Teachers Arraigned Before the Accountability Gods

An utterly tiresome nostrum being circulated by education pundits, particularly those in the current mainstream reform camp, emphasizes the need for accountability. We might well ask, accountability for what, of whom, and to whom?

The putative virtues of accountability have been rehearsed so often, by minds that appear to be set on autopilot, that I will reprise them only briefly here. We are reminded, again and again, as if the repetition made the claims true, that virtually every business and profession entails accountability; that taxpayers advance funds for the education of our children, and have a right to see some results; that accountability is a normal part of adult responsibility; and so on. All true; I have no objections to any of these claims.

But why is it that everyone suddenly feels it necessary to sit in the Judgment Seat, as if their main contribution to children's educations, for which we should be eternally thankful, consisted in setting up accountability systems, banging on the table, and demanding results? Great, you want high test scores . . . so do we, and so have we, for many years. But what exactly is the contribution you accountability hawks are making, or have made, that gives you the right to bang the table and make demands? Is it that you cut a bunch of clever deals for yourselves, made buddies of the right people at the right cocktail parties and in the right backroom offices, snookered the voters with enough unfulfilled promises often enough to advance in your political careers and then sneaked away, on to another inside job, before the voters ever had the chance to catch up with you? Just who are you people, and what have you ever done for students who really needed help? Oh, perhaps you attended fundraisers, shook your heads in synchrony with other supposedly knowing one-percenters -- those you had met in the Ivy League colleges your fathers paid for, and that you now feel guilty about, realizing that your careers were made by the unequal access to resources that you now decry -- about those terrible, failing public schools; perhaps you even did some charity work, devoting one or two Saturdays to playground construction or some other unpaid manual labour at a school in a tough neighbourhood, and then felt good about yourselves as you drove back to your own far more comfortable neighbourhoods. Perhaps you even taught for two years, or even a little more, and then gathered your wisdom and set yourself up in some advocacy job, so that your main contributions to children's educations then consisted in "standing up for the poor", and telling everyone else what to do, without actually having the courage to stick around long enough to try implementing your own advice yourselves.

What gives you the right to sit in the Judgment Seat and try teachers?

And why are you so hyper-confident that your teacher appraisal formulas are just what our educational systems need, among the numerous other proposals, some of them based on the actual research that you don't have time to read, for school improvement that you could be supporting? And why are you threatening teachers' livelihoods, their careers, on the basis of statistical arguments that are in dispute, including by the expert who formerly ran statistical evaluation for the Educational Testing Service that writes our nation's most important tests?

Are you familiar with the sin of hubris, as you direct this ongoing tragedy?

It's time to back off, stop pushing educators into corners, and reconsider so that together we can move forward in a direction offering more hope.    

Of Federalism in Education

The three best educational systems I know of -- those of Australia, Canada, and Switzerland -- are all federal in nature, the last two (which I think are the best of all) especially so. And please don't think that I derived this result as one I had been seeking in advance for ideological reasons -- in other words, that I decided in advance that I liked federalism, and went seeking after the fact for justifications and ratings that coincided with my ideological preferences. Quite the reverse happened; I decided on criteria by which I would rank educational systems, then saw how those systems ranked related to the various criteria, then published a summary of my findings, and only afterwards noticed that the top finishers all had federal systems.

These findings are salient in this political season, this being the weekend between our two national party conventions and with Margaret Spellings and others being interviewed on the sidelines by media like Education Week. I reflect on what Mr. Bush's administration attempted to do with respect to education, and on what President Obama's administration is currently doing, and detect some bad moves, mostly due to a morally justifiable desire to make a difference in the lives of our nation's underachieving poor, who lack the equal opportunities they should be entitled to according to our founding national ideology. But while I think these two administrations' educational efforts morally justified, I think they have been tactically ill-advised, and that they are stimulating a backlash that could set back the federal Department of Education for decades.

It may well be the case that, with regard to primary and secondary education, most matters are best addressed at more local levels, and that federal educational leaders should revise their visions of their jobs and their policy priorities accordingly. The problem may essentially be one of talent, and where a society's stock of human capital is most likely to allocate itself in large vs. small countries. In most international comparisons of education (for example, Marc Tucker's Surpassing Shanghai and Vivien Stewart's A World-Class Education), the most admired systems are those of small nations like Finland and Singapore, which would be best likened in our nation to a (sovereign) state and city school district, respectively. These countries do not have ambitions or visions of global dominance, as ours has; and therefore, while a lot of top government talent in the United States aims for positions in the state and defense departments, where they can vitally influence the affairs of the world, talented young Finns and Singaporeans, not having these outlets, will have a likelier attraction to a field like education, and will try to better the lives of their fellow citizens and future generations through this career. This of course is attractive to American educational commentators, who may long for a society that would make heroes out of educators, rather than consigning us to the also-ran obscurity in which many of us toil. But it is unrealistic to expect the United States of America to start acting as if we were Finland or Singapore.

Perhaps we should let our federal government take a more modest role towards directing educational destinies, and allow leadership to emerge at less exalted levels, which is where we already have educational institutions established for such purposes. 

The Common Core Math Standards Have Failed Already

To be more precise, that title should read, "The Common Core Math Standards Developers" have failed, and this will cause difficulties for all who have committed to them and who may be unable to escape those commitments. For example, in my home state of California, the new mission statement printed in "A Blueprint for Great Schools" begins, "California will provide a world-class education for all students, from early childhood to adulthood." But it can't do so if it follows the Common Core, because under the latter, students will not begin algebra until ninth grade, and therefore won't learn any calculus in high school. Even under the "compacted" sequence the core documents discuss in Appendix A to their presentation, advanced students will be "encouraged" (147) to take Calculus, which continues to be deemed a "college" course, in their senior year. Contrast this with the mathematics career of my younger son, who, as his older brother did, will start algebra next year, in seventh grade, and therefore will be on track to repeat his older brother's success in Calculus in the eleventh grade, and thus will be able to have proved he can do advanced mathematics by the time his college applications are read.

This makes it sound like my children are geniuses, but they aren't; they are merely doing what every child entering middle school in Korea is scheduled to do, and they are getting the nearest American equivalent to the mathematics education they would have received in Korea if they had stayed there. And Korea isn't unique; children in China (including Hong Kong), Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore generally follow a similar path, and will remain ahead of American children even after this expensive national experiment in mathematics reform is completed.

This means that this much ballyhooed change isn't much of a change at all -- that calculus is still considered "college" mathematics in the United States, even though it's high school mathematics across east Asia -- and this is a signal that the mathematics establishment in America (I'm thinking first and foremost of our for-profit publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, and also of that non-profit special interest group run like a for-profit, the College Board) were able to infiltrate themselves into the core of the reform process so as to generate results that will mean both gigantic potential contracts (there is enough change here, especially because of the computerized test delivery model, to require a new generation of products) and minimal content revisions to their existing inventory. This is a sweet deal for them, and won't disturb the private school market either, because if American families want a world-class education for their children, they will have to continue to look to private schools to deliver it, especially in California, where state officials appear to have tied their buoy to a sinking cruise ship.

Rather Than a Single Formula, a Single Process

I have criticized the various recent proposals floating around the country for new teacher appraisal systems on many grounds, including being instances of the fallacy of composition, which in this case means the notion that a complex activity like teaching, in its many different permutations in different subjects and grade levels, can be reduced to a single formula, to be applied uniformly across entire states. Reasonable friends might ask, "Okay, if you oppose these fomulas, what would you do? Surely you don't want to leave the status quo in place?"

Indeed I don't. What I propose is a single process oriented towards improvement for all teachers, rather than any single formula for judging their putative merit. Such a process would have all teachers meet with their immediate supervisors (ideally this would be a teaching inspector, but I'll save that idea for another post) near the start of the school year, say around October, to set targets related to aspects of their job description and to establish personalized professional development plans to help each teacher reach those individually chosen targets. A cycle of coaching sessions and follow-up meetings would continue during the year, with these oriented towards helping each teacher get better. Near the end of the year (somewhere between April and June), a summative appraisal meeting between the teacher, the immediate supervisor, and the administrator the next level up would write out the annual formal performance review, with the teacher's own written self-assessment discussed before management produces its formal appraisal, with its paragraphs detailing the supervisor's reasoning and with the teacher's performance crystallized in a number representing a holistic assessment of that performance while also utilizing the same scale that the school uses to assess its students and managers.

Why Teacher Appraisals Should Not Directly Include Student Test Scores

I can immediately think of four reasons why student test scores should not be counted as any direct percentage of a teacher's performance appraisal: (1) it is inherently unjust to judge person A on the basis of person B's performance; (2) any such formula is by definition an instance of the fallacy of composition; (3) it will destroy teacher morale, and therefore end up costing taxpayers more at a time when we haven't money to pay for those increases; and (4), worst of all, the backwash effect of any increased emphasis on testing will continue to degrade the educations our students are receiving.

(1) I am completely willing to be judged on my performance, but given my experience at Locke High School, where I heard of students making funny face designs out of their Scantron answer sheets on tests which held no stakes for them, I believe the potential for abuse is too great to make important decisions about people's employment and careers on such a flimsy basis.

(2) The most valuable class I had in college was Philosophy 9, Practical Logic, at UCLA. One lecture dealt with logical fallacies, and one of those included was the fallacy of composition, which assumes that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. It isn't; the arrangement of the parts matters as well, and it is often difficult to completely identify all of the parts in any complex activity, of which teaching is one. Imagine Mrs. Lincoln being asked to give her review of Our American Cousin: we can imagine her dutifully filling out a form about the play's plot, acting, direction, and so on; there would not likely be a category about one's date's safety included on the form, but the Ford Theatre's lack of security had a decisive influence on her experience of the play ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"). Similarly, there are far more aspects to successful teaching than are being discussed in any of the reductive formulas being passed around, and the last thing we need is a formula-based simplification of the teaching profession akin to the simplified reductions in curricular learning we have seen as a result of the formula-based assessments that proliferated after No Child Left Behind.

(3) I have read that, wherever such formulas have been tried around the world, they have been intensely disliked, and it's hard to see why we should now expect an exception. Teachers' morale is already at a historical low, as recorded on surveys going back to the 1980s, and as we drive young people away from entering such a badly appreciated career, the only way to attract and retain people in a job whose intrinsic satisfactions have so badly declined will be by compensating teachers with higher salaries, and our states and taxpayers do not have big pots of money lying around waiting to be drawn upon to pay those higher wages.

(4) I used to teach Advanced Placement English as well as classes preparing those students who had already failed California's High School Exit Examination multiple times so as to help them pass that test, so I am well acquainted with teaching to high stakes tests; but many subjects (art, music, vocational, and others) are not oriented towards such tests, nor should they be; and we have entirely too much testing going on already, particularly in our increasingly miserable primary schools. A predictable consequence of this appraisal proposal will be having teachers whose job security and salaries are dependent on their students' scores not put students first and do what is best for them, but instead put themselves first by turning their classrooms into appalling test prep factories. I have already noticed a change in my younger son's school, from which he graduated this week and from which his older brother graduated eight years earlier. The older teachers in my older son's school knew how to teach interesting lessons and units that did not end in some sort of standardized test, and so the best part of the school year was after such tests were finished, in May. By contrast, the younger teachers and new leaders in my younger son's school seem to have no idea what to do once the testing is finished; the last five weeks of the school year are a round of parties and games and are devoid of learning, a complete ripoff of the taxpayers, and this apparently has met with administrative approval.

I know some will think I am switching sides here, but I believe reform has gone badly off the rails in the last few years, and I urge the teachers in Los Angeles and similar communities to reject this bad idea being promoted by well intentioned people.

On Teacher Appraisal

I was talking last week with some friends well placed to be influential with regard to upcoming innovations in teacher tenure and appraisal. In short, I expect that moves to replace LIFO (the last in, first out rule that governs who gets laid off in what order when districts face budget shortfalls, which seem never-ending in California) will come to this state as they already have in several others. I support replacing LIFO, and last year appeared in a StudentsFirst video explaining why I do (schools should be free to hire and retain the staff they think will serve students best: this is particularly necessary if we're going to start holding principals more accountable, as we should). But two of my friends, well informed on these matters and reasonable educators with relevant experience, raised two objections: (1) how are you going to ask teachers to give up LIFO in this economy without knowing what's going to replace it, and more specifically how they will be appraised, and (2) even if you have a great appraisal system, who is going to implement it fairly when you have so many untrained, underqualified principals filling the middle management ranks of our school systems?

I recognize that point 2 is a valid concern, but only propose to treat of point 1 today; I'll only point out here that if we get this appraisal issue right, our general talent level in education will rise over time. We may well need transitional arrangements in the meantime.

 I've been studying appraisal systems in my usual comparative way for some time now, primarily because the school (One World Secondary) I am planning to open will eventually need one, and secondarily because this is a hot topic in education policy debates these days. Possibly the best system in current operation is that of Singapore, its Enhanced Performance Management System (EPMS). This system has been operational since 2005, and has succeeded in attracting and retaining a large cohort of talented, qualified teachers in one of the world's best run school systems. Under EPMS, all Singaporean teachers, like all other civil servants in that Chinese-dominated, multi-ethnic society, are appraised annually. Teachers who perform well receive bonuses of 10-30% (smaller than the performance components we are proposing at One World) and are eligible for promotions along one of three career tracks, not all of which require them to leave the classroom, a defect common in our education personnel systems. So performing well leads to increased pay and attractive promotions along with high status (teaching is the second most respected career among college students in Singapore, behind medicine but ahead of law, business, and the many other careers outcompeting education in the United States), while performing poorly leads to counselling and targeted professional development and can lead to the removal of teachers from classrooms into other careers to which they will be presumably better suited in an economy whose unemployment rate remains near two percent.

We have a lot to learn from EPMS, which has continued to be revised annually, which is fundamental to One World's teacher appraisal system, and which should be studied in districts throughout the United States.

The Future in the Past

I've just finished Steven Brill's Class Warfare, which I read like a Daily Racing Form for the American education reform movement (which I've been a past member of, but now identify more with Governor Brown's formulation, "a reformed reformer"). Though long, the book's brisk style keeps the pages turning; for specialists it lacks depth, but is a good primer for those new to the controversies.

Now out of all that cast of characters, a number of whom I know personally and in a few cases pretty well, whom do I most identify with, and with whom would I most like to team up? Al Shanker! Al Shanker was a man passionately devoted to raising the status of teaching to that of a true profession; I admire that, and fomented the revolt at Locke in part to also raise the status of teachers (which hopes were dashed by our intended partnership being transformed into a takeover by Green Dot). Shanker was one of the earliest advocates of charter schools, which he envisioned as (unionized) laboratories for pedagogical experimentation and innovation, particularly for those struggling in our regular public schools; my vision also was and is for teacher-led and teacher-empowering chartered schools, rather than those with business practices and business mentalities foisted upon them by people who don't understand teachers or teaching. Shanker also supported school choice for families stuck in disadvantaged neighbourhoods by supporting allowing them to cross district lines, while I have already written a previous post identifying school district boundaries as a source of much of the inequality and injustice in American society. Shanker was open to more meaningful teacher appraisals and performance pay, both of which I support. I only wish we could resurrect him from the dead. Reaching back into Shanker's past may well provide a good way forward as we move into the future.