Bruce Baker reviews the Vergara claim that teacher laws in Néw York deny students a quality education and shows that it is fallacious.
He writes:
“VergarGuments are an absurd smokescreen, failing to pass muster at even the most basic level of logical evaluation of causation – that A (state laws in question) can somehow logically (no less statistically) be associated with selective deprivation of children’s constitutional rights.
“Are children in New York State being deprived of their right to a sound basic education.
“Absolutely.
“Yes.
“Most certainly.
“Are VergarGuments the most logical path toward righting those wrongs? Uh… no.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is public school funding/opportunity inequities between poorer districts and wealthier districts, not teacher tenure, that cause the most significant “in school” factor(s) feeding the achievement gap. Reformers have most recently resorted to the “in school” microscope because they desperately need to find a scapegoat that will give their long list of distractions some whiff of validity.
Not only do they realize that student inequities are directly related to social and economic inequities (combined with blind deference of policy makers to free-market trickle down economics), they look to profit from preserving inequity (even increasing through “choice”, translated as they Romney-esque “all the education they can afford”).
It would not garner support in the court of politics or public opinion if reformers blamed the very system they want to make investment wins within, or if they said “we can make some serious bucks if we recruit away the easier to manage students and replace dedicated educators with cheaper drill sergeants for the most challenging students. The PR smear is now teacher-focus. Our economy, job opportunities, the market crash, our budget challenges…why, it’s all about teachers. Every student deserves an excellent teacher. An excellent teacher makes a positive difference, and bad teachers protected by tenure crash economies, drive income inequity and send jobs overseas.
And uncomfortable chairs in my dentist’s office give me cavities.
Of course we all want good teachers. I want comfortable chairs in my dentists waiting room, but if I’m living off pixie sticks and soda pop that doesn’t mean my dentist should lose his career and maybe license if his chairs are uncomfortable and I end up with a mouth full of rotten teeth. I’m sure he will make every attempt to minimize, ameliorate and maybe undo the damage done-do what he can for my teeth. But he has no control over what happens outside his office and what I do to the teeth I bring to him. He can make his chairs as cheap and uncomfortable or as cozy as he wants, and it is part of the experience within his office. He has been well trained, educated, and has many years and many patients worth of experience informing him. That doesn’t mean he should possess a magic wand that heals damage done or that he should be attacked or have his reputation ruined for not having that wand (or toothbrush?).
The most prominent “reformers” and tenure attackers are a symptom of the rot teachers and public schools have been battling for a long, long time. They are now attempting to peddle more pixie sticks and blame the dentists.
Dan,
Your essay is an insult to Pixie Sticks, which, I now understand, come in tropical flavors? Is that true? My best buddy and I used to steal them from his house and run up the block laughing that we could consume so many. . . . . that’s a world of 9 year old boys being foolish and carefree.
Which resulted in a lot of dental visits for me.
Kidding aside, your analogy is fantastic. It is a two way flow, I think, that excellent care is performed inside and outside the dentist’s office.
However the same is true for schools, and other than attendance, it is difficult to legislate parental involvement, which makes the role of schools to engage parents ever more important.
However, will they have the resources to do it?
When I was a kid, milk still only cost 7 cents for lunch, ice cream was 15, I think though I didn’t get that often. If I saved up my coins, the walk home Friday could include a stop at Clark’s on Main St in Homer, NY. Penny fireballs, gob-stoppers, laffy taffy, and those pixie sticks that were fat as your thumb and about 2 feet long (least it seemed that way to a kid)…man, 25 or 30 cents could take you all the way. 50 to a dollar and you found friends you never knew you had. I in no way would demean the power of the pixies.
I love your parent engagement point, and think that is central to the whole evaluation and what makes a high quality educator and/or educational program.
In schools where attendance/engagement/community involvement are the issues, those things should trump test scores as the focus- measures.
A good intro to my last posting on the Vergara Decision.
What role do reason, consistency, logic, and facts play in the self-styled “education reform” movement?
From a posting on this blog of 3-23-2014, “Common Core for Commoners—Not My School!”—
“This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
Link: http://nashvillepublicradio.org/blog/2014/02/10/lipscomb-academy-chief-advocates-for-common-core-but-not-at-her-school/
When you’re a supernova of the “new civil rights movement of our time” like Michelle Rhee you don’t have to get your numbers right—or even read the source you cite for your assertion!—when you make a claim.
“So the report Rhee herself cites contradicts her main point: standardized testing does, in fact, gobble up lots of classroom time. Her statement above, according to the source she herself cites, is just dead wrong.”
Link: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-is-michelle-rhee-wrong-about.html
If you’re Bill Gates you can assert to Lyndsey Layton re the potential $tudent $ucce$$ synergy between Common Core, Pearson and Microsoft that:
“Yeah, we had the old Pearson stuff. I, it, it, there’s no connection, there’s no connection to Common Core and any Microsoft thing.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
But then there’s the joint statement by Pearson and Microsoft of 2/20/2014—
Link: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1748922
But surely during the Vergara trial Dr. Raj Chetty was able to demonstrate the hard-nosed, data-based logic, consistency, reasons and facts behind VAMania and high-stakes standardized testing and the like, right?
Please refer to the following link for the references re Dr. Chetty’s testimony:
Link: http://www.vergaratrial.com/storage/documents/2014.01.30_Rough_am_session.txt
*Note that I will refer to the latest more refined version of the rough draft, which goes from pp. 508-595.*
Pp. 553-554, Dr. Raj Chetty:
“In my opinion there are two different approaches to analysis. You can look for anecdotes or you can look at large data sets. I prefer to look at large data sets because I think there is a psychological bias that any human being has to focus on outliers.”
Sounds reassuring until you realize that this is his way of “reasoning” away myriad accounts that VAM estimates fluctuate wildly or that Campbell’s Law is a real concern, not just a “conjecture.”
But here’s where the rubber meets the road.
When discussing LIFO (i.e., seniority) policies, he goes all in to make sure we of little understanding grasp why the least effective senior teachers should be laid off before the more effective novice teachers:
P. 576: “…[L]et me give an analogy which hopefully will resonate and be familiar with many people here.
Let’s say you are a manager of a basketball team and you have a new player, Michael Jordan in his rookie year who looks very promising, but in his rookie year he is not doing so well relative to the other players on the team. So you could take a short term perspective and say, well, this guy doesn’t seem to be doing so well this year, so I’m going to let him go and stick with the other players so that we do well in the next season, or could you take a longer term perspective and say Michael Jordan seems to have a lot of potential, he is going to be great in two years, he’s going to be one of the superstars, I’m going to keep him because I really care about my team in the longer run.
The LIFO policy is effectively saying let’s let Michael Jordan go, I wouldn’t want to have Michael Jordan on my team.”
There are so many things wrong with this brief example of “high-disorder” thinking that I hardly know where to start. But just some brief comments, and I won’t even bring up the whole mismangled approach to teamwork, cooperation and collaboration he brings up. *Michael Jordan could give Dr. Chetty some good advice: “There is no ‘i’ in team but there is in win.”*
So we lesser beings must zealously avoid the “psychological bias” we have in focusing on “outliers” and ground ourselves instead in “large data sets”? Is it too much to remind a numbers/stats person that the NBA has, maximum, less than 500 players [and not all can dress for any one game? And that these are exceptionally fine athletes, world class no less—literally, if you saw one of them playing in your local gym or playground, they would blow everyone else away. The bench warmers are outliers! They are ALL outliers!
And Michael Jordan is an outlier among outliers! Picking him as an example of what approach to use in assessing the effectiveness of millions of teachers via numerical rankings is betraying a hopelessly confused surrender to the “psychological bias” to focus on “outliers”!
Capiche?!?!?!?
And as for those millions of teachers: VAM already has moved the “highly effective” and “highly ineffective” and the “most effective” and “most ineffective” all over the rankings from year to year—how long could Dr. Chetty’s “Michael Jordans” survive such VAMboolzement before being kicked out of the classroom? [With all apologies to Dr. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley.]
I stop here. End of my Vergara Decision series.
Let’s pay heed to Joe Flood, author of THE FIRES:
“Initially, we use data as a way to think hard about difficult things, but then we over rely on data as a way to avoid thinking hard about difficult problems. We surrender our better judgment and leave it to the algorithm.”
[Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION, 2013, p. ]
😎
P.S. Even a very dead, very old and very Greek guy knew better:
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” [Plato]