The Daily Howler has a few choice words for today’s opinion piece about how to reform teaching, by a Harvard professor.
The writer of the Daily Howler happens to be a former teacher and cares a lot about education.
Today he begins to dissect the NY Times article that I described as one of the dumbest ever.
He knows more about Harvard Professor Mehta than I do. He comes from Baltimore, where the Daily Howler livrs. His elite background may explain his contempt for public school teachers.
Today, the New York Times gave a lot of column inches to an article by a Harvard professor who claims to know how to fix the teaching profession.
He begins with the assertion that despite the many reforms of the past 30 years, the performance of our K-12 education system “remains stubbornly mediocre.”
His “evidence” is the test scores on the 2009 PISA in which the US scored about average.
Wouldn’t you expect a Harvard professor to check out the socioeconomic breakdown of the PISA scores which showed that US students in low poverty schools had scores higher than those of Japan, Finland, and other high scoring nations and that our average scores fell as the poverty level of the school increased? (Table 6, p. 15.)
Wouldn’t you expect a Harvard professor to cite the far better US scores on the 2011 TIMSS tests, where black eighth grade students in Massachusetts tied with their peers in Finland in math? If the Daily Howler noticed, why didn’t a Harvard professor?
He then goes on to say this, as though both Rhee and I are extremists and equally wrong:
“The debate over school reform has become a false polarization between figures like Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, who emphasizes testing and teacher evaluation, and the education historian Diane Ravitch, who decries the long-run effort to privatize public education and emphasizes structural impediments to student achievement, like poverty.”
Wouldn’t you think that a Harvard professor would see some relationship between the scandalously high rate of child poverty in the United States–about 23%–and low scores on international tests?
The rest of the article is an effort to shift the blame to teachers for what he claims is mediocrity. If only we could get “the best and the brightest!”
If only the professor would explain how the teaching profession will improve when state after state is demoralizing teachers with unproven evaluations based on test scores, stripping away protection for academic freedom, cutting benefits, and lowering standards for new teachers.
Grrrr.
In a brilliant post, Bruce Baker of Rutgers demonstrates that states are imposing teacher evaluation systems that are flawed.
This is what Arne Duncan and Bill Gates demanded, and this is what states are doing. And it is wrong, it is factually wrong.
Who will hold Duncan, Gates, and all those state officials accountable?
Chris Cerf in New Jersey and John King and Merryl Tisch in New York assure the public that the evaluation systems will work because they take many factors into account. But Baker demonstrates that they are wrong. The evaluation systems are fundamentally flawed and they will not work. They will do damage to schools, principals, teachers, and students.
Baker writes:
“The standard retort is that marginally flawed or not, these measures are much better than the status quo. ‘Cuz of course, we all know our schools suck. Teachers really suck. Principals enable their suckiness. And pretty much anything we might do… must suck less.
WRONG – it is absolutely not better than the status quo to take a knowingly flawed measure, or a measure that does not even attempt to isolate teacher effectiveness, and use it to label teachers as good or bad at their jobs. It is even worse to then mandate that the measure be used to take employment action against the employee.
It’s not good for teachers AND It’s not good for kids. (noting the stupidity of the reformy argument that anything that’s bad for teachers must be good for kids, and vice versa)
On the one hand, these ridiculous rigid, ill-conceived, statistically and legally inept and morally bankrupt policies will most certainly lead to increased, not decreased litigation over teacher dismissal.
On the other hand… The anything is better than the status quo argument is getting a bit stale and was pretty ridiculous to begin with.”
In a post today, a comment by a charter school teacher explains the high turnover in charter schools.
“Sadly, JUST like the teachers in KIPP, I got a job in a charter school WELL before realizing what this whole “school reform” movement was all about… didn’t know the difference between charter/public/private… and it’s only been over the course of several years, total exhaustion, and in the last few months of being enlightened about the “school reform” movement that I now understand what type of system I’m working in. Although I work with some wonderful people, I’ve seen the toxic result of the reform movement creeping in … always expecting more, doing more, giving more… . If you find ANY work/life balance, you “appear” lazy and you earn a reputation for “not doing your job” (because some of the expectations are through the roof. I’m sticking it out this year, but looking for either a public school position in a high SES neighborhood (where parents work with their kids and it doesn’t fall all on the teacher)… or a parochial school (where if I have to push kids so hard, at least I can pray with them too!) “
By now, we have all read the encomia heaped on KIPP, and we know that KIPP presumably has what Mayor Rahm Emanuel once referred to as the “secret sauce.” That is the extra ingredient that
magically turns ordinary kids into scholars bound for Harvard.
Gary Rubinstein, ex-TFA, went to visit a KIPP school. He didn’t see the magic. He saw young teachers struggling to control their classes.
Read it to see what goes on, and be sure to read the comments.
The New York Times recently reported on the introduction of software that is able to grade student essays and give instant feedback. It is currently being used in a number of universities; many others are likely to follow suit.
The student submits an essay and instantly receives a graded response from a computer. The student can then revise in hopes of improving the grade.
The software inevitably will be adopted for use in schools as well as colleges and universities.
Actually the Educational Testing Service already has an essay grader that can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. Michael Winerip wrote about this in another article in the New York Times, back when he had a regular education column.
In both articles, the chief critics of machine grading of essays is Lew Perelman of MIT, who teaches writing. He says that it is easy to game the system, to prep for it; he also says that the system cannot identify good writing. It does not like short sentences or short paragraphs. Worse, as he says about the ETS system, it cannot tell truth from falsehood:
“He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945,” he said.”
Brave New World, indeed.
Jay Mathews wrote that he no longer believes that teachers should be evaluated by test scores.
However, he went on to say that teachers should be judged by their principal, and that principal should have the absolute power to hire, pay, judge, and fire teachers at will. If we don’t like the principals, we should fire them and get others.
Here is the answer to Jay by Carol Burris, who was just named principal of the year by her colleagues in New York State:
The better answer is to put in place systems of supervision and evaluation like [Montgomery County’s] PAR [Peer Assistance and Review]. This obsession that we can ‘fear and fire’ our way to excellence, is nonsense. ‘Give them (principals) the power to hire, compensate and fire staff members as they see fit”. This principal says….bad idea. As is doing the same for principals. That is still putting evaluation by tests scores in a primary place. It will also make schools more political than they already are and create more “Atlantas”.
Gerald J. Conti’s eloquent, passionate letter of resignation ignited public discussion in Syracuse about the toxic, malicious changes now imposed on our public schools by federal and state policy. Private schools treasure dedicated, experienced teachers like Mr. Conti. But reformers insist on taking all autonomy out of their hands; standardizing their work; giving them a script; making sure they are doing precisely what all other teachers in the same classes are doing. He thinks of himself as a professional, and he can no longer bear to work in an environment that demeans and diminishes his professionalism.
New York State cannot afford to lose teachers like Mr. Conti. Let us hope that the tide will turn before we lose more.
Help his letter go viral. Post it on Facebook. Tweet it. Send it to your superintendent. Send it to the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and your local newspapers. Send it to your legislators.
Tell them to support our experienced educators. Tell them that teachers should be respected as professionals Tell them to support public education.
A reader comments:
The profitization of public education on the backs of students, parents & teachers is obscene to the spirit of the human being business we call Education. Families raise the children, educators prepare them for the free world as American citizens armed with knowledge and compassion to contribute to the good of this planet.
No matter how critical the corporate deformers think testing should be to the rest of us, WE educators have something they do not…experience.
The business model just doesn’t work quite the way they think it should in education. We aren’t manufacturing widgets, cookies or engine parts that are built through exact science and physics…all ingredients are the same in measure and substance to the finished product that rolls out on the assembly line after rejects are tossed out for scrap materials.
We are grooming human beings who are uniquely individual and diverse in their abilities, culture & wiring. Last time I looked out into my classroom, there weren’t any robots looking back at me.
It may feel right to test the living hell out of kids for the sake of using the latest data analysis and pretend it’s important to the artful task of teaching, but coming from a Southern farm growing up, I may know a thing or two about how to produce a fine, marketable outcome.
“You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it!” Testing is NOT teaching.
The results can redirect teaching, suggest new methods, offer ideas and determine that more time is needed for a child to learn the material, but excessive amounts of testing will not create a learned student. It is a waste of time beyond the basic measurement of how “fattened” s/he is with the knowledge needed to become a great American citizen.
That time is better used to connect, welcome an abiding relationship and create a more humane environment in which a child can truly learn and grow into the kind of citizen we all want going out into the world.
Quit the bickering, ignore the foul pundits who seem to think it’s okay to make blood money from their pitiful displays of greed and start speaking out against it all. This meek & mild approach to our work has to end. Some will be sacrificed, but that’s what happens in great battles.
We have all the good stuff on our side. Without an uprising and demanding of the right change, we will continue to suffer. The administration has been put in the middle of this tirade, forced to succumb to irrational mandates funded by philanthropists and govt interventions that do not work and from the top down, the teachers carry all that angst, frustration and fear into the classrooms where it is dumped onto the hearts and minds of students.
Make no mistake about this truth folks…the conditions of education are the conditions in your childrens’ classrooms. Always has been, always will be. It’s a human being business and no amount of infiltration of corporate shenanigans will ever change that. Don’t mess with human nature, big boys. You will never be greater than that reality. I am one “Edgy-cator” these days!
The Virginia Legislature passed legislation proposed by the governor that opens the door to privatizing any school in the Commonwealth that is found to be “failing.”
Rachel Levy has the details here
Governor McDonnell’s “Opportunity Education Institution” is an ALEC-inspired dream.
It creates a governor appointed commission that will take over schools with low test scores.
Levy writes:
“The Institution will be run by a board of gubernatorial appointees, which includes the executive director. There is no guarantee that the board would include any people who know anything about education. The board would contract with non-profits, corporations, or education organizations to operate the schools. Funding for the new bureaucracy would be provided by federal, state, and local taxpayers. The “failing” schools’ local governing bodies would be represented on the board in some way, but they would lose decision-making power and would not be able to vote or, from what I can tell, have much meaningful input, besides providing the same share of local funding and being responsible for maintenance of the school building. As for staffing, current faculty at the schools being taken over could apply for a position as a new employee with the OEI or apply for a transfer.”
And more:
“…teachers at the OEI schools would not have to be licensed, so the students who need the most experienced teachers would be getting the least experienced. Nor would those OEI teachers be entitled to the benefits, pay, or job protections that other Virginia teachers are, even if they were employed by the school being taken over prior to takeover. Who will want to work at such schools, or schools that look likely to be taken over? Interestingly enough, the members of the new OEI bureaucracy would be eligible for VRS (Virginia Retirement System) and other benefits that the teachers would lose.”
Levy points out that the tests are supposed to get harder and more schools will fall into the hands of the OEI. The basic idea is to use New Orleans as a model for Virginia, ignoring the fact that most charters in New Orleans have been rated a D or F by the state, and even the reformy Cowen Institute at Tulane said recently that two-thirds of the NOLA charters are academically unacceptable.
And then there is this consideration:
“Finally, eliminating democratic institution and processes in a democratic society is not a cure for dysfunction or low test scores. Certainly, mass failure on the SOL tests signals a problem, but before the state blames and disenfranchises school communities, it really needs to figure out what that problem is and then target its resources accordingly. While many majority poor schools do just fine on standardized tests, I think we all know that the schools with low standardized test scores are often majority poor. Last I checked, being poor isn’t a reason to disenfranchise communities and hand their schools over to outsiders.”
Levy urges you to act now. If you live in Virginia, speak up. Join with your friends and neighbors to stop this raid on the public’s schools.
“So, I urge you to contact Governor McDonnell (804-786-2211) and your state legislators ASAP to state your opposition to the Opportunity Education Institution and to tell them to vote against SB1324S and amendment 12. This bill is likely unconstitutional and it’s bad for Virginia–bad for public education and bad for democracy.”
