Plan of attack

The time has come to ask what exactly the people in charge of overseeing public education are trying to accomplish.

And I'm sorry, "Improving public education" isn't a good enough answer.  Nor is "making sure we have teacher accountability."  I want to know, specifically, why our elected officials and educational leaders are moving in the direction they are, along with evidence of how their decisions will work to accomplish their goals.

Because at the moment, a lot of it looks like a carefully-designed program to tear down the entire edifice.

[image courtesy of photographer Svetlana Miljkovic and the Wikimedia Commons]

Here are a couple of the latest salvos.  So let me tell you about those, and see if you agree with me.

Let's start, as so many attacks on education do, in the state of Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has appointed Donna Bahorich as the chairperson of the State Board of Education.

Bahorich is an ultraconservative who backed last year's decision to approve history texts that claimed that the United States Constitution is based on the bible, and that the American system of democracy was inspired by Moses.  She is strongly in favor of using money from taxpayers to support private religious schools.  Her qualifications?  She was a manager of a telephone company, campaign treasurer for Senator Dan Patrick (who himself has gone on record as stating that creationism should be taught in public schools), and a member of the pastor's council at Houston's Vineyard Church.  Her M.A. is in counseling from Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist bastion, Liberty University.

She chose to homeschool her own children.

So to summarize: Texas now has a woman in charge of their educational system who has never taught, did not send her own children to public school, seems to have no qualifications for the position whatsoever, and has shown herself to be an ideologue who would love to see free secular public education replaced by publicly-funded religious schools.

Even some of Abbott's Republican supporters think this is a misstep.  State Board member Thomas Ratliff said, "Public school isn’t for everybody, but when 94 percent of our students in Texas attend public schools I think it ought to be a baseline requirement that the chair of the State Board of Education have at least some experience in that realm, as a parent, teacher, something."

Yeah.  You'd think so.  But Texas isn't the only one.  Right here in my home state of New York, we have Merryl Tisch as chancellor of the State Department of Education, a woman whose sole experience with teaching was seven years in two wealthy private Jewish schools.

Is it becoming a requirement that in order to lead public education, you need to have no experience with public education?

Then, we have the ongoing attacks on teachers via the reliance on standardized tests to measure not only student progress, but teacher competence.  So given how much is resting on the outcome of those tests, you'd think that there'd be a great deal of emphasis on having qualified scorers, right?

But according to an exposé in The New York Times, the high-stakes exams from Pearson Education and other testing-for-profit corporations are being graded by people who not only have no teaching experience, but no background in pedagogy whatsoever:

There was a onetime wedding planner, a retired medical technologist and a former Pearson saleswoman with a master’s degree in marital counseling.  To get the job, like other scorers nationwide, they needed a four-year college degree with relevant coursework, but no teaching experience.  They earned $12 to $14 an hour, with the possibility of small bonuses if they hit daily quality and volume targets.

Bob Sanders, vice president for Content and Scoring Management at Pearson, said that none of that mattered.  "From the standpoint of comparing us to a Starbucks or McDonald’s, where you go into those places you know exactly what you’re going to get.  McDonald’s has a process in place to make sure they put two patties on that Big Mac.  We do that exact same thing. We have processes to oversee our processes, and to make sure they are being followed."

You know, Mr. Sanders, if you're trying to make an argument that you're dedicated to quality, comparing yourself to McDonalds might not be your best choice.

And then, we've got the more fundamental problem that the evaluation system itself is faulty.  Let's take my own situation as a case-in-point, because I just got my "final grade" for this school year yesterday.  The numerical grading system in New York has been in place for three years.  Two years ago, I scored a 92.  Last year, I scored a 91, missing the "highly effective" designation by one point.

This year, I scored an 80.

So according to New York State, I became 11% worse at teaching between last year and this one.  Good thing I didn't drop more than that; another 5% downward, and I'll be classified as "Developing," which is kind of funny given that I've taught for 28 years.  If I haven't "Developed" by now, I don't think it's gonna happen.

And the tailspin in my score is, of course, being laid at my feet, because there can't be any other contributing causes, right?  It couldn't be because of things like differences in student effort and work ethic from year to year, changes in the exam scaling, or the fact that 50% of one of the classes I was evaluated on this year were special needs students, including two tenth-graders who read at a fourth-grade level.

Nope, the drop in scores was clearly my fault.

What the hell is going on here?

Elected officials are appointing people to leadership roles in education who have little to no experience in public education.  A teacher evaluation system has been put in place that is not only so faulty that a student in a freshman statistics class could see the flaws, but has been handed over to for-profit corporations who farm out the actual scoring to people who have never spent a day working in a classroom.

You know, I don't tend to buy into conspiracy theories, but this is more and more looking like a well thought out strategy to destroy public education from the ground up.

I hope I'm wrong.  Incompetence and mismanagement are easier to forgive than deliberate, calculated malfeasance.  But as the problems pile up, and the solutions appear designed to make things worse, and the people appointed to be in charge continue to be selected from the ranks of anti-education demagoguery, my confidence that we're not seeing some kind of coordinated attack is becoming weaker and weaker.

Standardized incompetence

Why is it that the people trying to "fix the education system" seem hell-bent on making it worse?

It's a mysterious phenomenon.  There is now a mountain of evidence that (for example) standardized test scores are unreliable measures of both student progress and teacher competence, and yet we are increasingly using exactly those metrics for gauging both.  In my home state of New York, 20% of my "final grade" as a teacher is mandated to come from high-stakes standardized tests (in my case, the Living Environment Regents Exam, which may be the most poorly-constructed exam I've ever seen).

So given that we've had incontrovertible evidence that it's a bad idea to put the futures of our students and the careers of our teachers in the hands of the corporations who are paid big bucks to write ineffective standardized tests, what do you think would make sense, as a next step?

1. Reduce the emphasis on those tests, and go with measures devised to assess growth, creativity, and critical thinking.
2. Make the standardized test scores have an even higher impact by giving them more weight in end-year assessments for both students and teachers.

If you went for option #2, all I can say is, you understand the system of educational oversight all too well.  This latest idiotic idea was proposed by New York Chancellor of Schools Merryl Tisch, who wants test scores to trump everything else, including the evaluations of teachers done by competent school administrators.

In Tisch's own words, she proposes to:

... (e)liminate the locally selected measures subcomponent, established through local collective bargaining. The data reveal that the locally-negotiated process for assigning points and setting targets in this subcomponent do not differentiate performance in terms of the composite ratings that teachers and principals receive. Instead, assign 40 percentage points to student growth on State assessments and other comparable measures of student growth – including performance-based assessments.

And what is her rationale for proposing this?  It is, she says, because too many teachers were rated as competent by the previous metric.  The number rated "ineffective," Tisch said, was simply too low.  In other words: if the metric says that most teachers are doing their jobs, then the metric has to be inaccurate.

She also proposes monetary incentives for "high-performing teachers" and "teachers taking leadership roles," thus pitting one teacher against another in terms of who gets the highest-performing classes.

Let me take my own situation as an example.  This year, I am teaching only one section of Regents Biology (which I steadfastly refuse to call "Living Environment," largely because the last "paradigm shift" we had in New York State was called "Raising the Bar," and they "raised the bar" in my course by renaming it, which was considered raising the bar because "Living Environment" has more letters than "Biology" does).  In our school, primarily because of staffing and financial issues, we have gone to a model of dealing with special-needs students called "co-teaching."  Co-teaching allows the district to put virtually all of the "classified" (i.e. special education) students together in one class, and then to assign a special education co-teacher to be in the classroom with the subject-area teacher.

This year, I got the "co-taught" class.  Half of my 24 students are "classified."  In this class, I have students who read on the fifth grade level.  I have students who have behavioral disabilities.  I have an autistic child who shuts down whenever things get stressful, which averages four days out of five.  I have ten students who have yet to pass a single quiz this year, despite extra help from myself and the co-teacher, and "modifications" (i.e., quizzes that have been adjusted to be easier to pass).

This is one of the classes on which I will be evaluated this year.  What do you think my chance of being rated "effective" is going to be?  If there was a monetary incentive this year, I'd be unwise to make advanced plans for spending it.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the kids in that class.  They are, by and large, sweet, cooperative, funny, and earnest.  My co-teacher is a wonderful educator, and we have a great working relationship.  But to call the two of us incompetent because we can't get this group of kids to pass the state assessment is to ignore the reality that we cannot treat teachers like factory workers, and kids like widgets that have to be made to a particular specification.

The ironic piece of all of this is how completely obvious this is to anyone who has spent any time in a public school, and how mysterious it all seems to the people in charge.  Merryl Tisch, for example, has in her career spent only seven years teaching children -- and these were years spent in wealthy private schools.  I would humbly suggest that perhaps, wild idea though it may be, we should have the people in charge of public education be individuals who have devoted their lives to teaching children, of all sorts of backgrounds, in public schools.

I would also humbly suggest that Ms. Tisch doesn't know what the hell she's doing.  Nor did our former Commissioner, John King, who oversaw both the APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) and Common Core implementation disasters that have taken place in New York over the last couple of years.  But since in government, you can't screw something up badly enough to stop you from getting promoted, King is now going to work as a top assistant to U. S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

How have we gotten here, to treating teachers like untrustworthy assembly-line workers, and children like little cookie-cutter images?  It doesn't take being a teacher to see how absurd the latter is; anyone who has children of their own knows that they develop at different rates, excel at different things, have different problems, different stumbling blocks.  The idea that anyone could take a random group of tenth graders (for example), and get them to the same place at the same time, is moronic.

And the idea that if the kids aren't all at the same place at the same time by the end of the year, it's the teacher's fault, is somewhere beyond moronic, in that ethereal realm that there really isn't a word in the English language to describe.

I think the answer about how we got here is twofold.  First, people want a uniform product.  That 1950s-mentality, construction-line model is sunk deep into the American psyche.  And if we can't achieve it, we naturally look around for scapegoats.  Teachers are convenient in that regard, aren't they?

The second reason, though, is more pernicious, and it is, to state it bluntly, the almighty dollar.  It's financially expedient to blame the teachers, turn everything into numbers, and act as if those numbers mean something real.  By doing so, you (1) pretend that the problem is fixable without actually changing anything substantive; (2) frustrate the absolute hell out of experienced teachers, who then get out of the profession, saving districts money; (3) avoid considering solutions that might truly work, like reducing class sizes, creating classrooms with differentiated instruction to better meet the needs of children with different abilities and challenges, and allowing schools to beef up programs that encourage creativity, such as music and art.

Nope.  That's not the way, say policy wonks like Tisch.  Test the little buggers to a fare-thee-well, because that somehow will tell you what is really going on, both with the kids and with the teachers who are trying their best to teach them, despite larger classes, less funding, and more absurd busy-work from state agencies.  Reduce funding via state taxes, and simultaneously put a cap on local levies, thus forcing school boards into the Hobson's choice of cutting virtually the only thing they have control over, which is staffing.  (And guess what goes first?  The aforementioned "non-core" subjects like art and music.)

But the wonks keep rising to the top, and the teachers keep saying this sort of thing, and keep getting ignored.  To pay attention to us would be to admit that we're on the wrong course, and have been on the wrong course for some time.  Which would mean that our educational leaders have achieved a score of...

... ineffective.  And we can't have that, right?

Of course, right.