Anthony Cody has written a guest column for readers of the blog. As you may know, Anthony regularly blogs at “Living in Dialogue,” hosted by Education Week. He is one of the most thoughtful commentators on the education scene. He taught science in middle school in Oakland, California, for many years and is a National Board-Certified Teacher.
Bill Gates’ annual letter was just released and can be read here. http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#
A preview of his letter stated this: http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2013/01/My-Annual-Letter-Accelerating-Impact-through-Measurement
“This year, my letter focuses on the catalytic role that measurement can play in reducing hunger, poverty, and disease. Setting goals and measuring progress are obviously not new ideas. But over the last year, I’ve really been struck by the impact this can have improving the lives of the poorest.”
Measurement has been central to the Gates vision for improving schools in the US as well. But this approach has not, in my view, improved the lives of the poorest among our students.
Ever since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, school reform has been driven by measurement and numerical goals. But unfortunately for the poor, we are not measuring what matters most, nor are our responses to the measurements truly helpful.
Mathematician Cathy O’Neil has offered an interesting critique of the Gates method of solutions via measurement. She writes: http://mathbabe.org/2013/01/29/bill-gates-is-naive-data-is-not-objective/
“the person who defines the model defines success, and by obscuring this power behind a data collection process and incrementally improved model results, it seems somehow sanitized and objective when it’s not.”
“Don’t be fooled by the mathematical imprimatur: behind every model and every data set is a political process that chose that data and built that model and defined success for that model.”
There is an old saying, “when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In our schools, standardized tests are our hammers, and as Cathy O’Neil points out, the standards and the tests that measure what has been learned have lots of questionable assumptions built in.
In his letter, Bill Gates draws an appealing portrait of how teaching is being improved at a school in Vail, Colorado. Reflecting the findings of the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, he points out that they focus on “several measures that schools should use to assess teacher performance, including test data, student surveys and assessments by trained evaluators.”
Unfortunately, a closer look at their research shows that the way these various models are validated is by the degree to which they align with test scores. This is circular, as Bruce Baker explains in some detail here. http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/gates-still-doesnt-get-it-trapped-in-a-world-of-circular-reasoning-flawed-frameworks/
We could choose to measure other things, of course. The idea of measurement is not useless. The trouble is that some of the things we truly value are harder to measure, and so we devolve back to the simplest metrics – test scores. This is defined as the “outcome” that we desire. But this is only one of a host of outcomes that we actually want for our students.
Nothing makes this clearer than the personal decisions made by people with the MOST control over their own children’s education. The schools attended by the very wealthy are not chosen for their test scores – in fact many of them do not give standardized tests at all. Neither do they use student test scores to evaluate their teachers.
While Bill Gates undoubtedly used test score data as the basis for his assertion that class size does not matter much, and should be allowed to rise, it is fair to assume that the small class sizes at the private school attended by his children offer outcomes other than test scores.
What are the outcomes these schools offer?
The Sidwell Friends school, attended by Sasha and Malia Obama, says this: http://www.sidwell.edu/about_sfs/school-philosophy/index.aspx
We cultivate in all members of our community high personal expectations and integrity, respect for consensus, and an understanding of how diversity enriches us, why stewardship of the natural world matters and why service to others enhances life. Above all, we seek to be a school that nurtures a genuine love of learning and teaches students “to let their lives speak.”
The Lakeside School, attended by Bill Gates himself several decades ago, and now by his children, says this: http://www.lakesideschool.org/academics
“Lakeside’s 5th- to 12th-grade student-centered academic program focuses on the relationships between talented students and capable and caring teachers. We develop and nurture students’ passions and abilities and ensure every student feels known.”
“Each student’s curiosities and capabilities lead them to unique academic challenges that are sustained through a culture of support and encouragement. All students will find opportunities to discover and develop a passion; to hone the skills of writing, thinking, and speaking; and to interact with the world both on and off campus. Lakeside trusts that each student has effective ideas about how to maximize his or her own education, and that they will positively contribute to our vibrant learning community.”
The parents who send their children to these schools keep a sharp eye on the outcomes that really matter. They know that personal relationships are key, and that is something that cannot be measured on a test. It is something that is made possible by small class sizes and a warm environment that recognizes the uniqueness of every child.
This is the opposite of using standardized measurement tools to score and rank every learner, and every teacher.
Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote back in 1947,
“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.”
Measurement and standardization delivers efficiency without excellence. When this becomes the driving force in a marketized education system, it fosters conformity and channels innovation towards commercially viable solutions for those unable to purchase the sort of personalized education the wealthy choose for their own children. Measurement in education will not serve the poor. It will merely make our schools more efficient in preserving their poverty.
Gates was on Colbert last night. Last time Melinda was on, I emailed and complained that he treated her with kid gloves. Same with Bill last night.
I urge everyone to email Colbert and ask why he doesn’t challenge Gates on his anti-teacher agenda.
Didn’t I read on this blog somewhere that Colbert’s wife has ties to some sort of reformy outfit?
Colbert’s booker is Jonathan Alter’s wife. He was in “Waiting for Superman,” praising testing and charters.
Bill Gates gets treated with kid gloves when he’s on a real news interview show like Charley Rose. But Rose is savvy enough to realiz that he has nothing to gain by having his faulty ideas challenged on a national media outlet.
That which can be measured, can be managed.
In other words, it’s all about control (well, that and money, too).
No one should be surprised that Gates is obsessed with this. After all, his genius and passion was never for superior technology – as Windows users well know – but for monopoly control and expanded defense of intellectual property rights.
That also explains his foundation’s investment in Monsanto, which is at the center of privatizing and monopolizing the agricultural gene pool.
You hit the nail on the head, my friend!
And this is why I am not a “windoze” user any longer!
Here’s the concluding paragraph from the section of Gates’ report that deals with public education, with one phrase IN ALL CAPS that I added:
“I think the most critical change we can make in U.S. K-12 education is to create teacher feedback systems like the one in Eagle County that are PROPERLY FUNDED, HIGH QUALITY, and TRUSTED BY TEACHERS. These measurement systems need to provide teachers with the tools to help support their professional development. The lessons from these efforts will help us improve teacher education programs. The countries that have better education systems than the United States provide more teacher feedback than we do today, but I think it is possible to do even better than any country has done so far.”
I find it hard to argue with this aspiration. I also find it hard to criticize the exemplary evaluation system Gates describes in the article. Teachers are observed 10 times a year and coached by peers. It appears that the teachers endorse the linkage between the observations, student test scores, and compensation. But Gates’ aspiration depends on three variables: “proper funding”, which requires money for more direct supervision; “high quality”, which requires the incubation time afforded the teachers in Eagle County, and “trust”, which requires solid, sustained leadership from the school board through the master teachers. Gates’ problem is that he contends ANY measurement system is better than NO measurement system and so he ends up supporting evaluation systems that are NOT properly funded, do NOT provide the time needed to meet the unique needs of every district, and, therefore, do NOT engender trust.
I don’t think Bill Gates is an enemy to teachers. What teacher WOULDN’T support a properly funded, high quality and trustworthy evaluation system. I DO think Bill Gates is naive if he thinks that this aspiration of his can be accomplished cheaply, quickly, and imposed from the outside.
The primary purpose of grading teachers is to provide a necessary component of a framework for reducing the number of teachers nation wide and lowering the compensation packages of most who remain. In the business world, this is referred to as “deskilling.” Automation (virtual learning) will save a significant portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent every year on teacher salaries and benefits. Some of this savings can be redirected towards for profit enterprises, and some can be redirected to government accountability efforts and to NGO service providers. If that’s how you would like to see public tax money used, support Bill Gates and school reform. [I’m not a teacher and I don’t work in education]
I can think of a lot more critical changes to K12 education than teacher evaluation systems. How about equal funding? How about making sure every student attends school in a structurally sound building and physically safe environment? How about making sure they all have adequate books, well-stocked libraries, functional technology, space to play and explore? What about valuing and respecting teachers, especially the most educated and experienced ones?
My experience, from every position I’ve ever been in in a number of different fields, is that no one really wants “feedback”. People want to know what they’re expected to do, they want the resources to do it, then they want to be left alone to do it in the way they feel best. Even for people who are confident that their reviews are going to be decent or good or even excellent, review time is just plain icky.
I should clarify that by “feedback” I specifically mean review-type feedback from a supervisor telling you what you’re doing right and what you need to do better. As Bridgeport Advocate points out below, all of us get day-by-day or even minute-by-minute feedback on our work just based on how people react and how things come out – we learn by doing. That kind of feedback is generally welcomed, as that is the meat of the job.
Every penny spent on teacher evaluation systems is a waste. It is also a waste of time.
There is not a teacher quality problem in this country – that has been fabricated argument synthesized by billionaires and politicians in order to rid themselves of veteran teachers, raid pensions and benefits, and privatize the system (without having to worry about teacher unions.)
The recession of 2008 sent local and state governments reeling in order to cover for expenses and teachers are an EASY target. For many families, the women’s salary is secondary to her husband’s, and 85% of teachers are women.
Police and fire have been protected while teachers have been consistently attacked because of proximity and ease to overcome.
There are as many incompetent teachers as there are incompetent cops and fire personnel, yet teachers have received the brunt of the attack. While in many states public employees have taken pay freezes and other involuntary actions to save money, no other portion of the public sector has been attacked like teachers. It has turned into a national campaign.
Yep!
In addition .. there are about as many incompetent teachers as there are incompetent:
Doctors
College professors
Plumbers
Contractors
Corporate CEO’s
Dental Hygienist
Butchers
ETC
In short any place there are humans there are some not too great humans.
When shall we begin the drive to reform plumbing?
There is an important difference between between people who practice all those occupations and a teacher in a traditional zoned school system. The government does not assign me to a plumber and prohibit me from switching plumbers.
The government assigns you to police, firefighters, ambulance drivers, bus drivers, mail carriers, etc. and they don’t permit you to switch. They are public services, not individually designed services just for you. You can always go private, if you think you’ll have more choices there.
That is true about these professions, and why the government has an added regulatory burden when it comes to employing them.
And yet they are all unionized and on salary schedules that are based on education and experience, not paid for performance, yet no one is complaining. Maybe because they’re not a primarily female workforce like P-12 teachers are?
I am not sure what being a member of a union has to do with the governments regulatory responsability when it requires citizens to send their students to a designated school.
I do agree that the public school system has not adjusted to a world where women have a much wider set of careers to chose from.
I don’t agree that only teachers are under pressure from the public, here is a story from NPR about firefighters in California: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/26/168059128/firefighters-deal-with-community-backlash
@teaching economists – whether the government assigns or does not assign you a plumber is irrelevant.
The bottom line is there is NO teacher quality problem in this country. There is NOT a shred of evidence suggesting there is. In fact, the key statistic used against teacher quality, is the high evaluation marks of administrators for their teaching staff – like there is something wrong with that.
Are administrator ratings inflated? Probably, with things like the halo effect and observer effect, however, I trust what administrators have to say overall.
If there was a plethora of incompetent teachers, a vast majority of administrators would pursue them. There is NOTHING stopping administrators from firing teachers in my state – we are a right to work state and have a weak union. It is interesting to note that states with unions actually fire more teachers.
And who cares about firing incompetent teachers? We lose almost 50% of our new teachers within the first 5 years of their hire, many of which simply cannot hack the terrible working conditions and stresses that are associated with our profession.
We should be more worried about recruiting and retaining teachers than firing them.
My point is that choice is a substitute for regulation. As long as governments assign students to designated schools, the government is obliged look into every detail of how the school is run. If the government assigned me to a plumber, I would want the government to set a required response time to my calls and a very narrow service window for example.
The primary relevance of unions to this matter is that they serve as a buffer between the previous spoils system, which was a revolving door of politically appointed cronies who often lacked expertise in their jobs, and a system that seeks to hire and protect career workers who have relevant education and experience for the work they do.
I think it’s a dismal state of affairs when people forget why unions are important for government and public workers, too. It’s been primarily teachers who’ve been under attack.
Sure, there are always outliers, such as the firefighters in Contra Costa County, CA. I’ve often wondered if firefighters might be next in line to come under attack, because so many communities across the country have volunteer firefighters, so people might be more likely to see that as a field which requires less education, experience and investment –a lot like what “reformers” are claiming in their case against career teachers. As with Sandy Hook, memories of the heroic firefighters who gave their lives on 9/11 are sadly fading.
I don’t think Gates has any ideas about a high quality, trustworthy evaluation system for anyone.
Check out the evaluation system at his own company:
From the Vanity Fair article:
“…a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.””
This “stack ranking” sounds very much like the teacher eval systems we are now being subjected to.
See full article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
The idea of relationship is key. Perhaps as perceptive a book as I have ever read on teaching, and which I used to give to my student teachers when I served as a mentor, is Parker Palmer’s The Courage To Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. Palmer discusses three overlapping relationships, that between teacher and students, that among the students themselvess (which is often key to a positive learning environment), and that of all, teacher and students, with the curricular material. The last is important, because it makes the teacher in part a co-learner with the students, not merely functioning as sage on the stage, but as someone modeling productive learning.
There is more I could add to Anthony’s wonderful post. Independent schools like Sidwell Friends often pay for ongoing professional development throughout a teacher’s career, whereas Gates has opined that teachers reach their peak after 3 years, with a strong implication that schools should not be paying more for experience. As one with almost 2 decades of teaching experience I note of myself and of my peers that we continued to improve as teachers or we quickly lost our effectiveness.
Gates also does not seem to think that class size makes all that much of a difference. And yet the elite schools he and others of wealth and power select for their children often advertise their small class size. That class size is often essential for fully developing the kinds of relationships that really make a difference, where a teacher can really get to know her students. At the secondary level, it is not merely class size, something that has a powerful effect on how much students participate. It is also a question of the total teacher load. at my peak I had 6 sections totalling 196 students. Consider that if 180 turned in a paper that took only 3 minutes each to reach and upon which to offer comments (feedback being essential to a productive teaching relationship), that is 540 minutes, or if you prefer, 9 hours for one set of papers. We overburden our secondary teachers and rob our students when teachers have too many students. This is especially true if we want to help students develop their writing skills.
Thanks, Diane, for having Anthony guest post. This is an important piece.
It is my impression that schools don’t pay more for experience in general, they pay more for experience in the district. Is that true?
I also note that you must have seen some faculty lose their effectiveness. Why not pay teachers based in effectiveness instead of using the proxy of years teaching in the district?
How do you accurately measure “effective” teaching or solid learning? All measurement tools have major flaws. People are complex creatures. Do you want to base someone’s livelihood on an error riddled data analysis? That hardly seems like an “educated” thing to do. “Therein lies the rub.”
Do you propose that you be paid in Higher Ed based on your effectiveness, too, i.e., the standardized test scores of your students, rather than the steps and lanes salary schedules for instructors’ experience and education that are so common there as well?
Then take that to the next level, because “reformers” have indicated they believe college faculty should be evaluated based on the test scores of their students’ students. So if you have students who will be teaching economic literacy in schools, you could be paid based on how THEIR students perform.
let me try this again – the computer ate my first attempt
first most districts pay on career ladders. the ladder determined by education (BA, BA + 30, MA, MA + 320, etc.) gaining steps up based on experience. This matches the model of military, civil service and some corporations.
second, it is based on years of experience in the field, not in the district. I have experienced this several times when I transferred districts. Occasionally a district will have a cap for entry, that is, perhaps not paying above step 10 even if the experience would warrant a higher step
As far as some experienced teachers getting stale, so do people in other fields. The proper response is supervision and counseling, and if a tenured (meaning entitled to due process) teacher refuses to respond dismissal is positive.
As far as “merit” pay, the evidence is fairly clear both in education and in other fields that it does not result in the sought for results and in some cases it is counter productive.
Readingexchange my post was based on teacherken’s observation that “we continued to improve as teachers or we quickly lost our effectiveness”. I would make use of teacherken’s knowledge and have peer evaluation of effective teaching.
Cosmic: in higher education pay, tenure, and promotion decisions are primarily based on peer evaluations. As I (and others) have argued in the past, peer evaluation would work well in K-12. After all, you know the test scores are wrong in part because you have evaluated your fellow teachers and the test results do not match your evaluations.
Teacherken: good to know that contracts recognize experience up to a point. As for education, I assume that if you think online K-12 programs are deeply flawed you would also say online MA programs are a problem. Finally, I see paying teachers based on the results of peer evaluation as an important way to keep effective teachers in the classroom and not force them to choose between the financial health of their family and their passion for teaching.
TeachingEconomist: I have taught at over a half dozen colleges in my area, both as full time and part time faculty, and they’ve all had the same kinds of lane and step salary schedules here as in public K-12 schools.
That is far from the norm in higher ed.
Gates et al have a bias toward quantitative measures and contend that observations which don’t match test score data are not valid and reliable.
The single salary schedules I’m most familiar with are at public community colleges and state universities. These kinds of salary schedules are common in government and public service jobs. Teachers are being singled out when other public service employees are on similar pay schedules based on education and experience.
That is certainly not how my state university works. Starting salaries for first year assistant professors will easily range between 40 and 80 thousand depending on the field. Go outside the liberal arts and sciences to include law, engineering, and medical school faculty and the top end gets a good deal higher. Each salary is negotiated individually and also includes things like travel funds, etc.
TeachingEconomist, Are they unionized there, as they are here?
If you mean the faculty at my institution, the answer is no. I am not sure why that is relevant to the discussion, however.
City, county and state government and public service employees around here, including K-12 and higher ed faculty, have long been unionized and unions negotiated the pay schedules based on education and experience.
There might be wiggle room in some places, but pay for education and experience is basically the same for other government employees, including federal workers –who are unionized as well. Most people do not realize this, because all of the attention has been diverted to teachers. I’ve yet to hear any complaints around here about how other government and public service workers are evaluated and paid. They get a free pass, while teachers are punching bags.
If faculty salaries were set like that at my university we would have to close the medical school and likely the law, engineering, and business schools as well. It would be too expensive to pay all faculty a medical school salary and we would not be able to hire any faculty for those schools if we paid them at the same scale we pay, say, for English professors. There would be a similar problem within the liberal arts and sciences where expensive departments would have to shut down and our most accomplished faculty would leave for other schools in the United States or around the world.
You can’t fix stupid …
When it’s in the code …
Maybe Norton can help …
There is an interesting analogy between Gates’ clumsy “Microsoft”/PC world view on teaching vs the wholistic humanist world of Apple and Apple based software and the views expressed in Anthony’s blog: his vs these top private schools…and public ones I might add.
For example here is Scarsdale School District’s Mission:
“The Mission is to “enable our youth to be effective and independent contributors in a democratic society and an interdependent world.” We are doing this by pursuing three inter-related goals:
To prepare our students for effective participation in an interdependent world
To develop minds and spirits to inspire a love of learning
To foster decent, responsible, contributing citizens (non sibi)”
“I was amazed to learn a few years ago that over 90 percent of teachers get zero feedback on how to improve.”
I’d be amazed to learn that too. It’s absurd.
In even ten seconds standing in front of any class, the feedback that simply pours from students is incalculably infinite. How they are looking, sitting, responding, sleeping, texting, writing…. all of these are qualitative morsels of feedback.
It’s a truism in teaching that “if you don’t have a plan for them, they’ll have a plan for you.” Experience *IS* feedback.
This is SO true, Bridgeport, ESPECIALLY with middle school kids (who will eat you alive!) However, as to your first sentence–if still true, this is a massive failure of school administration–administrators paid for, but not doing, their jobs. It takes me back to the new special ed. teacher’s comment to Diane that she was getting neither help nor support from administration, and Diane posted it, asking for readers’ help. (And–I know–the most often used {and poorest!} administrative excuse is, “But the union…”
which is simply rubbish, especially RE: new teachers.)
I was lucky enough to have worked with some really wonderful principals (and, no, this wasn’t in a wealthy suburb, but a middle-to-low income majority encompassing several suburbs), and one, in particular, who came to observe me and gave me the constructive criticism (“You write too much on the board–write less, and your students will absorb more, better,” and “Talk more slowly! I know you’re excited about teaching, & that’s commendable, but your students need time to digest & to understand!”) I remembered and used his suggestions to the end of my teaching career, with the positive effects as he predicted.
Now THAT’s how administrators SHOULD be evaluating & supporting teachers. It’s ALL about improving teaching.
I taught High School from 1970-2008.
During that time I had what I thought every teacher deserved: mentors.
The year prior to that, I student taught at Taft HS in the Bx. and had one of the most gifted teachers there as a cooperating teacher. While in A.E. Stevenson in the Bronx, NY, from 1970-1986,I was part of a system that had strong department chairs (APs) who were master teachers. They knew their role was to develop teachers into the best teachers they could be. The first two principals I had at the school (now closed by Hizzoner da Mayor Bloomberg) were also master teachers prior to becoming principals. They hired the best department chairs they could find and filled their departments with as many talented people as they could find. They also actively worked at making us better.
Many of those talents left the building to become APs, Principals, Curriculum Coordinators, writers, college profs, nationally known education leaders or teachers in other districts where they could continue to grow and learn to teach better. It was always about getting better. When leadership changed and this was no longer the goal of our principal and new APs, I left.
When I left AES to go to Woodlands HS in Greenburgh NY, I had a group of colleagues who mentored each other. I team taught with one of the best teachers in the state. We worked collegially on the best program for HS seniors in the country (WISE… http://www.wiseservices.org).
When student population decreased and I was going to be laid off in 1990, I found a new job at Scarsdale HS, one of the best public high schools in the county. Of course, it’s community’s high income and well educated families were a major part of that, but even more so was the quality of my colleagues. We constantly worked at improving our craft as well as helping each other in oh so many ways…too many to list here.
The point is that regardless of how much natural talent I may have had as a new teacher, without the nurturing, mentoring, and collegial planning along the way, I never would have grown in to a better teacher.
That is how it should be for all teachers in all schools, in all districts.
AW
FIAM
WOT
Arguing With Fools Is A Major Waste Of Time
Debating the advertising claims of Narcissistic Nerd Nostrums is a pointless pursuit. When these know-nothings start prescribing these poisons for their own children and grandchildren then we will know they truly believe in them. That won’t make them any less poisonous, of course, but at least it will contain the strychnine massacre to their own gene pools. In the meantime, all we can do is either ignore them or try to get them out of our hair.
Things will change — and it’s just getting started — when people who actually have educations in their respective if disrepected disciplines and have a clue what a genuine education is regain their self-respect and stop taking orders from ignoranuses.
Or is that ignorani?
Eagle/Vail, Vermont, Finland. I think you can show whatever you’re doing looks pretty good when you choose ideal conditions.
If Gates had gone over to Yakima for 10 years and with the same amount of money improved the entire district and not just selected schools, had increased graduation rates, decreased drop outs, and increased test scores..
THEN, he would have something to crow about.
Measurement is the right thing to do providing we measure the right things for the right purpose. A classroom teacher is part of a “system” of education and to focus on one element of the system neglects the impact and importance of the context of the teaching act. Edwards Deming, the guru who revitalized Japanese industry after WWII, warned about numerical quotas and blaming people for failures of the “system.” He believed that 85% of organizational problems were the fault of management and not the workers. We should be measuring the effectiveness of the educational system as a whole. We’d find that teachers are hamstrung by the educational processes set up over 100 years ago when education began to model the manufacturing industry during the era of “efficiency.”
Gates has tinkered with the district I used to teach in, Denver Public Schools. The results of his “knowledge of educational practices” is farcical! The press will never
assess his theories, posited from his imagination, not based on anything that has
university tests prove are inventive AND productive, OR from the real world of teaching! His control and motives that have been clearly referred to by many other commentors before me that paint with REALITY the cryptic drives that inspire his “theories!” I am so sick of globalists and corporate
czars whom the press promote as if they were gods! The slick sophistry of Gates and his croonies didn’t waste their $ on advertising agencies for the companies OR for their touted, miraculous wisdom that is reality is VERY far from it for nothing! ALL the theories that have descended and riddled the DPS faculty with migraine inspiring fear is nothing short of a 1984 double talk that shrouds the actual destruction in positive terms that the public and press can’t lavish praise on heavy enough! I read the Gates section on teaching and it truly made me ill!! Teachers LOVE his new, draconian evaluation system??? What a joke! Not a word that any teacher feels differently…load the argument with one distorted side and, Wa La! It’s the cure for all the ills of education. Only problem is, his and Arne Duncan’s “cures” are worse than the original problem! More of his pompous
posits that, if emplamented will finish his agenda of scrapping public schools for Dicksonian charters…God help the children who are pawns in his globalist designs!
So true. Everyone knows his ideas are ridiculous but no one in the media or politics has the guts to stand up to him. His ego is so big, he couldn’t dare admit he’s wrong. The worst part of it all is that you realize the Dept. of Ed. is basically his playground. I wonder how Duncan likes being a puppet on a string. The 1984 comparison is so true. Heaven help the U.S. if charter schools become the norm. They are garbage.
This is a great read on how management worships the math they are befuddled by. http://www.auroraadvisors.com/articles/Webber-Metrics.pdf
Know who said this?
“President …. calls for liberal education of a small, elite group and vocational education for the masses. I cannot think of any idea more completely reactionary and more fatal to the whole democratic outlook.”
“If I were asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education I should say: ‘Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of the present life’ ”
“He referred to the major political parties as ‘the errand boys of big business.’ ”
“He declared that the ‘control of government must be redeemed from the special interests which have usurped it and restored to the people.’ Unless this were done, he warned, political democracy would be doomed.”
They were said by the person whose philosophies are the foundations for the schools Gates, Obama and his kids, Duncan, Rhee, Romney etc attended. Like Montessori, the approach was never intended for elites, but now it’s primarily the domain of the privileged.
Spoiler Alert: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1020.html
He would no doubt be cringing at what’s been going on in our times –and who the instigators are, cloaked in Opposite World garb, with all their misnomers and euphemisms.
BTW, Bill Gates’ alma mater also touts the fact that 79% of its faculty have advanced degrees –something Gates claims is of no value for teachers in public schools.
Re: “Teaching Economist”
Choice is no substitute for regulation. Along with economics and teaching, I can see that you have little acquaintance with plumbing, plumbers, their grades of licensing, building codes, and work specifications.
Without regulation you have no choice but to take your chances with whatever a chaotic mass of crooks, carpetbaggers, and corporations choose to offer, a chaos to which we are fast returning if we don’t pull up on the reins.
You also ignore the history of how this “local control” business came about — it was the The Last Stand of the Reich Wing position to which the Liberal Lefties grudgingly relented, but only so long as the RW promised to knock off their nonsense about Separate But Equal and guarantee equal protection under the law in the public education sector.
Public education is not a commodities market. Public education is an institution that the People create and maintain in order to ensure the survival of their democratic way of life. That is what makes it a public responsibility to fund and monitor. Public education is not a commodities market but an essential function of the People’s own self-preservation.
Jon,
Think about the additional regulations you would desire if the government assigned you a plumber. Perhaps you would want the government to limit what the plumber charged you? Perhaps you would want the government to set a price for each type of job rather than pay by the hour? If we had all been assigned plumbers, the government would not only need to set regulations about things that are hard for you to detect (issues with buried sewer lines, for example) but also for things that you can easily detect (like unscrupulousness plumbers) and avoid IF you could choose plumber.
I should add that terms of service would have to be regulated as well. A maximum time to return your call, a maximum allowed service window, how quickly the plumber would show up at your home, cleanliness standards, parts on the truck vs. back at the warehouse or on order, the list can go on. Think of everything that distinguishes a plumber you would choose over a plumber that you would avoid, and every one of those factors is a candidate for regulation IF the government decides what plumber you are allowed to use.
Much simpler to let you make the decision, isn’t it?
Measurement is and always has been a very necessary component of teaching and learning. The issue is how, how often, by whom, how the measures are reported, and for what purpose.
“Reformers” like Gates have indicated that they know many veteran teachers are suspicious and don’t value testing as they think teachers should, so they believe a new breed of teachers is necessary, to create a teaching workforce that’s more amenable to administering all the tests they want.
Funny thing about that. In my assessment course, young future teachers have indicated that they grew up under NCLB and precisely because of terrible, stressful memories of having to take so many tests as students, they can’t stand testing and have an aversion to administering tests as teachers.
Yep, the plan is backfiring.
As a School Committee member, I get tired of hearing that “some of the things we truly value are harder to measure, and so we devolve back to the simplest metrics – test scores”, without an alternative set of measurements being put forth. To say a school district’s performance is unmeasurable is not acceptable to me. How can we know if we are doing the right things if we do not measure our progress? Seems as basic as it can get. I wish some organization would publish a guide to school measurement – suggestions on what and how to measure – that we could simply adopt (with whatever changes we might like). Maybe that exists somewhere?
Rick,
As a parent, how do you appraise the quality of the school your children will be attending? I imagine you take a look at the test score data, but if you are like me, you also visit the school. You walk through the hallway, sit in classrooms, talk to children, teachers and other parents. You want to absorb a host of factors that include the atmosphere for learning, room for creativity, the way students and teachers treat one another. I would hope school board members would carry out similar visits, and look for similar indicators that go far beyond test scores.
If we focus primarily on test scores there are two huge problems. Sometimes really great schools may look bad on paper. For example, I visited a high school in Albuquerque a few months ago that actively recruits students who have dropped out or are at risk for dropping out. They engage them in a highly relevant curriculum focused on building, architecture and engineering. They do NOT do a lot of test prep. As a result, their test scores are not the best. According to our current paradigm, this is a “bad” school, and should be closed if it does not raise the scores. But shifting the focus to test prep would make this school exactly like the schools these kids were so turned off to. It would wreck what makes this school so great. ( see here: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/12/in_albuquerque_a_charter_schoo.html )
The second problem is we falsely declare schools “good” that are engaged in poor educational practices, such as test preparation. In Oakland, many low income schools were teaching no art, history or science, because the state tests did not cover these subjects. The school board passed a rule mandating science, because they were worried about the STEM crisis. But no direction was given regarding history or art. The point is, when we allow tests to be our primary indicator of quality, we get misleading information, and we reward poor practices.
And I thought no person had the ability to scrape off the BS that is pumped out daily about the glories of testing, and discern the reality of how that “grading system” can be gamed five ways from Sunday! Speaking of Sundays, Michelle Rhee, that Machiavellian, educational queen of destruction, was on the national morning talk shows, smirking about her scorched earth policy of firing, willy nilly, principals and teachers who don’t
achieve turning straw into gold in one year! That is raising a hard to serve school’s
test 20 points or more! If she’s such a guru, please let her take charge in a classroom and meet her own requirements! Your point of walking the halls for the school buildings ambiance is much more indicative of what is happening in those classrooms! Often, and increasingly so with this 1984 “Pass or perish” punishment in vogue, the halls will often reflect the pervasive fear of principals and faculty, who know their job security hangs by a test! Rhee was also bragging about her policy of eliminating tenure…wonder if she will foot the bill for the meds that the harried faculties need just to show up at the depressed, non-creative schoolrooms? It was truly touching when she shyly admitted that it was a error in taste to show her in “action” bloodless, and dare I say sadistically firing a principal who didn’t dare to utter a word in his own defense!
Your suggestion that a parent chat with teachers in a building about the educational environment is a worthy idea, except in oppressive buildings where the principal mentally whips the teachers, you’ll never hear the straight skinny to your inquiry.
Trust me, retaliation is alive and well in far too many public schools to the pitiful regret of faculties. That all being said, your ideas far outweigh a single test score to show a school’s worth! Oh, before I go, just another gem from Rhee’s rant; she declared that prior to NCLB, etc. schools had NO testing at all to show growth…REALLY??? Ever heard of the Iowa standard tests that WERE given since the 50’s? Can’t say anything about prior to that decade as I wasn’t a student, but darn sure took that yearly spring test and NEVER had a teacher show anxiety or “teaching for the test” at all! Bet cha
the scores back then would make the pressure cooker scores of today look like a sad
plummet down the “Rhee Rabbit Hole!”
Anthony,
I think you’re talking past Rick’s concern. I hear Rick saying he wants a new measurement method, not the current standardized infrequent or end of year method.
The current testing methods are not the measurements we should be using, but we have the technology to measure all kinds of human activity. We’re continuing to talk about a very limited measurement system without trying very hard to improve the method of measuring. We could use meaningful teacher created formative and summative assessments and portfolios that included all kinds ways to teach and learn.
I’ve written a series of posts about the possibilities http://developingprofessionalstaff-mpls.blogspot.com/2012/10/evaluating-teachers-part-five.html
Hmm, my question to any kind of “measurement” is this: Why is it that when I started to teach in ’72 the evaluations were meaningful, took into consideration my student make up, allowed me to be truly creative producing great test scores, happy parents and students, (and teacher) plus,more important, life-long learners? The more “measurements” that don’t allow or recognize these important aspects of teaching produce what we have now sunk to in the teacher corp: harried, health destroyed victims of measurement hurdles that can be fixed to meet, all too often a hidden OR verbalized age disqualify er! Now there are going to measure the principals who all too often feel the fiery breathe of a MIchelle Rhee prison guard from the ad building, forcing them to beat the serfs harder to meet their arbitrary “goals!” Teaching is an art, not a computer skill! Children are not robots, but sensitive little learners that, if the atmosphere is calm, affirmative and creative will learn to love intellectual pursuits! Measure that…its like measuring a Monet with a 50 point check list!