The turning of the tide

Sometimes writing this blog seems like whispering into a windstorm.

There are so many loopy ideas out there that attacking them is like taking on the Hydra -- cut one down, and there are nine more lurching up to take its place.  Now, to be fair, they're not all equally destructive; my attitude is that if you'd like to believe in Bigfoot, or ghosts, or astrology, there's no real harm in it as long as you don't mind people like me laughing in your general direction sometimes.

On the other hand, there are some crackpot ideas that cause direct harm, and to me, this crosses a line.  At that point, I tend to stop poking gentle fun, and start getting hostile.  These include homeopathy, anti-vaxx, and treating mental illness as if it were demonic possession (and, of course, as if demons themselves were real).

But nothing makes my blood boil like attacks on education.  Not only are we talking about my career, here; we're talking about the children.  We're talking about the young people who will grow up to lead our country, our next generation of doctors, nurses, technicians, scientists, scholars, and lawyers.

The whole battle has become increasingly heated lately, to the point that the powers-that-be on the state and federal level are feeling a little... beleaguered.  And they should be.  They have sold out to corporate interests, to the likes of Pearson Education and the Educational Testing Service.  They have ceded our nation's future to a group of men and women who believe that only that which is quantifiable is real, who value test scores above creativity and depth of understanding, and who believe that it is fair to hook the evaluation of educators to these same meaningless streams of numbers.

But the chickens are coming home to roost.  Parents are, in increasing numbers, opting their children out of high-stakes standardized tests.  No, I'm sorry, my child won't be in school today.  He's sick.  Oh, he has a standardized test today, and it'll have to be rescheduled for three weeks from Tuesday?

I'm sorry, he's going to be sick that day, too.

Teachers, too, are fighting back, where they can.  Unfortunately, school districts' hands are often tied by capricious laws that link funding to cooperation with poorly-thought-out state mandates.  But our voices are getting louder.  Just last week, a New Jersey teacher named Melissa Tomlinson confronted New Jersey governor Chris Christie at a rally, asking him, "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?"

He shouted at her, "Because they are!"

Tomlinson, undaunted, threw back at him his record of defunding public education, a record that included cuts of over one billion dollars in his first year in office.  At this point, Christie lost it completely, screaming at her, "I am tired of you people!  What do you want?  Just do your job!"

Another teacher, Mark Naison, had the following to say about the encounter:

What do I want? What do 'we people' want? We want to be allowed to teach. Do you know that the past two months has been spent of our time preparing and completing paperwork for the Student Growth Objectives? Assessments were created and administered to our students on material that we have not even taught yet. Can you imagine how that made us feel? The students felt like they were worthless for not having any clue how to complete the assessments. The teachers felt like horrible monsters for having to make the students endure this. How is that helping the development of a child? How will that help them see the value in their own self-worth. This futile exercise took time away from planning and preparing meaningful lessons as well as the time spent in class actually completing the assessments. The evaluations have no statistical worth and has even been recognized as such by the NJ Department of Education.

Christie's not the only one who's under siege for his support of destructive educational policy.  Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin has come under criticism from several fronts over her support of a teacher assessment model that gives each school a grade of A through F based solely upon students' performance on standardized tests.  Schools scoring in the D to F range can be closed, the entire teaching staff fired (with a maximum 50% rehire rate), and then reopened -- under state control.

This, despite a joint study by the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University found that what schools are doing is only responsible for 20-30% of student achievement -- the remainder being accounted for by factors outside of school control, such as socioeconomic status and parental support.  A spokesperson for the governor, Alex Weintz, said that he was "dismayed" to find that teachers' unions were using the report to discredit the A-F evaluation model, and that the governor "does not support" the findings of the report.

"It’s not helpful to anyone’s cause," Weintz said.  "It seems to be some opponents are absolutely bent on undermining the credibility of the entire system.  The fact of the matter is this grading system, regardless of whether or not you believe it should have been put together differently, is the law."

Regardless, apparently, of whether or not the grading system actually reflects anything real.

Then, just two days ago, Dr. Gary Johnson, Director of Special Education Advocacy and Instruction at the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center in Utah, testified before the Wisconsin State Legislature -- and said that the tests associated with the new Common Core Learning Standards amount to "cognitive child abuse."  The exams, he said, have little in the way of norming or peer review, and no validation studies -- meaning that using the scores to evaluate anything would be questionable, but using them to draw conclusions on the success or failure of schools is downright absurd.  "The US Department of Education's testing policies are like The Wild Wild West," Johnson said.  "They are doing what they want with no accountability, no constraints, and no oversight."

Here in my home state of New York, the backlash against the people who put us in our current predicament has been so strong that there have been demands that Commissioner of Education John King resign -- the latest from the New York State Allies for Public Education.

Troubled times, these.  It's easy to lose hope, and heaven knows my morale lately has been at its lowest since I can remember.  But there are signs that the tide might be turning.  My post last week about the lack of trust in educators got hits from all over New York State, and beyond -- and responses that included support from principals, superintendents, and school board members.  As a result of what I wrote, I've been invited to be part of a regional panel that will look at the teacher evaluation model, and other current issues in education.  All around me, I see people organizing, participating in peaceful resistance, speaking their minds and refusing to be silenced.

And perhaps this will, finally, be enough to turn things around.  Maybe we can break the stranglehold on education wielded by the top-down micromanagers, the b-b stackers in the state and federal departments of education who have never taught a day in their lives, but who think they know best how to educate children and evaluate teachers.  This is not a fight against accountability, as it has been characterized by the besieged politicians who still support the current model, and who are (sadly) still in charge of crafting educational policy; this is a demand for reasonable accountability, for an approach to education that gives every child a chance to excel, for assessments that generate statistics which actually mean something.

So I'm trying to stay optimistic, here, and toward that end I keep telling myself, over and over, that wonderful quote from Mohandas Gandhi:

How not to evaluate educators

In his talk "The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" (which you can, and should, watch in its entirety here), Daniel Pink describes how the micromanagement and punishment-and-reward system built into the American workplace model simply don't work.  Pink, who worked as an aide to Labor Secretary Robert Reich and who was listed as one of the fifty most influential management thinkers in the world, describes several studies that have findings that are astonishing -- including one that found that in tasks that require engagement and creativity, reward-and-punishment strategies lead to poorer performance.

But what interests me most comes in the middle of the talk, where he describes an Australian software company, Atlassian, that instituted a policy that runs completely counter to the usual business model.  Once a month, every employee at Atlassian is given an entire day to do whatever they'd like to -- in Pink's words, "you can work on whatever you want, with whoever you want, but you have to show us the result in 24 hours."

"In that one day of pure, undiluted autonomy," Pink states, "this has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, and a whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise would never have emerged."

Autonomy, then -- up to a point, certainly, but far beyond what most businesses are willing to try -- increases productivity, engagement, motivation, and morale.  We do our best, most creative work without someone breathing down our necks.

Which brings me to the latest from the New York State Department of Education.

Some of you may remember from previous posts that the most recent brainstorm from NYSED is that this year the teachers are getting numerical grades.  Yes, folks, in a month or so, I'm going to be getting a report card!

Only fair, you might say, given that I do the same to my students.  And honestly, I have no problem with accountability; I welcome being observed and evaluated.  There is nothing to be gained by a policy that allows inadequate teachers to continue indefinitely in the same job.

The problem is the way the grade is calculated.  Part of it is based on observations by an administrator; but 40% comes from how well students meet "SLOs" -- "Student Learning Objectives" -- based on their performance on standardized tests.  To determine whether the students met their SLOs, an exit exam is administered, and used to see if the student met or exceeded a "target" score based on scores on a pre-assessment.

Let me give you an example from my own class that will illustrate why this is a statistically spurious method.

I teach, amongst other things, AP Biology.  It's a notoriously tough subject, full of technical terms and difficult concepts.  For this class, the "pre-assessment" used is the average of the students' scores on the Regents (Introductory) Biology and Regents Chemistry exams.  Now, the problem is, these are both dramatically easier classes and exams; most of the students who made it to AP Biology scored in the 90s on the Regents Biology exam and at least in the 80s on the Regents Chemistry exam.  So the students walk in with, most of them, a "pre-assessment" score of around 90.

Then, at the end of the year, they hit my cumulative, college-level final.

I can say that almost without exception, everyone scores lower on that exam than they did on their "pre-assessment."  In fact, this year, 12 out of 23 students who took my final did not meet their "state target scores" -- in other words, in New York State's eyes, the students, and I, have failed.  From the point of view of the people at NYSED, it looks like the year my students spent in my class actively made them stupider.

But it gets better.  Because just yesterday, we received a communiqué from Ken Slentz, the Deputy Commissioner of Education in New York State.  The message stated that students who are not eligible to take the science Regents exams because they did not turn in enough labs during the school year -- New York has a requirement that high-school-level science students do a minimum of thirty hours of labs to get credit -- are counted as zeroes against the teacher's score.

You read that right.  A student who was out for medical reasons, and who is on home tutoring and cannot do labs -- which three of my students were, this year, for months at a time -- not only is penalized by not being allowed to take the final exam, but that zero is counted as a failure of the teacher's.  Students who simply disengage, and decide that they have no particular interest in turning in anything, are also counted against the teacher's evaluation score.  "It is the responsibility of the teacher to ensure that all students meet lab requirements so that they are able to sit for the Regents exam," Slentz wrote in an email that was sent to every high school science teacher in New York.  "The Department recommends that districts... create processes that ensure students have opportunities to make up lab requirements."

As a student put it, when I discussed this policy in my Critical Thinking classes, "Wow.  First, teachers have an incentive to give easy final exams.  Now they have an incentive to lie about whether we turned in our lab reports."

In the case of the teachers in my school, I have to say that virtually all of them have responded with indignation.  "I'll be damned if I'll compromise the integrity of my course for some bullshit rule," one said.  "If the state wants to grade me down because of things that are outside of my control, they can knock themselves out."

But what it has done is to destroy morale.  More and more teachers I know are actively looking for other jobs.  One, a friend of long standing who has young children in the school, is looking into finding a way to take her own children out of the public school she teaches in -- a stinging vote of no confidence in the direction public education is going.

My fear, though, is that this trend of turning everything -- students and teachers alike -- into numbers is only beginning.  Micromanaging b-b stackers like Deputy Commissioner Slentz, who evidently don't have the vaguest idea of the reality of classroom teaching, will accomplish nothing by these new mandates but driving those of us who actually care about educating children into other jobs.

As for me: I'm not too far from retirement, and would be eligible for a buy-out (should one be offered) in three years.  I can stick it out that long.  How much longer I'll be able to keep my morale up is another matter.  But after all, given the mediocre grade I'm likely to get on my Report Card this year, it's probably better that I start thinking about getting a job where my evaluation is actually based on my level of performance.