Andrew Cuomo, education, and the lie between two truths

The episode of The X Files called "E.B.E." contained what may be the most insightful quote that the series ever generated.  Fox Mulder's informant, the man who is never known as anything but his code name of "Deep Throat," says:  "And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most conveniently hidden between two truths."

That statement is especially accurate when the truths are stated outright and the lie is implied.  And this is a lesson that apparently was well learned by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's Director of State Operations, Jim Malatras.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Daily News, Malatras once again places the blame for New York's "failing schools" in the laps of the teachers and administrators, and lauds Cuomo's plan to hitch teacher evaluation, retention, and salaries to high-stakes standardized tests.  Malatras writes:

Public education should be the great equalizer — a system that helps every child learn in order to achieve a brighter future... (O)ur current system fails to deliver on that promise. That must change. 

And the governor has a plan to do it.  He will attract the best and brightest teachers by providing full scholarships to those who enter the profession.  He will create a fair and objective evaluation system, rewarding good teachers and providing unprecedented support and mentoring.  He will turn around failing schools and transform them into community schools.  He will continue to expand early education... 

If the Legislature enacts these reforms, we will spend an additional $1.1 billion in aid — bringing education spending to the highest level in state history.

This "fair and objective evaluation system" involves tying 50% of teachers' numerical scores to student performance on tests prepared at great cost by companies such as Pearson Education, despite a long history of inaccuracies and errors and scholarly research that showed as long ago as 1999 that standardized tests are a poor measure of both student achievement and teacher quality.  Not only would the governor's plan lead to veteran teachers facing revocation of their tenure if their students fail to hit the benchmark score, it would also tie scores to a $20,000 incentive for "highly effective teachers," and require five consecutive years of "effective" or "highly effective" ratings for a new teacher to achieve tenure.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo [image courtesy of photographer Diana Robinson and the Wikimedia Commons]

Malatras includes a couple of truths in his piece.  He states correctly that New York has the highest per-capita spending on education ($19,522 per student).  He also says that the bottom line should be the students -- their learning, their achievement, their mastery of skills.  No one, I think, would disagree with that.

But the lie is hidden there, and hidden well, because it's implicit in a true statement he makes at the end of the fifth paragraph of his piece.  Malatras writes:

But the governor is not willing to throw more money into the system as it exists today. A system where 64% of our third- through eighth-graders are not proficient in math, 69% are not proficient in English language arts and a quarter of high school students fail to graduate in four years. A system where nearly 110,000 students sit in 178 failing schools, and nine out of 10 are minority or poor.

Did you catch that?  In the failing schools, nine out of ten children are minority or poor.

The implicit lie is that the governor's plan -- hitching the careers of teachers to a flawed metric generated by high-standards exams -- is going to fix the inherent impediments faced by children who grow up in poverty and disadvantage.  So how about Governor Cuomo and Jim "Yes-Man" Malatras consider research by Regina Enwefa, Stephen Enwefa, and Robert Jennings, that found that the single metric that correlated best with students needing special education services was poverty:

Today’s youth in poverty, who need skills to match the rapidly changing directions of our society, are failing academically.  More than seventy-five percent of poor youths have below average basic skills and almost fifty percent are in the bottom fifth of basic skills because of poor reading and math skills.  Poverty alone can cause low academic achievement. Poverty along with cultural and linguistic differences, tends to lower academic achievement and result in very high drop out rates.  Though educators try to meet the academic needs and demands of children and their families with disabilities, they too face barriers.  Inadequate staffing to meet the needs of today’s increasing numbers of poor children clearly affects the child’s ability to perform.

So Governor Cuomo's opinion is that this is some kind of coincidence, and that these children's failure to achieve is the result of poor teaching?  Easier, of course, to blame the teachers and the administrators and the schools rather than addressing the actual cause of the problem.  Easier to pretend that you can use an identical "fair and objective evaluation system" to generate an assessment both for a teacher of AP students in a rich school in Westchester County and a special education teacher teaching disadvantaged children in inner-city Buffalo.  Enwefa et al. write:

Global policymakers are working relentlessly in an attempt to determine ways to restructure education with significant focus on educational services for children with disabilities.  If our government indeed wants to help poor families of children with disabilities out of poverty, and then there must be a fundamental change in policy.  Policy makers must look at poverty itself, rather than at specific problems that could result from poverty...  Budget-cutting policies in areas of housing, education, health care, and employment need to be re-examined.  It is clear that policies targeted at raising family incomes can contribute to increasing children’s cognitive development and academic accomplishments.

Of course, that's not the only problem with Jim Malatras's clever little smear piece.  You can also lie by omitting facts.  He conveniently fails to mention that despite the high per-pupil expenditure in New York, the state education budget is 5.1% lower today than it was in 2008, and the unfunded state mandates have multiplied every year.  The shortfall, of course, has had to be made up by increases in property taxes, already some of the highest in the nation -- until the governor instituted a 2% tax levy cap, and took even that source of revenue out of districts' hands.  The result: devastating staffing cuts and loss of program.

So to recap: Governor Cuomo's plan is to ignore the root cause of failing schools, and instead tie teacher retention to standardized tests that even if they measured what they're supposed to measure, unfairly penalize teachers in poor schools and teachers of students with disabilities.  At the same time, he's reduced funding, increasing the burden on taxpayers to make up the difference, and expected schools to continue functioning the same -- no, better! -- than before.

By any measure you like, Governor Cuomo is failing New York's children.  A pity, isn't it, that politicians can achieve an "ineffective" rating without any consequences?

I wonder why that is.

The war over tenure

I know how to fix the educational system.

It's so simple, I can even put it in a bulleted-list form.  Here's what you do:

• Shorten the time between teaching the material and giving the test.
• No make-ups or reteaching allowed.  If the kid doesn't get it the first time, (s)he deserves to fail.
• A student's progress will be measured by standardized, quantifiable assessments only.
• If a student fails the test for two units in a row, (s)he will be required to drop the course.
• The teacher has the last word about whether a student is dropped.
• Studies show that between 1-3% of students are "grossly stupid."  Because this is clearly the students' fault, and is unremediable, they will be expelled from school.

Pissed off yet?  I hope so.  But you might want to consider that all I did was to take the results of last week's alteration in teacher-tenure law in California, and stepped it down from teachers and administrators to students and teachers.

Okay, I know that I might not have played fair, and that the comparison between teachers and students is a bit of a false analogy.  But consider what the core of the changes have accomplished; shifting the balance of power entirely into the hands of administrators, ramping up the anxiety (especially for new teachers and teachers in poor schools), and gauging effectiveness solely by numerical measures that consider nothing but the all-powerful standardized test.  If we really did do something analogous in our classrooms, parents would rightfully be howling for blood.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But do it to teachers, and a lot of people just nod and smile.  Damn slacker teachers, getting union protection even if they're incompetent, plus two months off in the summer.  'bout time we tighten the screws, hold them accountable for the job they're (not) doing.  Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington D.C. schools, was thrilled by the ruling, and said, "The union's job is to protect the rights, privileges, and pay of their members.  They want their members to be able to keep their jobs regardless, and what this judge is saying is that we have to look out for the interests of children, first and foremost -- that we have to ensure that there's a high quality teacher in front of every child every single day."

Because clearly, teachers themselves have no particular concern about the interests of students.

I've been a teacher for 27 years, and yes, I've met some terrible ones.  But even the judge in the California case, Los Angeles County Judge Rolf Treu, says that "grossly incompetent" teachers account for only 1-3% of the teachers out there.  So how do you fix the problem?  Surely it's not by removing the legal right to due process from all teachers.  Put simply, you do not create good teachers by firing bad ones.

In my own school system, we've had staff cuts, increasing class sizes, and reduced budgets for supplies, equipment, and textbooks for the last ten years in a row.  We've had a steady decrease in instructional time -- this year, we've had once-a-month half-day "staff development days" that have accomplished nothing worth the loss of student contact time, not to mention foolishness like the state-mandated "field tests" that pull kids out of their classes for several periods in a row to take a pilot exam simply because the Department of Education wants more numbers to crunch.  It seems like on the middle and elementary school level, they're having some sort of standardized test every other week.  And now we're basing teachers' end-of-the-year score on these metrics, despite its being demonstrated over and over again that standardized test scores are inaccurate measures of understanding, and that other factors outside of teachers' control can have as big an effect as what happens in the classroom (most importantly, poverty, which no one wants to talk about).

Couple that with the lack of trust that upper administration, and society as a whole, has for teachers.  I know that I've said it before, but it's worth a reminder: did you know that in New York State, teachers are not allowed to grade their own final exams, because the NYSED is so afraid we'll cheat?  In several classes I teach, I've had to go to an all multiple-choice format for the final, because to do otherwise would require my training another teacher in the curriculum I teach so that (s)he could grade the exam fairly.

So: do more with less.  Less money, less supplies, less time.  Increase the penalty for failure to meet the benchmarks, up to and including losing your job.  Remove the protection of due process for all teachers, and simultaneously treat them with distrust and suspicion, so as to create a work environment that has maximal risk and maximal stress.

Yup, that should work just fine.

The cynical side of me is becoming convinced that these people want public schools to fail -- that the biggest social experiment the world has ever seen, that all children can and should receive a broad education in liberal arts and sciences, should be replaced by a merit-based system of charter schools.  It boils down to "break the system to show that it's broken."

Understand me: I'm not in favor of protecting bad teachers.  The whole "rubber room" phenomenon is idiotic.  For the truly incompetent -- and I think that even 1% is a high estimate for that category -- the road to dismissal should be short.  Just as with other professions, there are some people who simply shouldn't be teachers.

But for the rest, and especially for those teachers who are struggling, how about these suggestions, to counterbalance the tongue-in-cheek ones I started with?

• Increase the support that teachers get, and not just by useless "staff development."  Have young teachers, or those who are struggling, mentored by excellent educators.  And... pay those mentors well for their time and expertise.
• Use metrics other than standardized tests for measuring teacher effectiveness.  Especially in the upper grades, those should include evaluations by students.  After all, they're the clientele -- they know best of all if a teacher is doing his or her job well.  And in my experience, students are, for the most part, fair and articulate evaluators.
• Likewise, evaluate students using something other than corporate-developed standardized tests.  Teachers supposed to be the experts in instruction and assessment; let them do their jobs.
• Revise the current school funding system, that has bled school districts dry, resulting in staff cuts, programatic losses, and bigger class sizes.
• Trust that, for the most part, teachers know what they're doing.  Let's turn Judge Treu's numbers around; if 3% of teachers are incompetent, then 97% are doing their job in a competent fashion.  Doesn't sound so bad if you put it that way, does it?

I know that the war isn't over yet, not by a longshot.  The unions are already challenging the California ruling, and the battleground is being set in other states.  But we need to think through what we're doing, here, because the stakes we are playing for are the highest of all: the futures of our children.