continue to celebrate the misguided goals of the “Race to the Top,” which include evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. This kind of assessment of teachers is wrong on so many levels: psychometry, pedagogy, social equity, and ethics.  Why do reputable journalists continue to hold teachers to standards they would never allow for themselves?

A cardinal principal of the science of mental testing, psychometry, is that a test should never be used to evaluate what it was not designed to evaluate. Therefore, a test designed to evaluate math or reading should not be used to evaluate the teacher of math or reading.  It would require an inference that could not be supported by the data.  Otherwise we might hire journalists based on their S.A.T. scores or fire copy editors for their low scores on the Millers Analogy Test. Even reliable tests can be abused and make faulty judgments.

Standardized tests are not true indicators of academic progress, especially for students who think critically or methodically.  All teachers know students who do not test well, because of the emotional pressure or because they read questions too critically or because they need time to process their thoughts.  Standardized tests privilege the quick response and the suppression of ambiguity, so that thinking is always convergent and the first answer is better than the second one.  What we consider higher order thinking, the core of our curriculum, is not assessed by standardized tests.

Perhaps journalists are accustomed to this on-demand world or even prefer it, since theirs is a world of deadlines.  Journalism is the one kind of writing with relentless and unforgiving cycles and only certain kinds of writers can adapt to them.  Yet writing in other circumstances allows the luxury of multiple drafts and time to receive feedback from other writers and editors. The same can be said of problem-solving in math, science and the social sciences.  Standardized testing does not foster these process-oriented, critical thinking skills, yet it is becoming the primary indicator of educational success.

The test performances of students in urban schools are a target of “Race to the Top.”  The conditions in urban school environments can subvert effective teaching to the extent that good teachers will run away from them.  Good teachers know they are constrained by the effectiveness of their schools.  Numerous factors are beyond their control, such as class size, flagrant absenteeism, aliterate family environments, and undiagnosed or over-diagnosed special needs.  These conditions contribute enormously to the achievement gap. Until such conditions can be reliably addressed, urban teachers and teachers of disadvantaged children should not be evaluated by their students’ performance. Otherwise good teachers will avoid the urban schools, knowing they will be penalized for teaching there.

And if  a young journalist began her career writing for a pulpy tabloid, how would that reflect on her style?  How much opportunity would a writer have to shine under the pressure to tell the most lurid story of the day?  How does the writer’s prose reflect her ability, if the text must be written at the fifth grade level? Professionals might call this “paying their dues,” but what would a similar early career performance do to a teacher, evaluated by her students’ performance?  Would anyone take into account the above-mentioned variables that undermine her good teaching?

Ultimately fairness in evaluation is a matter of ethics. You should not evaluate a job performance with the blunt instruments of standardized tests any more than you should evaluate a journalist by the word count she produces each month.  The professional standards implied by such thoughtless evaluation are unconscionable. How can we expect teachers to teach compassionately when they are assessed by tests they don’t take, with so many factors beyond their control?  They will become as disillusioned as a stringer might over time, because he never received a special assignment or appreciation for anything except meeting the deadline.

Since I am a teacher, I do not truly understand the conditions that might coarsen a young journalist, but I try to understand.  I wish for the same consideration for teachers from the editors of the New York Times.

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Schooling on the Ground

“Keep the school open with existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive outside support.” This is what 54% of poll respondents said when asked how to address a poorly performing local school this past June. In a poll conducted by Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup,  one thousand Americans responded to this question as they have in the past: preserve the school and reform it.

Paradoxically U.S. citizens always defend their local schools in polling, and at the same time object to national trends and policies in public education.  This is the perennial sky view vs. ground view of public schools. Schools viewed as test scores and dropout rates are called dysfunctional and permissive. Schools viewed as diverse and overcrowded communities are called under-funded and inclusive.

The prevailing view comes from Washington, where Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has sanctioned the sacking of dysfunctional schools and the re-invention of education from the ground up by charter schools and private ventures.  While extreme cases call for extreme measures, the reinvention of schooling is not as simple as the Secretary imagines it to be.

Parents and local stakeholders in the public schools understand this. They know that principals and teachers develop to meet the needs of their communities.  A principal has to learn how to get parents into the building, how get them involved in their children’s education, how to balance academic subjects with athletics. A teacher has to understand the demands on the students, the language barriers, the baby-sitting demands, the neighborhood conflicts that interfere with schooling. None of this can be taught in schools of education. They are adaptations that good teachers make to serve their schools.

When a school is demolished, much of this lore dies with it.  You can build a new school around excellent faculty, but they will have to adapt to their community in the same way that the previous faculty did.  Perhaps they will even be better teachers than their predecessors in three or four or five years, if they stay that long. But if they are recruited by Teach for America or KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) they probably will not stay that long. They will be exhausted by the rigors of school-building and leave after their obligated service. The sky-view reformers should think twice before closing a school.

This is the season when thousands of schools decide how to reinvigorate their programs, their faculty, their curriculum, their disciplinary codes.  They have their work cut out for them. But they should remember that the majority of the parents and stakeholders in their community are pulling for them. They appreciate school reform from the ground view and want it to succeed.  They know that the quality of life in school buildings matters more than the test scores headlined in the media.  They know that schools offer a sanctuary for kids who otherwise learn in the streets.

Here’s to those who choose to transform, rather than demolish, schools in need.

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“Last Out-First In”

If you are a teacher educator, your heart sinks when teachers of one to three years’ experience lose their jobs due to lack of school funding.  Many of these teachers will receive their jobs back because of the signing of the “EduJobs” bill by President Obama on Monday. What impact will this have on the quality of teachers in the public schools?

“The status quo is exactly what this $10 billion will perpetuate,” scoffed Minnesota representative John Kline on Tuesday.

“Schools will continue to operate on ‘last hired, first fired’ policies that ignore student achievement when deciding which teachers to keep in the classroom.” He continued: “These dollars are not targeted based on jobs at risk or student needs. This is nothing more than an across-the-board inflation of state spending”[Education Week, August 12, 2010]

If the Congressman really knew the kinds of teachers who will be re-hired this fall because of this bill, his fiscal sensibilities would be comforted.  The newest teachers in the profession are the hope for change in schools at risk.

If we judge teachers as products of industry, their appreciation in value tends to increase sharply in the first three years of their careers.  One rationale for 3-4 years to make tenure is that the craft of teaching is perfected in the classroom. Teachers know this intuitively, but even the crude measures of the test scores of their students, show a sharp incline in the first three years of teaching and over the first five years of teachers who receive alternative credentials.  If we eliminate the jobs of teachers early in their careers, we are releasing them during a period when their value to the school is growing exponentially.

The cycle of releasing early career teachers and later hiring novice teachers when the budget permits it is a drain on the human resources of a school. As Linda Darling-Hammond has observed, “Schools that hire a parade of novices and short-term teachers must constantly pour money into recruitment and professional support for new teachers, without reaping benefits from the investments. Like filling a leaky bucket, these schools are forced to repeat this waste of energy and resources over and over again”(The Flat World and Education, 50).

Eliminating the job of the early career teacher would be like a major league baseball team grooming a star pitcher for three years and then releasing him without any compensation.  The next pitcher they bring up through their farm system would have the same learning curve, before they had to release him again. At least the major league club can make a trade and salvage their investment.

So the rehiring of teachers who were released this past spring is just sound fiscal management and not perpetuating any of the systemic evils Congressman Kline deplores.

But if we value teachers for their energy, their collaborative spirit, their eagerness to incorporate new methods and technologies, then these re-hires are —- priceless.  These teachers were hired during a very competitive market, they have the optimism often depleted by long careers, they were prepared with the most recent digital technologies, and they have been educated in the most recent standards for K-12 achievement.   They are a valuable resource for schools committed to reform.

Salvaging the jobs of early career teachers is one of most prudent investments the federal government can make in education.  No budget move can do more to grease the wheels of school reform. Now, eliminating the jobs of certain Congressional representatives, that’s another matter!

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What Do We Mean By “School Reform” ?

With the historian’s critical eye, Diane Ravitch has documented the transformation of the meaning of  “school reform” over the past two decades in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.   The same words have come to mean something entirely different over the last twenty years, without notice from journalists or national leaders, such as the Council of State School Officers (CSSO).

In this new era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision-making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools. Whatever could not be measured did not count. It is ironic that a conservative Republican president was responsible for the largest expansion of federal control in the history of American education. It was likewise ironic that Democrats embraced market reforms and other initiatives that traditionally had been favored by Republicans (21).

In the decades preceding NCLB, national educational reform targeted disadvantaged populations through Title I, Early Childhood, special education, and bilingual education initiatives, seeking to integrate marginalized students into the mainstream.  Mainstreaming students does not always raise average test scores. They often enter the testing pool at the lower end and may have a negative impact on the average score. So the overall trends recorded by the NAEP in the last twenty years have been relatively flat.

Since NCLB, test scores have become the barometer of success in education, without much notice from the media. In a previous blog (“Figures Lie,” July 24), I observed how states, such as Massachusetts, Kentucky and Texas, used exclusions of students from NAEP writing assessments to enhance or mitigate the changes in their writing scores over nine years (1998 – 2007).  These states excluded special education students at twice the national average on 4th and 8th grade writing tests.  While these might be appropriate exclusions, they show how the concern for test scores affects the inclusion of students we have been trying to mainstream over the long term of educational reform.

Another radical shift in the operational meaning of “school reform” is what Ravitch called “punitive accountability.” In a lucid chapter “The Trouble with Accountability,” Ravitch thoroughly articulated the problems with test score validity and concluded with the appalling consequences of inadequate performance.

In the NCLB era, when the ultimate penalty for a low-performing school was to close it, punitive accountability achieved a certain luster, at least among the media and politicians. Politicians and non-educator superintendents boasted of how many schools they had shuttered.  Their boasts won them headlines for “getting tough” and cracking down on bad schools. But closing a school is punitive accountability, which should happen only in the most extreme cases, when a school is beyond help (165).

Ravitch also cited examples of “positive accountability,” which run counter to this trend, particularly in New York (1996) and Atlanta (2009).  Superintendent Beverly Hall in Atlanta  “raised the quality of the professional staff by careful hiring, ‘ meaningful evaluations, and consistent job-embedded professional development'”  (165). She set accountability targets for every school and financially rewarded the entire staff of the school, when it reached 70 per cent of its targets.  And ultimately Atlanta was the only one of eleven urban districts studied by NAEP between 2003 and 2007 “to show significant progress in both reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grades” (165).

The current federal administration has done nothing to change the dialog about “school reform.”  Test scores continue to be the significant barometer of success, even to linking teacher evaluations to the scores of their students.  The closing of schools has been acclaimed by the Secretary of Education. The dominant metaphor for school success is a “Race to the Top,” suggesting there will a host of losers.  None of this suggests a concern with inclusion and support for the disadvantaged in our schools.

To see the language of school reform become a “race to the top” is disheartening to any who have participated in school reform for more than the last decade.  The metaphor reveals what school reform has become: a competition based on highly suspect measurements.  The losers will again be representative of the disadvantaged and under-served students in our public schools. And the winners will be rewarded for managing the most students across a shifting and ill-defined line called “proficiency.”