Fearless Peter Greene criticizes economist Thomas Kane for his latest paper, called “Never Diet Without a Bathroom Scale and Mirror: The Case for Combining Teacher Evaluation and the Common Core.”
Kane directed the study called Measures of Effective Teaching for the Gates Foundation.
Greene calls the new study “grade A baloney.” Kane calls for “a massive adult behavior change exercise,” not an easy thing to accomplish.
But Greene writes:
“The bathroom scale image is brave, given the number of times folks in the resistance have pointed out that you do not change the weight of a pig by repeatedly measuring it. But I am wondering now– why do I have to have scales or a mirror to lose weight? Will the weight loss occur if it is not caught in data? If a tree’s weight falls in the forest but nobody measures it, does it shake a pound?
“This could be an interesting new application of quantum physics, or it could be another inadvertent revelation about reformster (and economist) biases. Because I do not need a bathroom scale to lose weight. I don’t even need a bathroom scale to know I’m losing weight– I can see the difference in how my clothes fit, I can feel the easier step, the increase in energy. I only need a bathroom scale if I don’t trust my own senses, or because I have somehow been required to prove to someone else that I have lost weight. Or if I believe that things are only real when Important People measure them.
“Kane envisions the Core and new evaluations going hand in hand, leading to more successful implementation of the Core (he does not address the question of why a successful Core is a Good Thing, Much To Be Desired). And his vision of how evaluation will provide a connection to standards as well as the kind of continuous feedback by people who don’t know what they’re doing and whose judgment can’t be trusted.”
Kane says that one of the big problems in American education is teacher autonomy. He believes that teacher work must be carefully monitored, guided, and measured. He refers to Japanese lesson study as exemplary, but does not mention Finland, where teachers are highly prepared, then given considerable autonomy to do the work they were prepared for.
Greene says:
“My experience is that every good teacher I’ve ever known is involved in a constant, daily cycle of reflection and self-examination, using a rich tapestry of directly-observed data to evaluate her own performance, often consulting with fellow professionals. It’s continuous and instantly implemented, then instantly evaluated and modified as needed. It’s nimble, and it involves the professional judgment of trained experts in the field. That seems like a pretty good system to me.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Peter Greene said, “My experience is that every good teacher I’ve ever known is involved in a constant, daily cycle of reflection and self-examination …”
So true. During the thirty years I was in the classroom, I lost a lot of sleep involved in that daily cycle of reflection and self-examination. Waking up at 3:00 AM to create new material for a lesson that wasn’t working to my satisfaction came with a price. And you have to work fast so you still arrive early to school to prep and set up for that lesson. Once the children arrive, there’s little time available for adjustments.
Amen
Without having yet read the link, it already gives me hives just by the title. The bathroom scale is, in fact, one of the biggest barriers to healthy living (the word “diet” itself gives away Kane’s bias, as it’s automatically about restriction). It makes it all about a number when it should be about taking care of and loving yourself.
To clarify, I mean that Kane’s title gives me hives. I’m sure Greene’s rebuttal is sharp and eloquent as always.
I wonder how much he was paid to produce this report? If I remember from my Texas days, Kane is an expert on ethics. He used to teach in Austin if I have my Kanes straight. How much money does the Harvard Ed. Department receive from the Gates Foundation every year?
“Expert on ethics”. Ha. Good thing I wasn’t eating or drinking when I read that.
Paul,
As far as I can tell Kane was never at UT Austin, nor claims any particular expertise in ethics. Here is his vita: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/faculty/documents/thomas-kane-71512.pdf
Thanks for the bio info TE!
As usual another edudeformer who hasn’t taught K-12 but is a supposed expert on teacher evaluations.
I have not participated in lesson studies, but isn’t the monitoring and guiding of this practice FROM colleagues who are also being monitored and guided? Isn’t it a collaborative process, with no administrators and no evaluations? Again, please help me understand…and if I’m wrong, I’m eager to learn.
Yes, I think Kane misunderstands lesson study if he thinks the purpose is for outsiders to come in and tell the teacher what he or she could be doing better, or to hold him or her “accountable.” My understanding is that the purpose of lesson study is for teachers to observe a lesson and then to discuss what they observed for the purpose of improving their own teaching. In other words, the observers are themselves learners, who use the common experience of observing as a starting point to discuss how good teaching works. In the film “The Finland Phenomenon,” you can also see Finnish teaching candidates doing this, watching a lesson together and then critiquing it afterwards. The purpose is not to give feedback to one teacher, but for a group of teachers together to articulate what they have observed, so they can use that understanding to improve their own practice.
At the risk of sounding negative…..every profession that has been “part art/part science” has undergone or is currently undergoing a transformation/reform based on economics . I am sickened at the way doctors have been told to practice so costs can be cut. Sure, medicine is cheaper, but the average “healthcare provider” office resembles a factory or a bakery where one is shuttled in for service, take a number and get out. The loser is the patient who know gets pretty substandard care in the name of cost cutting. Now, the same is happening in education, with public school students as the big losers…. Perhaps it is globalization, a shrinking world with a zero -sum game….with millions of growing economies grabbing for what the established economies have….I am so depressed thinking that there are puppeteers somewhere driving this idea: aiding, abetting and fostering this idea of market forces trumping all, as if human existence is measured only in terms of production and wealth. …When the term “human capital ” was first tossed around in reference to children/students I mused that it was a sign of one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse…..and I’m only half kidding. We have allowed technology and globalization to take away our manners , “civilizing” forces and the things that make us “human”; our “soul” so to speak…. I fear for my children.
“I fear for my children.”
Yes, me too.
This is quite true. I learned everything I ever knew about teaching from my fellow teachers. We would go over methods and lessons endlessly. Most classes I went to after work or on a weekend or at a conference were teachers showing you their methods. And most of the time they weren’t paid for these classes nor were we paid for attending. Teachers know preparation is the key. Knowing what you are doing, exuding confidence brings a wonderful loving atmosphere to a classroom where success happens. And that confidence comes from experience and years of constantly revising your methods, curriculum, etc. and adding on or taking away with what works. The best teacher I’ve even read about Torrey Hayden a wonderful special Ed teacher was observed by university professors. What do you do Torrey.? What is your system? Who do you follow? She simply added whatever works. YES..and teachers know that not the Gates or the professors or the principals or Pearson text book writers. The people who know this are the teachers who use it and tweak it for success. Who watch the kids light up or shut down. To be micro managed is to ruin the very creative intuition that saves and helps so many, many students in education today.
That helps clear things up…
Distrust. One of the core elements of the business plan of the “education reform” movement that masquerades as an educational model.
¿? Yes, distrust of public school staff is part of it. But just as important is the instinctive recoil of the accountably underlings of the “education reform” movement to explain themselves in public. Such as in public give-and-takes with folks like the owner of this blog. Distrust of their own ability to make sense!
A bathroom weight scale? This is how Thomas Kane explains his distrust of teachers? This is on par with Dr. Raj Chetty pontificating on the importance of large data sets and avoiding the all too human tendency to focus on outliers—and then proceeding to use Michael Jordan [a world-class outlier among world-class outliers re basketball!] as his example of how he evaluates typical teaching and teachers.
These folks can’t talk, think or argue their way out of a paper bag. Not even with a 3-page booklet designed by Arne Duncan, coloring crayons included, big pictures, large type, and a tutor to help them make sense.
I cannot help but think of Banesh Hoffman explaining in 1962:
[start quote]
The most important thing to understand about reliance on statistics in a field such as testing is that such reliance warps perspective. The person who holds that subjective judgment and opinion are suspect and decides that only statistics can provide the objectivity and relative certainty that he seeks, begins by unconsciously ignoring, and ends by consciously deriding, whatever can not be given a numerical measure or label. His sense of values becomes distorted. He comes to believe that whatever is non-numerical is inconsequential. He can not serve two masters. If he worships statistics he will simplify, fractionalize, distort, and cheapen in order to force things into a numerical mold.
The multiple-choice tester who meets criticisms by merely citing test statistics shows either his contempt for the intelligence of this readers or else his personal lack of concern for the non-numerical aspects of testing, importantly among them the deleterious effects his test procedures have on education.
[end quote]
(THE TYRANNY OF TESTING, 2003 publication of the 1964 edition originally published in 1962, pp. 143-144)
And think about another aspect of this: a prominent bean counter for the rheephormistas foists a ludicrous example on us—expecting that we are soooooo foolish and brain dead that we will “buy into” his “account” of Rheeality. He doesn’t trust that we can think for ourselves!
😱
Really!
But we’re not “buying” it—not even a Johnsonally sort of way…
😒
Just my dos centavitos worth…
But worth a lot more than all of Thomas Kane’s $tudent $ucce$$..
😎
Peter Greene: I great appreciate your comments, but please be careful in your choice of language…
I got a flood of emails from the Baloney Society of America (aka BSofA, or BS for short, not the most fortunate of acronyms) asking me to please take issue with your comparison with baloney of anything done re education by Thomas Kane or Raj Chetty or Eric Hanushek or William Sanders or other edubean counters.
With all the negative connotations that baloneys everywhere are subject to, this sinks to a new low and adds fresh insult to fresh injury.
I am not quite sure how to respond to their pleas for help. Perhaps I need to go to that place where all the hangers are, do my CCSS ‘closet’ reading, and weigh my options on a bathroom scale.
[sound of pages rustling]
After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, right?
😳
Oops! Wrong playbook. How did John Deasy’s two-page list of talking points end up next to my computer?
I apologize. Ignore the last part.
😜
“Never
dietreform without a bathroom scale and mirror”Kane should take his own advice — and Micheal Jackson’s:
I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change
Why would anyone give a rat’s rear what Kane thinks? Who is he trying to convince?
Kane = Lackey.
I guess this is the kind of “study” one gets when the checks have been signed by Gates for so long. How many Gates ideas are embedded in this piece?
CCSS (and finding another way to tie education to it to make it even more prevalent and overbearing)
Cameras and videotaping lessons (I’ve done it. It isn’t very helpful and more subjective to review in observation than Kane seems to admit)
Student Surveys (Which was part of the MET measures, so reviving yet another old Gatesian idea)
And it will all be for “student growth” which I must remember only matters if it is in reading, writing or math. All other forms of student growth are meaningless (such as verbal skills, increased organization, greater maturity and any other thing that can’t be quantified.)
This article was a poorly disguised attempt to incorporate every Gates suggestion into a single system. That so-called behavior change is simply what Gates and Kane believe about good teaching behavior. (Anyone remember how delayed the MET results were? It’s because there was no surefire method to teach anything which disappoints the standardization crowd. Boy, they want a silver bullet.)
The article just seemed another attempt to justify the CCSS as worthwhile. Now, they’re suggesting that CCSS be the starting point for all teacher goals and instruction. Somehow, it’s even more impossibly monolithic.
It’s also further evidence that no content knowledge is required. Teachers are simply relegated to clerks, as many here have noted that this is really the goal.
I have a teacher in my building that is the perfect Gates teacher. This teacher knows standards left and right but knows surprisingly little history for a history teacher. The lessons are nice little projects but there is limited knowledge enrichment coming from the teacher. This is ideally what Gates and his ilk want.
Content is meaningless. Only skills matter. I have many students who love learning new information for the sake of information. Many are not the most “skilled” kids but they’re far more inquisitive than they’re classmates. There is no place for curiosity in these ideas. Just do the darn task!
After drenching myself in this topic for the last few months, this is the picture that is emerging in my mind.
The Common Core Agenda of Bill Gates will turn teaching and learning into a mindless assembly line of facts that will be tested to insure memory retention, and teachers will be fired when kids don’t remember 90% or more of what they were fed through mindless assembly line learning.
What isn’t clear yet is what will happen to the kids who don’t measure up and the answer that is appearing slowly is that they will be fed into a pipeline to prison—probably private sector for profit prisons that NEED inmates for a profit.
I can see kids—when they turn 18—being sent to prison for twenty years for chewing gum or violating the dress code.
..and it is precisely the most independent, creative thinkers who will be cast out (or end up in prison).
Einstein’s experience is actually a perfect analogy. At all but 1 or 2 schools, his educational experience was dominated by strict regimentation and testing.
As a highly independent thinker, he absolutely despised it and, despite managing to get a university degree, may very well have ended up on the street were it not for his own tenacity and the help of a friend who got him a job at the patent examiner’s.
The rest is history. While working at the patent office, he produced his paper on the special theory of relativity and a paper on the photoelectric effect which revolutionized physics.
Einstein managed to do what mere mortals would not be able to do: an end run around the system for a touchdown (multiple touchdowns, actually)
Einstein talks about his experiences in “Ideas and Opinions”, which reads like a big red letter DANGER!! sign for what is now happening.
If he were still around today, I’m pretty sure he would be one of the most outspoken critics of education ‘reform” in the US.
What you know about Einstein’s life and thinking that would lead him to be against corporate driven fake-education reform sounds like a good post to bash the destructionists of public education.
Just read the EngageNY curriculum and you’ll see how true Steve K’s “Content is meaningless,” is. It’s like we’re reading books and the lessons have nothing to do with what the kids just read.
Abstract and subjective skills dominate the ELA standards. Abstract and subjective skills that cannot be taught and accurately tested. Abstarct and subjective skills that are more directly related to advanced brain development than anything else. Abstract and subjectuive skills that will doom the best test-prep efforts of teachers. Abstract and subjective skills that will doom the botton 2/3 of test takers. Abstract and subjective skills that will suck the joy and wonder out of learning. Abstract and subjective skills in lieu of authentic learning, content knowledge, facts and concepts – all the learning that would really improve reading, writing, and thinking skills. What an utter and shameful waste.
“Kane says that one of the big problems in American education is teacher autonomy. He believes that teacher work must be carefully monitored, guided, and measured. He refers to Japanese lesson study as exemplary,”
Kane is completely clueless if he uses Japanese lesson study as an example of anti-autonomy for ideal teaching. That’s not necessarily the case for math and science at junior high school. And certainly not the case for teachers at elementary school.
Besides lots of Japanese teachers belong to JTE(Japan Teachers’ Union). They are highly against government control of autonomy.
I think he is highly welcome to the clueless clan of Japan’s MEXT, that has no brain, no expertise, and no resources to make nation’s sub-standard foreign language(which is English!) much better. (Hey, Mr. Prime Minister, here’s the person you should introduce to the minister of Education! He’s one of those highly-skilled foreign labors you are looking for your growth strategy. You should appoint this man to emergency director to English language Education Reform to the year 2020. Give him a ride to the gravy train!)
I ask this man to go visit Japanese schools and see how Japanese teachers of English are screwed thanks to sub-par curriculum-making and MEXT-sealed crappy English text. It is exactly central control of curriculum that spoils them for so many years
to/on
This is just some more dribble from some Ivy League, Bill Gates stooge. He is more interested in measurement than the teaching/learning process, a process that includes more collaboration than competition. He just demonstrates his ignorance of what is important. Let him retreat to the tower where he can crunch numbers and pontificate on something totally foreign to his thinking.
Does anyone believe that “combining teacher evaluation and Common Core” was not the desired goal from the very beginning?
Gates, who funded the Kane study, actually said the following over5 years ago (July 2009) in a speech he made to the National Conference of State Legislators
“No factor advances student achievement more than an effective teacher. So a true reformer will be obsessed with one question: “What changes will improve the quality of teaching, so every student can have an effective teacher?”
“We need to take two enabling steps: we need longitudinal data systems that track student performance and are linked to the teacher; and we need fewer, clearer, higher standards that are common from state to state. The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they’re learning it. …
“Fortunately, the state-led Common Core State Standards Initiative is developing clear, rigorous common standards that match the best in the world.Last month, 46 Governors and Chief State School Officers made a public commitment to embrace these common standards.
“This is encouraging—but identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.
“Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests—next-generation assessments aligned to the common core.
“When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better. …
“All states and districts should collect common data on teachers and students. We need to define the data in a standardized way, we need to collect all of it for all of our students, and we need to enter it in something cheap and simple that people can share.
…
“I’m asking you to draw on the stimulus funding to do two things:
1. Embrace common standards and data systems so we can know where we stand and how to move forward.
2. Raise the quality of teaching by measuring teacher effectiveness, encouraging innovation, and spreading best practices.”
//end of Gates quotes
How convenient that a study funded by Gates supports a position he took over 5 years ago.
Collective behavioral change? Most of us “elders” fondly remember Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Just another brick in the wall. Hey Reformers, leave us all alone.
“The mechanical working world is falling away. The Human Workplace is already here, but some organizations are tone-deaf. They haven’t gotten the message. They try to hit their goals by treating employees like children and hemming them in with weenie rules and standards.
They don’t realize they’re destroying the fuel that could make their organizations great, delight their customers and make their shareholders giddy. That fuel is human mojo.”
from http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140926142036-52594-the-employee-engagement-scam?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-network_publishes-95-null&midToken=AQFcNt7TkKNh8A&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=2dx1ygQ96BaCs1
And much of the public education system has taken this tone deafness to a whole new level (in terms of employees AND students)!
When I diet I can control the outcome by eating the right foods and exercising.
Teaching is like my being judged on the weight of my students, without being able to control what they eat or if they exercise.
After having taken loans out for the privilege of doing this.
Great answer, Texas! These deformers love to make these simplistic analogies. As you point out, there are so many variables in students’ lives, it’s naive to attribute all performance results to teachers.
“Greene calls the new study “grade A baloney.”
Personally, I’d call it “USDA Grade AA Prime Bovine Excrement”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Kane finally attempts to prop up his dubious thesis that ‘better teacher evaluation systems will be vital for any broad reform effort, such as implementing the common core’… in paragraph 5:
“Better teacher evaluation systems have been shown to be related to >better outcomes for students< [link]. The Common Core is more likely to succeed in sites that are implementing better teacher evaluation and feedback as well."
The 'better teacher evaluation system' to which he links is the 2011 MTP-S (Allen, Pianta, et al), a coaching plan targeting teacher-student interactions [high school] that establish positive emotional environment and sensitivity to student needs for autonomy/ active role in their learning/ sense of relevance of content to their lives. No resemblance to Danielson et al or other hi-stakes VAM schemes. He just snuck that one in there.