Teacher evaluation

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Out lying

“Teacher Quality Widely Diffused” trumpets the headlines in the New York Times today (February 25, 2011). The headline and the article strongly suggest that the disadvantages of poverty and literacy-poor home environments are not critical influences on student performance on standardized tests. Rather that “teachers who were most and least successful in improving their students’ test scores could be found all around–in the poorest corners of the Bronx, like Tremont and Soundview, and in middle class neighborhoods of Queens, like Bayside and Forest Hills” (1).

The same article qualifies the results of the “value-added” assessment of students and their teachers by reporting “the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence level around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English. . .”  This technicality may be conveniently ignored by the Times, but it is more than an inconvenience to teachers who are now publicly evaluated by their students’ test scores.

The media, the Bloomberg administration and the Obama administration are so hungry to get the goods on bad teachers, that they are willing to sanctify any statistics that appear to support their case.  “Value-added” statistics are a clear improvement on evaluating teachers on the raw data of their students’ test scores, but with a confidence level that spans 53 percentiles in English, there is still much to question about publishing such data.

Suppose the verdict of a jury had a 53% variance with the truth?  Suppose the testing of a drug to cure HIV had a 53% confidence level of success? Suppose the computer models of an air assault on the nuclear resources of Iran had a 53% chance of disabling their nuclear program?  Would anyone take these risks? Are these test scores any less damaging of the reputation and the professional survival of a school or a teacher?

The cases that seem to fall outside the range of probability in the field of statistics are often referred to as “outliers.”  Outliers are often subjects of further experimentation, because they may speak to the validity of the data that falls within the confidence levels of the data.  Thorough scientists do not ignore outliers, because they may reveal flaws in their original hypotheses. They investigate outliers more rigorously to learn what they can from the deviations.

That is not what is happening with the “value-added” data offered up by the New York Public Schools. The data is being privileged with a public showing and sanctified by a headline like “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”  In criminal prosecution this would be called a “rush to judgment.”

In the media, we should call this “out lying.” The data is out, even though some of it may be lying.  It is all well and good for schools to use the data for discussion and give it further scrutiny to see what it really says. It is another thing to pretend that the data is evidence that poverty is not a mitigating influence on teaching.  This is what I get from “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”

Let’s not use blunt instruments to execute teachers. Let’s investigate the outliers, not lie about them.

 

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Stop Teaching Writing?

In the recent edition of Education Week (September 21, 2011 ), Paula Stacey describes the many travesties of teaching writing inspired by a decade of standards and textbooks that function like cookbooks.*  Most of these anecdotes are from her personal teaching experience, and they ring with authenticity. Her conclusion is to “Stop Teaching Writing” and merely ask questions and consider the answers.  She does not define the characteristic challenge of teaching writing, which is, to echo the venerable Don Murray, “Teach the Process, Not the Product.”

The problem is that teaching writing is not teaching to the standards or teaching by the book. It is teaching the writer first,  then the writing. A  great writing teacher views the writer as an actor, the writing as the rehearsal, and the standards as the critics, who like to have the last word. In the tentative bursts of language students produce in writing classes, the teacher sees a performer with talents that can be coached. The standards are the afterthought, not the dialogue in the drama. The textbook is the proposal, not the script, for the play.

The teacher seems to be a director in this metaphor. When actors praise directors, they always seem to appreciate their ability to bring out the best in the actor, to understand the capabilities the actor brings to the performance. They never comment on the good reviews they received, because of the director’s savvy anticipation of the critics. Rather they admire the director’s making the most of what they bring to the drama.

Another reason to like this theatrical metaphor is that rehearsals become the focus of growth.  Rarely will anyone pay to see a rehearsal, but if you wanted to see how a play comes alive that would be the place to be. No one expects perfect performance in rehearsals, but what you can observe is the evolution of the actor and character as they perform the same scene over and over again. So it is with writers and writing.

Educators have been more fond of metaphors of teachers as sculptors or master gardeners. Although these analogies ennoble the profession, attributing depths of understanding and skill to teaching, they fail to characterize the student as an agent of learning. Statues and lilies have very little initiative in their growth. They appear more as artifacts fashioned by the skill of the artist. These metaphors miss the point about teaching writing. It is very dependent on the participation of the writer.

When teachers formulate writing, they minimize that participation. Yet every writing teacher is prey to this tendency, because every teacher wants to make learning easier for students.  The good writing teacher will read the results of these formulations and consider why the writing seems lifeless or so uniform throughout the class. The answer will often be traced to the dimensions of the writing assignment or the graphic organizer that choked the writing in its attempt to provide structure.  Teachers with the souls of directors will bring a new approach to the next rehearsal.

Unless directors are not teachers, then writing can be taught.  Like the performance, writing is taught in the rehearsals with the focus on the actor and the actor’s capabilities. The actor is never asked to  be a macho super-hero if he is built slightly with a boyish face. The actress is not required to rely on feminine wiles, if she is tall and muscular. The director teaches to their strengths, while coaching their flexibility.

So, if we are not obsessed with our reviews or expect our performers to excel at their weaknesses, we can teach writing.  It may not look pretty, but that’s what rehearsals are for.

* http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/21/04stacey.h31.html?tkn=LLWFXCotiHDKc1Q1skAZmvCV5dLFk4ogMpLQ&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

 

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A Necessary Optimism

 We’ve done it now. Eleven years we had to educate the public, to
register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people
what was coming, and we blew it. We knew the moment would eventually
come and we hem-hawed, looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with
our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them
down. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now
we — and our students — are paying the price. We could have been
prophets but failed the test.
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2011/08/31/no-child-left-behind-a-conspiracy-against-public-education-that-too-few-called-out/

In a bitter reflection on the consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB),  Jim Arnold reprimands educators for standing by while the hurricane of so-called  “educational reform” swept through our classrooms. The dire consequences of blaming the victims, canonizing standardized tests, and allowing schools to be branded and euthanized are well-known to those who have taught for the past decade. But this kind of breast-beating over a massive federal initiative gone wrong oversimplifies what has happened since 2001, the Decade of Standards.

Arnold argues that we saw it coming and stood by and let it happen.  True enough, but what did we see coming? It was not like the hurricane coming up the coast in the sense that we could foresee its path and knew it was an ill-wind that would “blow no good.” Well, we knew that anything that relied on standardized tests as its exclusive measuring stick was ill-fated, but there were some promising high-pressure fronts moving in alongside it.

First of all,  someone in Washington was paying attention to the public schools. The federal funding surge that came with NCLB was a welcome transfusion for schools struggling to hire new teachers and make classrooms smaller.  Public education was a national priority all of a sudden. Unprecedented bipartisanship emerged on this bill, which has never been seen again, unless you want to count the invasion of  Iraq. (You might call that a “fatal bipartisanship”).  Even in the Obama administration Congressional representatives have crossed the aisles to support federal school reform, although even that good will appears to have ended.

Second, education was making headlines daily and becoming a universal concern. The amount of ink and megabytes devoted to education has skyrocketed over the past decade.  Education in the K-12 schools was finally on the public radar, right alongside the economy and political intrigue.  It’s hard to recall that, in earlier decades, public schooling was usually buried in the back pages, if mentioned at all.  As many public relations directors will claim, “All publicity is good publicity,” because being seen in print and heard on the airwaves is half the battle.

Third, accountability was promoted as a tool of reform. Although this should have raised giant red pennants, there is a strong desire for proving performance in public education.  Teachers want to be recognized for their hard work as much as anyone else. The problem is figures lie, and we have struggled for generations to make them tell a true story.  Testing has always been our measuring stick.  Perhaps this time they would show authentic progress.  Perhaps this time it would somehow reflect the hard work we invested in the most disadvantaged children in our classes.

Mark Twain said, “Teaching is the most acute form of optimism,” and probably optimism is also teaching’s fatal flaw.  We believe the conditions of schooling will somehow improve every year and that students will come eager to learn after the long summer break. How else do we psyche ourselves up for another school year? We believe we can make a difference, even when the cards are stacked against us. We even believe that our best efforts in the classroom will be reflected in the next round of test scores.  Or at least we believe someone will recognize our small victories, if the test scores do not.

Now that investigations have revealed teachers complicit in altering the results of standardized tests, perhaps even that optimism is endangered.  But the vast majority of teachers are incurable optimists, and they hoped that accountability for student performance would reflect their hard work and their zeal for the struggling student. Hoped against all reason and experience.

Was  “No Child Left Behind” a malignant conspiracy? Can we accept it as well-intentioned school reform, regardless of the intrigues of testing companies and curriculum publishers and the heavy-handedness of school administrators warping and scripting the curriculum? To read it this way is to understand why more educators did not rise up and shout against it.  It put education in the spotlight and on the national conscience.  It made Washington pay attention as never before. It made private foundations re-deploy their support to education. It made teachers critical to the success of schools. How could that be bad?

Sadly the last two administrations have shown how testing and accountability can destroy schools and optimism, regardless of good intentions and stimulus dollars.  What might have been the decade of the teacher has become the decade of inquisition, of branding and purging failure in the schools.  Arnold’s verdict on the demise of real school reform is tragically fair.

But I don’t accept the reprimand of teachers, the incurably optimistic profession that thrives on the renewal in every school year. Teachers will be fooled over and over again by the craft of Washington and the Council of State School Officers, because they expect better from them as they expect it from their students.  Teachers are near-sighted about education; they see mostly the students in their classrooms and plan how to maximize what the district and Department of Education hand them. Perhaps they need more cynicism about school reform, but would that make them better teachers?

In the decade of NCLB hindsight is 20-20. Teaching is always about the next decade.

 

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Voodoo Educational Reform

George I, our forty-first President, separated himself from his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, by declaring that the “trickle-down” theory of stimulating the economy was “voodoo economics.” By that he meant that the trickle-down theory assumed an outcome of prosperity from lowering income taxes or deregulating commerce: a cause and effect that were not directly connected. Like sticking a pin in a doll of your enemy was supposed to harm your enemy.

In the Twenty-first century all the happy talk of voodoo economics has spilled over to public education.  Down with restrictions and up with schools that will thrive in their absence, the charter schools, the parochial schools, the experimental schools with suspended teachers’ contracts.  Free schools mean innovation, and innovation means better schools.

Well, we have seen the results of free markets over the past decade, both in the economy and education, and reviews are mixed, to say the least.  There are pockets of success, like computer and wireless technology, like the KIPP schools which mentor new teachers in a high-pressure learning environment. But the overall health of the economy and the nation’s schools continues to falter, while the mantra of deregulation of business and unshackling of school administrators persists, with its dogged faith in freedom producing prosperity.  The triumph of hope over experience, someone once said.

Now comes Tom Watkins, former State Superintendent of Michigan’s schools with more voodoo predictions, now directed at teacher education.

What if our colleges of education did not have an exclusive franchise on preparing future teachers? What if we opened the teacher preparation business up to educational entrepreneurs who could demonstrate through scientific research that their methods actually produce more effective teachers? [http://www.thecenterformichigan.net/guest-column-taking-the-charter-school-to-college/]

In a commentary, ominously titled “Taking the Charter School to College,” Watkins suggests that the monopoly of teacher preparation institutions is stifling the growth and innovation of teacher preparation. Clearly the colleges and universities that prepare teachers are not interested in reform or applying scientific research to their methods.  This is like saying that a “small market” sports team is not interested in winning.  A mediocre record in professional sports must be an indication of lack of effort or seriousness from the mediocre team.

Anyone who has followed baseball or basketball in Cleveland knows that even when the spirit is willing, the resources may be weak. The free market has not been kind to these franchises.  Perhaps the management can be blamed, but ultimately the available resources can dictate the quality of the team.

So throwing the market open to genius and experimentation does not guarantee a better product, in baseball, basketball or pre-service education. There is no invisible current of innovation waiting to burst the dams of certification law and collective bargaining.  It is not as simple as converting potential energy to kinetic energy. Would that it were, Tom Watkins.

The research on teacher preparation cited by Linda Darling-Hammond emphasizes the collaboration of schools of education with exemplary K-12 schools in creating an environment where excellent teaching is modeled with students from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds.

One thing that is clear from current studies of strong programs is that learning to practice in practice, with expert guidance, is essential to becoming a great teacher of students with a wide range of needs.  To improve preparation, states and accreditors should require a full year of clinical training for prospective teachers, ideally undertaken in professional development schools (PDS) that, like teaching hospitals, offer yearlong residencies under the guidance of expert teachers.  These PDS sites develop state-of-the-art practice and train novices in the classrooms of expert teachers while they are completing coursework that helps them teach diverse learners well (The Flat World and Education 316-17)

The professional development school is not a vision, but a declining institution of twenty years’ experimentation.  In most cases both the university and its partner school are hobbled by the expense of paying full-time teaching supervisors and for the released time or stipends of mentor teachers.  Schools have to find the space and time to sustain professional education alongside the education of K-12 students. It is a model that hospitals have successfully maintained for medical interns, but the public schools have too often been overwhelmed by time and expense of nurturing novice teachers.

Instead the dominant model of teacher preparation in the United States is a ten-week highly controlled practicum experience, followed by certification, followed by throwing the novice in the deep end of the pool.  New teachers inevitably acquire the classes the veteran teachers are trying to avoid, are saddled with the extra-curricular activities that older teachers have jettisoned from exhaustion, and receive the closest scrutiny, based on the expectation that they will fail. The expected tightening of requirements for evaluation and tenure will only exacerbate these conditions.

The current dogma that increasing the funding of education does not improve the quality of education has led us to the ill-considered conclusion that multiplying options for education will yield better quality by driving inferior services out of the marketplace.  We subscribe to indirect means of improving education (voodoo reform) instead of direct means (infusion of material and professional resources). Rather than considering that our tax dollars might be more wisely spent, we assume that tax dollars are never wisely spent.  Hence our renewed and desperate faith in the marketplace to improve what indiscriminate funding did not.

Professional development schools could transform teacher education, but they will need financing–federal or private, it doesn’t matter. But it will be a direct infusion of resources at the point of need.  Not a magical spell cast on the educational marketplace that releases the pent-up genius of innovation.  Voodoo had its chance in the first decade of the Twenty-first century. Let’s put our money where our best institutions are and put our faith in committed professionals.

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In Search of a Draftable Teacher

Performance evaluation of teachers could count toward tenure, if we would take performance evaluation half as seriously as the National Football League does. As it stands, performance evaluation of teachers is a crude, untested mechanism languishing in the past, compared to the sophisticated multi-dimensional assessments of professional football teams.

In the months leading up  to the NFL Draft I was struck by the innumerable dimensions used to evaluate football talent– size, speed, quickness, strength, vertical leap, intelligence,  work ethic, “coach-ability”– these are only a sampling of criteria.  Draft prognosticators have learned to qualify the individual traits to make a complete assessment, such as “He’s only 4.7 in the 50-yard dash, but he’s quick off the ball.”   You could learn something about evaluation by listening to the media talent scouts who devote their entire year to preparing for three days in April, when the football draft ends the mind-numbing speculation.

Here are some insights I filed under “evaluation of complex skills,” based on the evaluation of football prospects.

1) No single trait outweighs the sum of the traits;

2) No statistic has more significance than the so-called “character” variables;

3) The context of the performance (weak opponent vs. a Major Bowl game) matters more than the performance itself;

4) The trajectory of a player’s development is more revealing than the performance of a single year.

Every professional football coach and director of player personnel takes these principles for granted. Why don’t they matter when we evaluate teachers?

Well, of course we don’t evaluate every teacher to the extent that we evaluate two hundred athletes with consummate physical and mental skills, but can’t we learn something about evaluation from the experts here?

Foremost, should the test scores of a teacher’s students sum up the talents of a teacher without considering:

  • The context
  • The trajectory
  • The complementary data
  • The “work ethic”?

Of course not, no more than the time of the fifty-yard dash overrules the many other parameters of football talent.

Second, should our coaching and intervention strategies be focused on a student’s success on a two-hour test once a year? Hmm, would a linebacker’s skill be multiplied if we got his 50-yard dash down to 4.5 from 4.7? That’s not what I hear from football coaches, whose jobs depend on successful evaluation of the whole player.

Third, should we just hire enough excellent teachers to manage 40-student classrooms, instead of hiring more teachers of heterogeneous ability to manage 25-student classrooms?  Maybe you could explain to Bill Belichek why two healthy players at each position is enough to keep his team competitive through a sixteen-game season. Depth turns out to be more essential than selectivity in hard-knocks football, and a deep, collaborative faculty also make a viable school.

Fourth, should we assign new teachers the most challenging classes and hold them to same standards as the veteran teachers with their college-prep schedule of classes?  Right, and we also expect the rookie quarterback to run the entire offensive playbook in his first game as a professional football player. And we break him in against the defending league champions, right? And we compare him to the retired previous  quarterback, who will probably get into the Hall of Fame.  Professional football coaches are far too shrewd to spoil young talent.

Sounds pretty stupid when we compare school policies to professional football, doesn’t it? Is this an unfair comparison or should we take a few pages out of the NFL playbook? Can we learn something from the most sophisticated machinery of talent evaluation in the civilized world? Can we consider the evaluation of the teachers of our children as important as the evaluation of our entertainment gods?

When the evaluation of teachers rises to a comparable level to the evaluation of professional athletes, public education will find status and peace. Then we can consider performance evaluation as integral to the tenure system in education.

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Politics and Education: A Failed Marriage

Politics and education just don’t mix. The disconnect between so-called budget-reforming governors ( particularly in Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey) and the national sentiment about teachers shows that politicians do not get education.  They view it as a budget item, rather than a national priority.

Public opinion polls consistently support teachers, especially local teachers, and the current N.Y. Times poll  supports their right to bargain collectively by 2 to 1.  Although Governors Walker, Daniels and Christie have tapped into the budget-cutting spirit of their constituents, they are taking on the wrong adversary, when they seek to de-professionalize education.  They are bringing a machete into microsurgery.

Pay attention to the destructive impact of government on education in the current fiscal climate. New Jersey’s teachers have been publicly excoriated by a governor who presumably wants to recruit better teachers to his schools. Providence’s mayor has laid off an entire teaching force, clearly a publicity stunt, and thoroughly demoralized an entire school system. The governors of Indiana and Wisconsin have attacked the collective bargaining rights of their teachers, because they were  not willing to make wealthy tax-payers help offset the deficit.  And our Congressional representatives have blithely wiped out funding for critical literacy programs, in particular the National Writing Project, because we can not afford $30 million to fund the most successful professional development program in the United States.

In Linda Darling-Hammond’s study of three countries with superior performance on the Program in International Student Assessments exams, she found several shared national policies on education. In a comparative study of Finland, South Korea and Singapore, she found that all three countries actively recruited and paid for the education of superb teachers for their schools, and that they separated the national administration of schools from the political process.

The study is summarized in Chapter Six of Darling-Hammond’s book The Flat World and Education, which highlights major differences in the recruiting, educating and mentoring of teachers between three nations and the United States. Regarding “National Teaching Policies” she says they

recruit able teachers and completely subsidize their extensive teaching programs, paying them a stipend as they learn to teach well. Salaries are equitable across schools and competitive with other careers, generally comparable to those of engineers and other key professionals (193).

Teacher education is modeled on the education that the professional ministry wants throughout the primary and secondary systems, and it continues into the early years of teaching where expert teachers are paid to mentor the first- and second-year teachers in the most difficult years of professional orientation.

But the national administration of education in all three countries is also de-coupled from the political institutions. This strategy affects the entire program of teacher education.

these systems are managed by professional ministries of education,which are substantially buffered from political winds. Frequent evaluations of schools and the system as a whole have guided reforms (193).

The reforms to schools and professional development of teachers in these three countries are a remarkable contrast to the reform incentives currently engineered by federal and state governments in this country. See Darling-Hammond’s remarkable book for the details (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010).

When will our lunacy stop? When we can perform a decisive poli-tectomy on our education system.  Politicians have mucked up our national program with alternate diet and binge budgets, with short-term reform programs, with pandering to the testing establishment, with demonizing the “enemies of reform,” and by declaring we will have to do better with less.  How would that fly in Finland, South Korea, and Singapore?

Teachers know they can do better, more than any politician could imagine. They just need the opportunity. They need better leadership. The marriage of politics and education has failed miserably.  Set them free to do what they do best.

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Who Taught this Kid?

The surprisingly reflective article in today’s New York Times (“Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers,” December 27, 2010) asks a question that statisticians often overlook in the evaluation of teachers.  Who taught this kid?

John White, Deputy Chancellor of the New York City Schools, addressed the problem of teachers getting ranked on subjects they did not teach or being omitted from the rankings altogether. This is more of an institutional problem, but it raises the more consequential issue of how to determine whether a teacher has been truly responsible for a student’s learning.

Mr. White reassured the Times that “before the next rankings was released, teachers would be able to review class lists to verify which students they taught, a practice that generally did not happen in the past” (A13).   But a more complex question that I rarely hear addressed by statisticians is: How many school days should a student be in class before he or she  can be considered a student of that teacher?   Is 90 out of 180 days enough?  70 out of 180? 50 days?

In city secondary schools this is not an academic question.  I can not cite individual attendance records for New York City schools, but 50% or lower attendance would not be irregular in an urban high school.  Should a teacher’s effectiveness be judged from the performance of a student who is present less than half the time?

Statisticians always assume that variables like school attendance will even out, if a large population is studied. Everyone will have attendance issues in their classes. But school attendance closely correlates with the socioeconomic status of secondary school students, because poverty often affects how much students have to work or baby-sit for caretakers who have to work.  So, unless each class has a random distribution of students from various socioeconomic classes, their rate of attendance will not be randomly distributed.

Every teacher knows which classes in a school will present attendance or behavior problems, and they will use every device in their repertoire to avoid teaching them. But someone will teach them, and they will be challenged by the discontinuity of learning and wearied by the endless make-up sessions that absent students demand.  They will work harder with less results, and they will be judged inferior for the test performance of students who were not in school enough days to really learn their subject.

As a writing teacher, I’ve been acutely aware of what happens to a student who does not attend school for ten consecutive days.  Consistent with good writing pedagogy, I might assign a major writing assignment over two weeks, allowing students time for brainstorming, drafting, conferencing with peers and instructor, proofreading and final publication.  Writing teachers understand that critical instruction, including grammar lessons, takes place in the midst of this process. Students learn very little from the final draft, returned with dozens of red marks and a “D.”  They learn about as much as a traffic officer learns from the wreck of an accident after the fact.

If a student misses five out of the ten days that a writing assignment was in progress, he or she will probably miss the critical instruction that occurs during the process.  It is not a question of grabbing the assignment sheet and catching up at home.  It is a question of producing a draft and getting appropriate feedback before it is ultimately due and graded.  It is a question of understanding why the writing that received a “B” last year can not qualify for a “C” this year.  It is a question of how to address a sentence structure problem that has persisted for four years, without sitting down with that student for fifteen minutes before the final draft is due. This is why you can hardly teach a student with marginal literacy, when he or she is absent 50% or more of the school year.

I’m sure teachers of other subjects, for which learning is a seamless process, could testify to this problem. I wouldn’t presume to speak for them, but I am sure that discontinuity of learning is a problem across subjects.

People who administer schools seem to have forgotten that when learning is interrupted, it is very difficult to grab the threads again when the absent student returns to school.  Your heart sinks when a student returns from a two-week absence and asks at the beginning of class, “What did I miss?”  Then you tell the student he or she will have to return at the end of school to catch up on missed work, and the student forlornly reports, ” I have to go home to babysit for my mom. She works the afternoon shift at the hospital.”  So you hand the student the assignment and steal a few minutes during class for a briefing that took twenty minutes one day of class and five minutes follow-up each day of the process. Only this students gets two minutes.

Not to get too sentimental about disadvantaged students, this vignette serves to show the impact of attendance on learning. The fewer days students attend your class, the less impact you will have you their learning. Sounds logical enough, but where is that considered in the byzantine complexity of value-added assessment? How do we decide who, if anyone,  taught this kid?

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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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“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!