Avoid Top-down Policies that Disrespect Teaching

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a point--the prevailing system for preparing, recruiting, evaluating, retaining, and compensating teachers does not work well.  There is broad agreement that prospective teachers require more clinical experience; that inexperienced teachers need more and better mentoring; that evaluations of classroom teachers are routinized and of little value; that accumulated course credits do not usually pay off in better classroom performance; that seniority doesn’t guarantee quality instruction; and, that it is too cumbersome and expensive to dismiss bad teachers. 

But “broad agreement” disappears when the conversation shifts to fixing the mess.  The Obama Administration wants to, daringly, use the federal stimulus funds to not only prevent teacher layoffs, but to prod states into revamping their teacher evaluation policies. It is placing very large bets on the speculative proposition that teachers are motivated by compensation. Secretary Duncan wants to require states to get ready to evaluate and compensate teachers by how well their students perform on standardized tests.  Its persistence and intensity in advancing this proposal ignores the primitive and unreliable state of methodologies for teacher evaluation and devalues the complexity and difficulty of teaching.

Simultaneously, Secretary Duncan urges that the 50-state array of academic standards and standardized tests be demolished.  NCLB mandated academic standards and testing, testing, testing.  Most states responded by adopting too many, badly weakened standards.  Mandated tests were gamed to produce misleadingly positive results.  While the Obama Administration seeks to tighten both standards and tests—a laudatory objective—it will use the current contaminated system to impose its new vision for teacher evaluation and compensation.   

Another problem is that the Administration’s focus on its teacher evaluation scheme deflects energy and resources from policies and practices that are indisputably more effective in narrowing the achievement gap, such as, high-quality pre-schooling that is closely linked to intensive early literacy in the primary grades.

Imagine a tougher job.  Most professionals are paid a lot more than teachers, but none are expected to deal with such an unpredictable stew of problems with so little support, advice, or preparation.  Secretary Duncan wants to clean up the bottom 5% of U.S. schools, most of which are found in poor neighborhoods.  Imagine you teach in one of those schools, a composite profile of which I have drawn from my analysis of high-poverty schools in New Jersey.  How would “pay for performance” affect you if . . .
You greet 27 bubbling third graders as school opens in your second year of teaching at PS #7.  Everyone qualifies for free or reduced lunch. Nine of your students were not at #7 last year—two were in the district, the others came from other cities or Guatemala and Mexico (your Spanish is below tourist grade).   Their records are non-existent or badly incomplete, requiring that you spend valuable time early in the year assessing their skills. 

The district introduced a new math series this year.  You spent four August days learning from the publisher that you must shift from a heavy emphasis on the mechanics of arithmetic to emphasizing mathematical concepts in your daily lesson plans (which will be checked by the principal each week).  Being math-phobic, you find this change unnerving.  Moreover, your teacher colleagues are no more confident, and the math supervisor is not expected until early October.

In setting up reading groups for the 90 minutes of morning literacy, you find that only five students are reading on grade level.  Small wonder. Seven students were promoted from a #7 second-grade class that was taught almost exclusively by substitute teachers.  Some of the newcomers don’t read at all, and three of them know no English.  You ask the principal for some help with the English learners.  “I’ll check downtown,” is the answer.   Not sure what to do, you read them stories in English from 1st grade picture books.

Every night you prepare new ways to get your students engaged with the content of tomorrow’s lessons.  Math is particularly tough since it’s all new to you.  And there are writing drafts to be edited and quizzes graded.

By Thanksgiving, four students have transferred out, their places taken by new students, including one more from Mexico.  Two students have been evaluated with “specific learning disabilities” by the child-study team, bringing to four the number of special education students.  This means that you must adjust your lesson plans to the specific requirements of their “individual educational plans.” 

With high turnover and your struggles with the “new math,” your class falls behind the district’s curricular schedule, particularly in science and social studies.  The principal wants to know which students are below grade level in math and reading so that they can be “invited” to the “Saturday Academy” that begins in January to prepare for the late-April state tests.  Almost all your students qualify.  In February, everyone begins the drills mandated by the central office—endless picture prompts for the writing tests, sample multiple-choice worksheets, and short explanations for how math problems were solved.  They’re boring, repetitive, and enervating.

Professional development?  You get two half-days on math and one visit from the bilingual supervisor.  The school’s reading coach has helped you set up small reading groups, but the math supervisor has been invisible.  The principal dropped by to caution about noisy bathroom runs, but offered no comment on your teaching.

Twenty-five students sit for the three-day tests in reading, writing, and math (three of the English learners are exempted).  Of these, only 16 started with you in September; two arrived in March.  By the time the test results are received, school is out.  Only seven of your students were “proficient” but the scale scores were average for School #7.  The students you taught all year did noticeably better than the newcomers.  The disabled and English learners did the worst. 

You worked hard and did the best you could.  Given the severity of the pedagogical problems you inherited, you received precious little help from the district, principal, or supervisors.  The state test scores confirmed that your students performed poorly when compared to other students in the wealthiest state in the Union.  Secretary Duncan proposes that those scores are good enough to judge whether you should be invited back for a third year of teaching or receive an increment in your salary. 

Not everyone teaches in a failed school.  I have a friend who teaches history in one of those suburban New Jersey high schools where 100% of the kids graduate, 90% go onto four-year universities, mostly highly selective.  The school system is so well regarded that families pay a 20-25% premium in home prices and property taxes.  The school scores 100% on the state assessments, which are treated as a six-hour nuisance, not as a measure of educational mastery.  What counts are the standards for scoring 3+ on the AP tests.

My friend works just as hard as the teacher in the failing school.  It is not easy to engage students who lead busy lives, and to inspire them to dig deeper than the district curriculum requires, to write real research papers on complicated subjects, and to polish them to high standards of clarity and readability.  She reports that not all her colleagues are as focused on teaching to such a rigorous standard.  Some get along on old lesson plans and avoid careful editing of student papers or in tackling graduate courses in their subject.

My friend teaches a subject that is not tested by the state.  Her colleagues who do, face no threat from disappointing results.  Secretary Duncan’s plan to connect teachers to their students and to the state test results is irrelevant in this and other higher-performing districts. 

Teacher accountability schemes assume that teachers are holding back.  Despite the rhetoric about hard-working, dedicated, and compassionate teachers, the implicit belief of those most persistent about “pay for performance” is that teachers know what to do, but just won’t do it because they are not adequately compensated for the extra effort. 

Teacher accountability weds two related and incorrect notions: first, that teaching is a mechanistic process of inputs and outputs, and that the teacher’s contribution to the outputs can be fairly measured by standardized tests.

The Secretary’s twin conclusions that easily-manipulated tests of lousy academic standards need to be scrapped, but that they are okay as measures of teacher performance defy logic.