John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, sees the bright side in the Obama administration’s apparent step-back from the testing regime it so loved.

He feels certain that the administration will go through some serious contortions to avoid admitting that the past seven years of test-and-punish was an outright mistake.

They might not want to be known as phase 2 of the Bush-Obama education program.

The most important opening that he sees is a ray of sunlight in the retreat from value-added-measurement, which educators despise.

Who knew that the administration praises Minnesota’s educator evaluation plan, which values test scores at 1% or less?

Of course, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s educators would completely strip the test score growth component out of any accountability framework for individuals. The best we could previously do, however, was help kick the value-added can down the road. This wasted money and educators’ energy, but it kept invalid and unreliable test score growth models from inflicting too much damage in the short run. It did so under the assumption that states would eventually tire of flushing those resources down the toilet in order to appease the federal government.

Now, the USDOE is basically inviting that delaying tactic. It endorses the District of Columbia’s backtracking. D.C. had once proclaimed its value-added evaluations as a great success but now it is seen as a model because it “has temporarily removed its value-added measures from its teacher and leader evaluation systems and continues to focus on providing quality feedback on its Teaching and Learning Framework/Leadership Framework.”

The Obama administration has not only demanded that student growth models be used as a part of “multiple measures,” it has insisted that these flawed and destructive metrics must count anywhere from 35 to 50% of teachers’ evaluations. Being realists, some educators have tried to water down test score growth metrics so that they become meaningless and thus harmless.

It could be argued that we need to give reformers a fig leaf, and accept a miniscule portion of an evaluation – say 1% – so that we don’t hurt corporate reformers’ feelings as we “monkey wrench” their scheme. If systems want to waste incredible amounts of money on testing and computer systems for keeping score in order to avoid admitting a mistake, that’s on them.

Guess what? The administration now supports Minnesota’s plan which allows “its districts to include state assessment based growth at any percent (even less than 1 percent).” The administration apparently agreed to this because Minnesota can pretend that it is gauging student learning growth measured by other factors.

And that suggests the obvious first step. Oklahoma and other states should immediately grab the low-hanging fruit and stop the indefensible policy of using test score growth guesti-mates for sanctioning individuals. I’d hate to have to continue to waste scarce resources on test-driven accountability, but I’d be willing to engage in a discussion of whether bubble-in growth should count as .01% of 1%, or .5% or even .99% of 1% of a teacher’s evaluation. It would be a process worthy of The Onion.

I hadn’t known enough about the Minnesota waiver the administration now claims to read in such a manner. So, I’d missed the humor of the situation. If the administration is willing to contort itself into such a pretzel in order to free us from the quantitative portion of teacher evaluations, we should enjoy the ride. If it will go through such contortions to avoid admitting a mistake and to not offend the Billionaires Boys Club who dumped this fiasco on us, it should prompt more than groans.

 

Thompson says we should not be too hard on the administration. Give them credit–or at least that fig leaf–to salute their symbolic retreat from the testing disaster. Please note that Thompson counts Colorado’s testing mania as one of the worst in the nation, based on a law written by ex-TFA State Senator Michael Johnston, who became the state’s leading advocate of high-stakes testing with his obnoxious S. 191. Johnston received some sort of commendation at Harvard a few months ago, for unknown reasons. For sure, no educator in Colorado is grateful for his foisting high-stakes testing on everyone else.

So, Thompson’s advice is to encourage the administration to keep backtracking while the rest of us enjoy an unexpected outburst of good sense and perhaps a good belly laugh.