New York Times

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Good News about Bad News

The New York Times published today the results of a Stanford survey on performance of students grades 3-8 on standardized tests. For once the investigators did not point to the characteristics of the schools, but the prosperity of the test-takers as clues to the disparity across races. The scatter-plots published showed Black students lagging behind White and Hispanic students, with White students dominating the region where two or three grade levels above expected performance were designated.

The investigators pointed out all the advantages that prosperous students have over impoverished students in school, factors that put urban schools at a disadvantage.
The real news, however, was the interview with the superintendent of Union City, NJ schools who beat the odds against them.

In one school district that appears to have beaten the odds, Union City, N.J., students consistently performed about a third of a grade level above the national average on math and reading tests even though the median family income is just $37,000 and only 18 percent of parents have a bachelor’s degree. About 95 percent of the students are Hispanic, and the vast majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Even a sound-bite of the reform strategies reveals the effective practices that may have raised their scores above the mean performances across class and race.

Silvia Abbato, the district’s superintendent, said she could not pinpoint any one action that had led to the better scores. She noted that the district uses federal funds to help pay for teachers to obtain graduate certifications as literacy specialists, and it sponsors biweekly parent nights with advice on homework help for children, nutrition and immigration status.

Professional development in literacy education makes common sense, but so many schools choose single events or technology quick-fixes for professional development. This shows investment in teachers with an eye to their retention.

The district regularly revamps the curriculum and uses quick online tests to gauge where students need more help or whether teachers need to modify their approaches.

Attention to formative assessment, not practice on standardized tests. This shows a laser focus on academic needs, not artificial attempts to goose the test scores. “Quick tests” shows that testing is used properly as a barometer of progress, not displacing the curriculum.

“It’s not something you can do overnight,” Ms. Abbato said. “We have been taking incremental steps everywhere.”

The superintendent refused to reduce the work to a magic bullet. You can see the comprehensive effort in engaging parents, addressing social needs, and recruitment of appropriate federal aid. The addressing of issues across the spectrum of the students’ lives shows a level of caring absent in many high-needs schools. The real lessons of the study are found in its outlier.

I have to admire a study that avoids simplistic conclusions and pays attention to the poverty of students. It finally reckons with the primary causes of failure in public education and even recognizing paths to success like the story of Union City. Perhaps the federal government and private foundations can align their support to programs like Union City’s, instead of the quasi-experimental and test-driven studies that emphasize the trivia of learning. The fundamental needs of students in poverty are driven by habits, personal literacy, and the collaboration of families with the goals of their schools.

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Rivals, But No Team

The New York Times this week documented the President’s alienation from his party and lack of personal connections with Congress.  Doing what she does so well, Maureen Dowd piled on today with a sweeping indictment of his term in office:

First the President couldn’t work with Republicans because they were too obdurate. Then he tried to chase down reporters with subpoenas. Now he finds member of his own party an unnecessary distraction.

Thus disillusionment with Barack Obama has  spread like the flu in January. Eventually the press tires of berating Congress and PAC’s and the Supreme Court, and so the narrative must turn to the President. It is disappointing to see those who cheered him into office to whimper their buyer’s remorse, but as Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here.”

President Obama’s problem is that he is not Abraham Lincoln and he does not preside in an era of bi-partisanship like Lyndon Johnson. The envisioned “team of rivals” has become the Capitol Circus. And that should not be blamed on the current President.

Abraham Lincoln might have made a team of the radicals on both sides of the aisle, but few others could summon consensus from the raging Congressional zoo.  Lincoln always had a good story to thrust his foes into line and knew when to use his clout, but he was a gift to a fractious nation that might have crumbled without him.  Name another President who would have handled the dismantling of the Union with such grace. Probably not President Obama.

Lyndon Johnson has been recently vaunted for his accomplishments forging the Great Society. He was a politician’s politician, but he presided over Democratic majorities and a Congress with a will toward consensus. Johnson’s personal charm would be despised by Congressional leaders today. His accomplishments of weaving the social safety net are blamed for our mounting deficit, his name breathed with curses from Tea Party leaders. No charm or power would make these beasts leap through hoops.

The dream of healing a divided nation has dissipated, but it is not the President’s fault. True, he has not lived up Lincoln’s “team of rivals” that would struggle over differences and emerge with policy, but that was another time, another gifted leader. Today’s partisanship and media illumination would test the likes of Lincoln.

President Obama has stumbled into a decade of utter vindictiveness, where every act or proposal receives the harsh scrutiny of bitter opponents, where his most amazing accomplishment–universal health care– has been cast as a conspiracy against the middle class, where his withdrawal of American forces from most vulnerable and unwelcome intervention as a sign of weakness, and where his overtures to Congressional leaders have been reflexively spurned as “not enough.”  Not so much a “team of rivals” as a forty-ring circus with each performer posing to the voters, hoping not to get booed out of the ring.

We could wish for a President who could rescue us from this fiasco, but we should not blame one who has struggled in vain to transform it.  We elected these posers; we need to take responsibility for them.

It’s too bad most of the elections this fall are not considered “contested.” They should all be.

 

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Homework: The Elephant in the Schoolroom

Thomas Friedman’s positive review of an Arne Duncan speech in Sunday’s New York Times (“Obama’s Homework Assignment,” January 19, 2014) resonates on so many levels, because it is a cultural critique, not a scapegoating about failures in public education.  At different times students, teachers, and principals have been blamed for the shortfall in the scores on international tests, but the word “homework” captures the space and time in which our culture does not support formal learning.

Friedman cites one teacher who reported that a student explained she could not keep up with assignments, because ” I have two hours of Facebook and over 4,000 text messages a month to deal with. How do you expect me to deal with all this work?” There’s no need to target either Facebook or text-messaging as the root cause of the lack of growth in K-12 student learning, because they are among dozens of distractions that keep students, and especially teenagers, from developing life-long habits and skills for learning.  There’s  online chat rooms and blogs, streaming of movies and TV series, music,  sports-fandom, video-games, automobiles, part-time jobs evolving to full-time, and distractions too numerous to name.

And distraction is good, when it helps divert us from problems and tensions we can’t control, but distraction also keeps us from developing learning habits, such as reading, writing, inquiry skills, problem-solving skills, moral-reasoning and reflection, all of which can not be reduced to compact lessons in the classroom. There are practices that develop only with practice, and there are not enough hours in the school day to turn complex practices into life-long learning. If it were possible for children in the early grades to develop literacies by exposure, it becomes increasingly challenging to acquire more complex habits as they age.

So Arne Duncan’s challenge to parents is more than a shifting of blame for faltering progress in schooling. It points to the increasing limitations of compartmentalizing learning between home and school as students grow in years and sophistication. Parents may honor sacred hours in the day for eating, for praying, for exercise, for a favorite sit-com, for chores, but they need to institutionalize study at home in the same fashion. Or, if there are no sacred institutions in the home, they need to make one or more hours sacred to study, reading, and focus on academic projects. You have no homework? Then what form of study will you engage in between 7:00 and prime time television? You have a project due in one week? How many hours will you allot to it each day from now till then? You don’t understand the geometric theorems you have to solve? Who are your resources, either in school, among friends, or online?  This is how  sacred practices or institutions are formed outside of  school.

Despite being a lifetime educator I have always struggled with the consecrated hours of homework. My parents raised me to make it a priority, but the sacred hours have always been threatened by the baseball season and sit-com manias. It’s all wholesome entertainment, but it stunts the growing edges of literacy, the kind of reading and writing that challenges me and calls for concentration and frequent attention.  My very identity as a teacher depends on making those growing edges expand. And these growing edges surround adults their entire lives.

There is a sense in which homework is forever. Will you study to become a better voter or to accomplish some household improvement you can’t afford to delegate to professionals? Will you study to improve your health or be better-informed about a degenerative illness? Will you study to decide what is the most reliable appliance or automobile to buy? The answer may depend on whether homework has ever been an institution in your home.

The opportunity to learn at home is the least-considered variable when we compare American schools to schools abroad, probably because our public institutions have the least control of that time and space.  The President has exhorted families to take responsibility for their children’s learning since his first day in office, but it is questionable if he has moved the needle on homework. Schools try to rally parents at back-to-school nights, but the parents stay home or at work.  There are powerful economic and cultural tides against the island of homework.

But we are coming to an end of our list of scapegoats for mediocre school performances and need to consider the most obvious one: the hours after school when learning needs to be practiced and reinforced. The time between 4:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., when learning sprouts need to be cultivated. It takes no more time than the preparation for a family vacation or a spring break odyssey. It takes less time than training for a sports season.  It takes about the same time as preparing for the fantasy football season or planning and sustaining a garden.  Many of us find time for these things, but not for a scheduled interval of homework.

Whether anyone is listening or not, Arne Duncan, President Obama and Thomas Friedman have it right. Homework makes a difference, because it is a commitment. It opens up space we have lately abdicated for education. It keeps us from going 24 hours without learning anything.  If we didn’t have other nations to shame us, that sobering truth should drive us on.

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Would You Buy a Four-Year Term from this Man?

Frank Bruni’s column offered debate advice to President Obama this morning: “Never Waver, Never Wobble.”  The gist of his Monday morning quarterbacking was that audacity beats truth every time.  But truth is not audacity, to riff a little on the President’s memoir.

With a bit of irony Bruni ruefully reflects, ” We worry about our flaws, sweat our mistakes, allow the truth to be our tether, and let conscience trip us up. We tiptoe. We equivocate.”  These cynical reflections seem only to regret that Obama’s lies were smaller than Romney’s lies.

But truth still matters when someone tries to sell you a bill of goods. Governor Romney still has to make the sale, regardless of how he presents himself: moderate millionaire, deficit hawk, guardian of the safety net, or advocate for the 53%.  Claiming to preserve Medicare, he still has to reckon with the “voucher plan” advanced by the Republican Platform.  Claiming to hold college loans sacred, he still has to reckon with his “borrow from your parents” advice on the Primary campaign stump. Claiming lower taxes for all, he still has to clarify what he means by a “fair share” paid by those earning more than $250,000.

Anyone who has bought and traded a car knows how to deal with double-talking salespeople.  If the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We probe for the weaknesses in the claim that we are stealing the car off the lot, that we are actually buying below wholesale price, that we are getting all the upgrades for free.  We understand that we have to be our own advocates.

The Republican Party has always viewed politics as selling a product.  Most Democrats have cherished the illusion that they are selling a narrative. Our story is better than your product.  Everyone likes a good story.

But we also like the deal. We like to think we are are shrewd and skeptical consumers. So Democrats need to probe the deal, the hidden costs, the losers and winners, the bottom line of the sales agreement.  They need to remind the voters that this is a four-year lease with no buyer’s remorse.  They need to be a voter’s advocate trumpeting, “Show me the the CarFax!”

Until the debate on October 3, the Democratic campaign had taken on the half-truths of the opposition fairly consistently. But Wednesday night a new salesman came out of the showroom, wearing a new suit and an audacious smile.  It is a little unsettling when the dealership shifts strategies at the last minute, and probably the new Romney threw the President off.

But the strategy is the same: sell the public on the deal at whatever cost to the truth. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware! If we remember we are negotiating for our lives no less than when we buy the car we can barely afford, we can keep the salesman at arm’s length.  Remember we can walk away and leave the attractive, but prohibitively expensive car in the lot. Remember that facts are audacious and they prevent us from being swindled.

And at the next debate, let the President be our consumer’s advocate, pointing out the flaws in this deal, showing how the salesman takes away with one hand what he “gives” with the other, how the fabulous trade-in is eaten up by the costs of the loan, and how asking the right questions can prevent us from getting stuck with a deal we can’t afford.

Truth is what gets us our best deal in the car showroom and at the polls. If we remember we are dealing with salespeople and their only goal is sell at the highest acceptable price, we will make good choices. It is not so much cynicism to say this as it is caveat emptor!

 

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Over the Bluff

When President Obama shelved the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, he made the biggest mistake of his first term.

He had commissioned this bi-partisan group to solve the problem of the federal deficit and assigned two statesmen of a bygone era, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, to chair it. They proposed a blend of cuts and revenue increases, which would have been the last reasonable suggestion for balancing the budget Congress considered in the present administration.

Why did the President back away their proposals? Perhaps the cuts were too severe for liberal Democrats or endangered the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act. Regardless, they represented the last true compromise, the last stab at a “Grand Bargain,” which could have separated the sheep from the goats in Congress.

Now both the sheep and the goats are headed toward the “fiscal cliff,” the automatic expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the draconian budget cuts scheduled for 2013. Writing in the New York Times on Sunday, Bill Keller suggested that the President should dare the squabbling herd to stampede off the fiscal cliff and let the consequences be damned. Apparently Erskine Bowles, co-framer of the last Grand Bargain, has recommended this course to press Congress to action.

This sounds like the right tactic for a Congress so tied up in its principles that it can’t move north, south, east or west.  Call their bluff and see if they’ll let their financial principles carry them over the fiscal bluff.  I’d buy a ticket to that show.

An even better show would be to make the Grand Bargain a campaign issue.  Make the candidates show their hands and threaten to take Congress to the brink. No more finger wagging about what should happen with the federal budget, but honest proposals about what could happen if Congress took its job seriously.

Put the Erskine-Bowles Commission’s recommendations on the table, as a symbol of compromise, and let the candidates explain their resistance. This is President Obama’s final chance to show economic leadership with a recalcitrant Congress.  Dare those posers to do nothing, to say nothing. Make this presidential campaign about the virtues of compromise and action, instead of posturing and resistance.

Tell Congress to get over the bluffing or head over the bluff with banners held high.

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Products or Patients?

The New York Times’ Sunday Dialogue this week raises the question: Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

The Common Core Standards have been praised, maligned and scrutinized, but mostly they have been mythologized as the solution to academic mediocrity. This comes from a business-model of product control. If you raise the quality standards, the product will improve.

The dangerous inference of this model is that testing controls the quality of students graduating from our schools.  To anyone confounded by the problem of mediocrity in the public schools, this is a seductive model, and it has driven school reform for at least fifteen years.

Rather than treating students as products, we should treat them as patients, not because they are sick, but because the decisions we make regarding their education are as complex as medical care, not as simplistic as product control.

The standardized test is the equivalent of taking a patient’s temperature: it can tell us if something is wrong, but not what. It is a crude instrument of screening. What does the doctor do with raw information? She checks it against other observations such as case history, other vital signs, and the patient’s reports.  The doctor makes a diagnosis and says, “Call me in a week, if the condition doesn’t improve.”  She does not use the body temperature to diagnose anything and the actual diagnosis is tentative.

We trust doctors because they are cautious, but methodical, in their diagnoses and, if we are good patients, we try to participate and make suggestions to be sure we are regaining our health. We understand that medicine has side-effects and diagnoses are tentative. Why do we assume testing of our minds is definitive and students are malleable products we can improve based on a single test score?

Cost. It costs a lot more to keep a patient healthy than to improve a product for the market.  Yet if we were asked if our children are more like products or patients, would any of us say they were “products”?

So we take the cheap way out: we test and fail and make our students better test-takers to improve their performance.  Or we use the tests to drive the curriculum by posting the standards on the board each day and focus our students’ attention on the product, instead of the process. That process is called “learning-how-to-learn.”

If we expect anything but the usual frustration with testing and failure, we have to invest more in our students. We need smaller classes, more collaboration of the professionals within the school, more professional development about how to use test results, more support of family literacy, and more collaboration between pre-service education and the schools.

The cost will be the hiring of more teachers, more hours in the school day for collaboration, more hours after school for professional development and family literacy, and more time devoted to training novice teachers in the schools.  Schools will become more like hospitals, where multiple measurements, collaboration across specialties, and a continuum of professional education from internship to residency has been the norm for decades.

Why would we ignore this superb model of professional practice operating right under our noses? Money. It’s cheaper to treat students like products than patients. We already spend too much medical care.

Yet, while the medical profession is learning to economize, education could be learning to assess and collaborate with the care and precision of medicine.  Eventually we will learn to control medical costs and to treat students with the dignity of primary care patients.

Unless we continue to treat students as products and their improvement as product control.

 

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Backpacks and “Game-Changers”

Mitt Romney’s school reform agenda rides the pendulum of change, carrying poor and disadvantaged students with it.  His proposal that students be equipped with a “backpack” of federal dollars to carry to the school of their choice shows how students of every new administration are the pawns of bureaucrats, who propose changes to get elected.

In the free market of schools students are movable pieces, representing federal dollars.  Grover Whitehurst, a Romney education adviser, says,

If you connected state funding with federal funding, then you’re talking about a backpack with enough money in it to really empower choice. . . . The idea would be the federal Title I funds would allow states that want to move in this direction to do so, and if they did so, all of a sudden it’s a game changer.

The metaphors of “backpacks” and “games” reveal so much about how politicians approach school reform.  The backpack represents the student as a unit of income for the school. There is no provision for what the student needs in that metaphor. Students with learning challenges need small classes, specialists who decrease the student-to-teacher ratio, programs in the arts and occupations that employ their strengths, professional development for their teachers to develop literacy across the curriculum, and paraprofessionals and volunteers to staff after-school programs.  In other words, schools need more and varied personnel, the single most-expensive budget item for schools, private or public.

In the past federal dollars have often made these programs possible, but in the current era of savage cost-cutting, what will happen to these federal dollars?  Oops, sorry, you’ll have to do more with less next year. But you’ll survive on American ingenuity and hard work.  Schools can do more with smaller backpacks.

Even more heartless is the metaphor of the “game changer.”  If a school principal says a new reading program is a “game-changer,” then we appreciate that some thought has gone into how reading instruction can be improved in her school. When a political adviser says a a voucher program is a “game changer,” we understand that “reform” means changing what has been unsuccessful in the last administration.  Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Education has traditionally been a “game” for politicians.  They believe somehow if you change the rules something good will happen.  Test and punish. Eliminate the Department of Education. Dismantle affirmative action. Invent a “race” and make your own rules.  None of this deals directly with the challenges of students lost in school bureaucracy.  But it represents “change” and that’s how candidates get elected: propose a new “game.”

A better metaphor would be to change the professional culture.  While politicians have complained that our schools do not compete with Finland, South Korea and Singapore, no one has suggested that we improve the status and conditions of teaching to emulate the teaching culture in those countries.   Because that would cost something. Linda Darling-Hammond outlines what meaningful change in the teaching profession would look like in The Flat World and Education.

  • universal high-quality teacher education
  • mentoring for all beginners from expert teachers
  • Ongoing professional learning, embedded in 15 to 25 hours per week
  • leadership development that engages expert teachers
  • equitable, competitive salaries  (198)

Most of these reforms would require major budget shifts at every level of government, and they would require more resources.  You don’t change a culture by moving the game pieces around. You invest in the members of that culture.

But since no one wants to hear that we need more resources in a decade of want, we will hear about “game changing.”  Moving students like pieces on the chess board. Moving schools out of neighborhoods. Moving teachers who can’t cut it to the unemployment line.  As they say in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.”

So for the next six months we will hear talk about backpacks and games, instead of slow, but relentless cultural reform.  We will hear about the magic of the free market, instead of the common sense of professional development.  We will hear about “change,” meaning moving the game pieces, instead of “reform,” which means investing in individual teachers and students.  We will hear about “races,” which are always predicated on more losers than winners.

These cheerful metaphors of American “can-do” will get someone elected. But they will not change the quality of public education.

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Squandering a National Resource

The most ambitious venture capitalist in the country has been shut down by the U.S. government. Who is it? The U.S. government. The most socially-beneficial industries, renewable energy,  restoration of the infrastructure (crumbling roads and bridges), career preparation programs from  K-college, have all been strangled by short-sighted cost-cutting measures in Congress.

Why do we applaud the ingenious, risk-taking entrepreneur, except if that entrepreneur is the federal government? Oh yes, the federal government is famous for waste and poor investments, but how many of our heroic entrepreneurs have misappropriated their own funds, in spite of careful forethought? The government is not the only investor to fund boondoggles.

Since the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) of 2008-09 private capital has been holding back, according to those who track investments. The heroic entrepreneur has not risen to the occasion, which is, of course, the privilege of capitalism.

Meanwhile a vast natural resource, college graduates, is going untapped. According to the New York Times ( June 5, 2012) 19.1 % of college graduates are underemployed. This includes the “jobless plus involuntary part-timers and those who have given up an active job search.” Such a neglect of natural resources would not usually be tolerated by advocates of the free market. Employ, baby, employ!

But since the heroic entrepreneur is not ready to venture the funds long-ago sent forth to stimulate the economy, let the government be our venture capitalist. Let the ultimate venture capitalist do what government does best– support socially-beneficial programs.  Who will otherwise repair our infrastructure, invest in renewable energy, and reduce the inhumane class sizes in public schools? Don’t even suggest that the private sector can rejuvenate these enterprises! They have had three years to enter the breech and still energy technology and roads and students are neglected.

But the ultimate neglect is focused on the underemployed college graduates who are flinging their resumes into the wind this June.  This neglected natural resource is a generational tragedy. As the Times  reported:

The damage will be deep and lasting. The lack of good jobs at good pay, combined with high student debt loads, means a slower economy for a long time to come, as underemployed and indebted workers delay starting families and buying homes. . . If young people with college diplomas cannot prosper in America, who can?

To consider the long-term damage done by the neglect of this priceless resource is to recognize the folly of holding back federal funds that could put college graduates to work. We can not let political stalemate squander our great national resource. Unleash the benign venture capitalist! Employ, baby, employ!

 

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Reconciliation and Recalcitrance

Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way or he may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer and you may be thrown into prison. (Matt 5:25)

The recent primary victory of Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock underlined the theme of “principled” leadership, a recognizable message of the Tea Party movement (New York Times, May 9, 2012).  While “principles” are sorely needed in federal politics, they are frequently a code word for recalcitrance and irresponsibility. Sometimes we refer to those who act from inflexible principles as “radicals” or “terrorists.”

I remember the 1970’s as defined by principles. You either favored peace or war, love or hate, freedom or repression. “Radical” was often used positively, as someone who wanted to change what was wrong with society. We acted on principles by marching, sitting in, or impeding traffic.  And we often had positive outcomes: the end of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights legislation, the exposure of Watergate.

But the radicals of the 1970’s were assimilated into government, institutions of social reform, even into churches.  They realized that they could change institutions from within and by negotiation, instead of by naked resistance. “Reformer” became the preferred term for “radical.”

The Tea Party represents contemporary radicalism, along with the “Occupy” movement. The difference is that the Tea Party wants to radicalize from within. They assume they can jam the cogs of government by their intractability.  They operate on pledges and vows that make their representatives pawns of their principles.  This is probably not what the Founders had in mind for a government of checks and balances. It is probably not what Jesus had in mind when he exhorted his followers to honor the principles of the law.

The fifth chapter of Matthew, the Beatitudes,  is all about reconciliation with enemies, reconciliation with spiritual brothers and sisters, reconciliation with the adversary taking you to court. The whole notion of “settling out of court,” which is advocated by Matthew 5:25, should be of particular interest to those who think our society is too litigious.

But Jesus was not merely concerned with short-circuiting the justice system, he was interested in reconciliation, bringing foes together, dissolving feuds.  And it is in this teaching that he undermines radicalism as we know it. He wants parties to be reconciled and to work together. He wants compromise and forgiveness.

I don’t like Christians who challenge my morality on the basis of partial reading of scripture, so I don’t wish to force my reading on others. But I see the Beatitudes as a central message of the Gospels, and the theme of reconciliation as the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and I think radicals ought to consider it, along with the notion of principle.  “Principle” can be suffocating and polarizing to mutual destruction.

The “judge” in Matthew 5:25 could be the Judge of all. The Gospels are suffused with stories of unforgiving masters and ruthless judges, whom God will not forgive.  Radicalism, while admirable in those who sacrifice their livelihood for their beliefs, can also destroy those who are trying to lead and mediate. A “principled”  stand can be alienating and deadly.

So judge carefully whether what you call “principle” is merely “recalcitrance” and ruthless opposition.

 

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Evaluate Teachers Responsively

Reading the “Sunday Dialogue” about the evaluation of teachers in the March 18 New York Times, I have to agree with Joanne Yatvin that the best of the bunch came from a high school student, Nikhil Goyal, who said “Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation.” How profound!

“Responsive Evaluation” is actually a well-developed model of assessment, which assumes that both the evaluator and evaluated have something to say about the process (Robert E. Stake, 1975).   The doctor patient relationship, the work of the investigative reporter, the work of Congressional inquiry all turn on the notion of “responsive evaluation.”  The goal in each case is seek out evidence that will result in equitable and significant conclusions.

If the goal of teacher evaluation is to develop successful teachers, then responsive evaluation is the ideal process. If the goal is to merely weed out the most egregious cases of malpractice then an adversarial approach, such as that practiced by our legal system, is the solution. But we already have that in the tenure system, which most will agree is flawed.

The problems with responsive evaluation are that it is time-intensive and it does not invite definitive results. For those who are not being evaluated it appears to be a very equivocal system, one with conditions. If the teacher accomplishes certain goals in the future, the teacher will be qualified and perhaps even rewarded or promoted. If the teacher does not reach all of those goals then new goals are set.  Eventually definitive personnel decisions will be made, based on continuous and responsive evaluation.

For those who are not assessed or for those who teach under less problematic conditions, evaluation models that prolong personnel decisions  are unnecessary.  They appreciate the quick-and-dirty process of “evaluation-warning-dismissal.”  This more resembles the process of confining criminals or social misfits. And, of course, the intent is the same.

For those who teach under the most severe conditions, where students arrive in school from dysfunctional or less literate households, where adolescents may have heavy work or baby-sitting responsibilities, where school attendance is a basic challenge, the ability to teach always seems in question.  The abilities of such teachers are refracted even as the achievements of their students are.   Many are teaching exceptionally well with minimal results. Under those conditions responsive evaluation is the only equitable and productive model of assessment.

Or, as the wise Mr. Goyal said, “Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation.”