Teachers, the New Piñata

A lot of "reforms" center on teacher quality as the critical factor in fixing our education system.  While I think teacher quality is important, I have argued on this blog that teacher quality and success are two different things.   Great teachers may not have the same connection and success with an entirely different class, and thus their success will vary across years.  I have also noted that I don’t think teacher quality is the largest part of why education in America is failing.  That said, it is important, and if we don’t start sending a message that teachers are respected, we risk losing the good ones we have and not being able to replace them.

The Problem

According to nearly every reformist’s model, you would think teachers are the problem with education.  If we just had better teachers, our kids would be fine.  You listen to them and hear about “the evil teacher unions” who favor bad teachers at the expense of children, you hear about the impossibility of firing bad teachers, you hear praise for programs that put 22 year olds with no real qualifications in the classroom, you see teachers being graded publicly for the results of their students’ test scores on one day and having their employment status and pay hanging in the balance.  Does this sound like a desirable job to you?  Yet so many great teachers go in day after day with low pay and decreasing job security. 

To illustrate this differently, imagine you were a foreman on the Ford assembly line.   Imagine that your right to unionize for a safe workplace and reasonable hours was being threatened.  Imagine that far cheaper kids in vocational school were starting to replace other foremen in your plant.  Imagine that your pay was determined by how well your team built cars on one arbitrary day of the year (and imagine that one team mate just got divorced and another’s dad just died and think how productive they might be).  Imagine that your boss did not want you to focus on quality or to innovate, but wanted you to focus on only a few bare-bones basics that were beneath your standards as someone with 25 years experience making quality cars.  That’s what it must feel like to be a teacher.

In summary, teachers are:

n      Unprotected:  Increasingly, teachers unions have come under attack as protecting bad teachers at the expense of student learning.  There are surely corrupt unions and bad teachers, and both are bad things.  That said, this idea that groups that protect teachers are simply unjustifiable is unwarranted.  In Texas, for example, a very powerful conservative group would sit in the back of classrooms and see if a teacher taught anything “controversial.”  Teachers do need protection from arbitrary firing.  Further, they are employed by the government, which means they can be used as a political football.  Given that the ultimate source of power is the government, a union serves to check that power.  Worse, in an era of increased firings and a new evaluation system every year that has real consequences, teachers deserve to have informed representation.  Many great teachers that I know (union affiliated) made the point that it is not in a union’s interest to keep bad teachers: it makes it harder to win gains for all teachers when you harbor a lot of bad teachers and it demoralizes really stellar teachers who may not want to be part of such a union.

n      Losing Job Stability: Because they are paid with taxpayer dollars and almost every level of government is struggling with debt, teachers are at the front-line of those job cuts.  Further, when you look at school leaders making headlines, many have fired teachers immediately upon getting a poor rating on a new evaluation system based largely on tests (Michelle Rhee fired 4% of DC’s teacher force in July 2010, Providence, RI, Mayor Tavares fires nearly 2,000 employees in February 2011, etc.).  Worse, a new trend in closing ineffective schools has teachers fearful that they may not even have a position from year to year, even if they are a great teacher in a bad school.

n      Paid or fired based on things out of their control:  The argument for using tests to judge teachers is that they teach a student, so if a student cannot perform well on a test, it must be the teacher’s fault.  That said, there are so many complications, including the weather and how a student is feeling or how well a student takes tests (not to mention whether the test contains worthwhile knowledge in the first place).  Nevertheless, that one high-stakes day can be used to determine the bulk of a teacher’s rating, their pay, and increasingly their employment status.

n      Denied creativity:  By basing scores on tests, many teachers feel like they run a test-prep program and are increasingly forced to waste time on practice tests and test-taking techniques rather than imparting knowledge or concepts.  Some districts (NYC, San Diego) suffered through the micromanagement of Anthony Alvarado who developed an exact reading curriculum that every teacher had to follow, down to having kids identify what kind of reading they were doing when they read a sentence (it had a mixed effect on scores at certain levels, and it did introduce a system of peer coaches for teachers that would have been good if they were encouraging all-around good teaching, not enforcing a model).  Many teachers have begun to question if they should remain teaching in a system that prioritizes teaching students what to think over how to think.

n      Paid poorly for a tough job: You are likely pretty highly-educated.  You have to work a full day, then go home and grade papers and plan lessons (and any good teacher will tell you that takes longer than delivering the lesson).  You may have to reach out to parents, attend school events, and supervise an extracurricular activity.  On top of that, you have to be accountable for the success of 30 students (some of whom are going through puberty) who change every year and may not be compatible learners to your style of teaching.  Then you have to be accountable to some 60 parents, and the local school board, and your principle, and the board of education.  Then you take home a whopping $40k ($45k if you have a Masters, maybe).  The majority of early childhood educators are not even clearing the poverty line.

n      Denied respect:  A special education teacher who was recently rated as “bad” in New York City (and publicly so at that) based on his special education student’s test scores not matching other students wrote a really hard hitting Op-Ed on the experience.  He notes that by virtue of teaching kids, everything he does from how he dresses to how he teaches is immediately critiqued by his students.  Worse, programs like Teach for America send the signal that any blind ape can teach.  We’re just going to throw these college grads into the worse environments after training for six weeks at a summer camp and let them figure out how to teach for two years before they go to business school.  Sending the message that you are easily replaceable and that your profession is merely a means to an end is a great way to increase people’s job satisfaction, right?  Sadly no: a recent survey of teachers found that in the last couple of years, teacher satisfaction dropped substantially (15 percentage points fewer teachers now feel very satisfied with their job) while the number of teachers that will likely leave the profession nearly doubled to 1/3 of all teachers!

n      Suffering from the pressure: As teachers are forced to pay the price for student outcomes on high-stakes tests or as they are expected to maintain high performance even as class sizes increase or budgets get slashed, it creates a high-stress environment that sets the teacher up for failure, an inability to give personal attention, and very little sleep. As the aforementioned Special-Ed teacher noted, his teaching became secondary to implementing the rather arbitrary requirements of his administrator (who controls his employment).  It isn’t an environment that supports good teaching.  It is an environment that punishes falling short of perfection.

The Implications

These are not all the problems, but even these few have some really devastating implications:

n      High turnover: As more teachers become too stressed, are fired because of a bad testing day, lose faith in the system, or are replaced by Teach for America members that largely leave after 2 years, more money is wasted finding and teaching new teachers.

n      Lost benefits of experience:  A teacher does not continue to become amazing after two to three years of teaching, but if experienced teachers feel unrecognized and leave and the new crops of teachers last (or are expected to teach) only two years, they leave right as they are getting their sea legs.  It is widely known that teachers gain the most in teaching quality in their first two or three years.  That means you have a perpetual crop of teachers stumbling to find their way that leave right as they get good and students are much less likely to benefit from a teacher who is excellent.

n      Lower-level thinking:  If your child’s teacher is teaching to a test (or as is often the case how to take a test), how much is your child learning?  Is it important that your son or daughter select the least bad summary of the topic in a poorly written essay?  That they can calculate the angles of a triangle in 45 seconds?  Some parents and many employers would like a well-rounded student that is able to work in groups, think through problems critically, and be well-rounded.  Very few of life’s problems or workplace tasks come with multiple-choice answers.

n      Exposure to fewer topics:  What is tested is what gets funded and taught, so if your child is not going to grow up to be a calculator, a dictionary or a test designer, they are severely disadvantaged by the push to have teachers teach to the test.

n      Greater inequality:  As the lowest performing students are subject to the whim of random reforms, teachers under fire, and school closures, they suffer from the problems they bring to school and a lack of stability and coherent instruction in the classroom. If they are getting a worse experience, they are more likely to perform poorly, become disengaged, and drop out.  My guess is that this is contributing to the widening inequality we see in our society.

n      Destruction of community:  When school closure based on testing or “poor teaching” is exercised, students lose the bonds they have formed with their peers, their teachers, and their community.  

Act on it!

n      Monitor your child’s homework and see what is being taught.  If you notice that the work is not very enriching and is more test-oriented, speak with the teacher.  If instructions come from higher, speak to the principal or go to a local school council meeting.

n      Don’t fixate on your child’s test scores.  If they do poorly, find out what concepts they find challenging and work with them.  If they are a bad test-taker, they may very well respond to a far different style of teaching and learning.  Worse, you are unnecessarily stressing them in a way that doesn’t encourage improvement.  Tests should extend learning, and these tests don’t.

n      Attend town hall meetings when school administrators want to close schools, punish teachers on untried evaluation systems, or fixate only on test scores.

n      Write to your member of Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind and to reign in Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan’s arbitrary use of discretionary authority to implement similar reforms.

People with the education level of many teachers can take their talents elsewhere.  If we make the profession appear so undesirable, those who might do really well and impact a whole new generation of kids will decide it is not worth it.  I already watched a friend who is amazing with kids, highly educated and organized, and a trained teacher leave the profession because it was too stressful and she was not supported.  I know scores of Teach for America alums who taught two or three years, were probably pretty great by the end, but who have now left the profession.  This doesn't fix our system, and it is unfair to our kids.

 

Speak out!

Tell me about a really great or bad teacher you had.  What made them good or bad?

Why Empowering Parents May Often Fail

Last week, certain segments of the education policy community celebrated what was dubbed “National School Choice Week.”  The core underlying theory of the school choice movement is in theory quite noble and good: create more choices for parents as to where they send their children to use the power of the free market to eliminate bad schools and thus improve the entire education system.  To achieve this end, several policies that have limited effectiveness (and that I have lambasted in this blog) are employed:  increase teacher accountability through merit pay, measure school progress transparently using standardized test scores, allow private individuals to develop charter schools to compete with failing public schools, and fund vouchers to parents to choose where to send their children instead of wasting large per pupil expenditures in the public system.   The name of the game is to empower parents, which is good.

My problem with the push for parental choice is that the movement leaves its fundamental assumptions unquestioned:

1.     Parents need empowerment.

2.     Parents, once empowered, will act on their newfound ability to choose.

3.     Parents are able to make good choices about education.

4.     That a child has parents that actively make choices related to their education.

5.     That the locus of blame for poor educational outcomes is the school.

6.     That the locus of blame for poor educational outcomes is unrelated to the parent.

It is my personal belief (a belief supported by many facts) that all of these assumptions sometimes (or often) prove false.  The purpose of this post is not, as you may expect, to say that parent choice needs to be abolished (although I think compelling arguments could be made for this argument).  Rather, I will seek to show that you need to understand the role of parental and family factors to understand which segments of the population parental choice can benefit.  From there, I think it is easier to understand some of the qualms one might have about making parental choice the guiding framework of our education policy.

The Parental Rainbow

The fundamental issue I have with empowering parents is that not all parents are the same, not all need empowerment, and not all those who are empowered will react in the best interests of their children as students (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not).   To better illustrate what I mean, I identify various types of parents and organize them by whether parental choice might benefit their kids:

Students whose parents have the following characteristics will not do better than they do now as a result of parental choice:

·      Enough money to send their kids to a private school

·      Work too many hours to be involved in decisions related to their child’s education

·      Not involved in their child’s life (dead, incarcerated, abandoned their child, etc.)

·      Not aware or unsure how to become aware about the school choices available for their kids.

·      Do not see the value of education and do not support their children’s education

·      Unable to evaluate different options presented and choose the best option for their child.

·      Bad at parenting or simply do not care about their children

·      Afraid/Unwilling to send children outside of neighborhood school

Students whose parents have the following characteristics might do better as a result of parental choice: 

·      Cannot afford private school for their kids

·      Value education for their kids

·      Can on their own or with help make informed decisions about where to send their child

·      Have or make time to make decisions related to their child’s education

·      Are open to and able to provide a means for their child to transit to a new school, if necessary.

·      Are alive and involved in raising their children

Parental wealth, knowledge, and involvement are the three main factors that determine whether parental choice can potentially improve children’s outcomes.  Unfortunately, as you can see above, some of the children who are worst off are most likely to remain unaffected by parental choice: those who have one or fewer parents, those whose parents work too much to be involved (this is not bad parenting, as you need a child to have a home or to eat before they can be educated, right?), those whose parents don’t care or are not involved in their lives.  To put it in plain language, low- to middle-income parents who value education, can be involved in decisions related to their child’s education, and who are willing to send their child to a different school that may be far away are the only group that could potentially benefit from parental choice.

Outside factors that might further limit any benefits of parental choice

Because children spend some 70% of their waking hours outside of school, the parental choice movement’s willingness to discount or ignore factors outside of school that affect learning outcomes is perhaps the largest weakness of the movement.  [update: The Washington Examiner, DC's conservative paper, published an article on January 30, 2012, that there is an even distribution of "effective" or "highly effective" teachers across good and failing schools, which could show the failure of the rating system or could just as easily show that a teacher's ability to make a difference is severely limited by some of the outside factors I list below.]

·      Family Income – One of the strongest predictors of student achievement is their family’s income.  Poor kids tend to perform poorly in school (which makes sense for a variety of reasons: parent is likely to be working and less able to be involved, student may arrive malnourished, student may live in or travel through a violent or difficult neighborhood to get to school, etc.).

·      Parent’s Education Level  - Parents who have had more schooling tend to produce children who do better and are more educated.  This is usually related to a parent understanding the value of education, being better able to make decisions related to their child’s education or help their child make educational decisions, and their having higher incomes to support a child’s education outside of school.

·      Child’s Previous Track Record – A child’s previous educational success or failure is another huge factor in their future success.  Because “tracking,” or assigning kids to different levels (regular, honors, advanced placement/IB, etc.) based on their “intelligence,” is quite common place, many kids who are on a lower track will stay there regardless of their school.  That’s to say, children who were already shafted by the schooling they received have a much lower likelihood of being helped even if their parent is involved and values education.

·       Student motivation – It is hard to place a lot of blame on kids for not getting the right education and parents play a big role in this regard.  If a kid is not guided and supported in making sound choices to do well in school, they will likely do worse even in a great school with great teachers.

·      Impractical or Bad Parental Choice Options – As many pro-charter/voucher movies have shown, there are not enough slots for most kids, so they are subject to a lottery to get into a great new charter.  Competition severely excludes kids with fewer parents with less motivation, so the worst off are still unlikely to be helped at all.  Further, as the Stanford CREDO study showed, many parents believe that charters are better than public schools when in 80% of the cases they are at the same level or worse in terms of student achievement.  That is to say, parents perceive bad options to be good (which belies the assumption that empowering parents leads to better outcomes because they make good choices).  Finally, many vouchers do not cover the full cost of enrollment for kids, so even the most involved and educated parents might not be able to afford the best choice.

·      Extracurricular Learning – The ability and willingness of parents to provide stimulating, educative activities after-school, on weekends, and during vacations is key.  Kids who reinforce learning during gaps in schooling are more likely to succeed.  You’ll recall that children without summer programs lose about 3 months worth of previous learning over the summer compared to those whose parents keep their kids engaged.  This has to do with both parental income and motivation in many instances.

·      Learning Disabilities – It is somewhat unrealistic to expect teachers with students that have learning disabilities and much greater needs to get all their students to the same level as students that lack such challenges and the need for support.

There are indeed some school factors that impact student achievement that parental choice could (but may not) improve, such as teacher quality.  There are other school factors that do not impact kid’s learning much like class size or materials that I don’t include for that very reason.  That said, the willingness to place ALL of the blame for student’s not doing well on teachers or schools without any consideration of the disadvantages children bring into the classroom is quite unfair.  It is also potentially dangerous and could deepen inequality in this country.

The Sinister Implications of Parental Choice

There is an unaddressed tension in the parental choice movement between the belief that teacher quality is the key to all students succeeding and punishing teachers/schools that have low performing students:  poorer students tend to be clustered in undesirable schools.  As the best students from these schools with the most motivated parents are siphoned off by charters, the worst students are left ghettoized in these schools.  This makes the school more of a failure (I mean, come on: take the good students from a bad school and it will “get worse” even if the quality level hasn’t changed).  Further, it makes the school less desirable to teach at, which means that the worst students are not getting access to the best teachers (which is probably necessary, and hence the tension).  These children then get shuffled around and ignored.   Worse, these students are losing the potential peer pressure effect to do well because their peers are doing well, as their successful peers will have gone.

Additionally, it could have sinister implications on teaching quality.  Parental choice policies hinge on standardized tests to measure and rank students.  Students in these environments, however, have no real connection to the facts on these exams.  Further, these students most need the ability to think critically and make tough decisions (as they have much more inertia impeding their success), which they don’t get as teachers are forced by legislation like No Child Left Behind to teach to a test or be potentially fired and see their school closed.  Many states have lowered their standards to comply with the provision that all students be at level on reading and math by 2013: where student achievement has seemed to go up, it actually was the result of state’s lowering the standards they held children to.  That is not progress.

Worst of all, this policy shifts the blame from policy makers and parents to teachers.  It is no longer society’s fault that we have such great social inequality perpetuated by our school system.  It is all in the hands of parents and students whether they sink or swim, even if they start off drowning without a raft.  Further, it makes teachers the scapegoats for social inequality: suddenly teachers are at fault if their students are too poor and hungry to focus or if they come in from the summer 3 months behind their wealthier peers.  LET ME BE CLEAR, there is no excuse for poor children to be written off (I was one!).  That said, the blame lies sometimes with their parents, sometimes with their government, sometimes with society, sometimes with themselves, and sometimes with their teacher and/or school.  To misdirect all blame to one of those is not just and will not empower the vast majority of those kids who could benefit from a great educational experience. 

In short, policies should not center around making kids successful at taking tests, ghettoizing the lowest performers, and punishing teachers for a child’s background.  Improving teaching quality is key, but unless these policy makers will do something that also addresses socioeconomic disadvantages, they will never improve the system. 

Act on it!

So long as parental choice is ascendant, we need to make sure that the poorest parents can make the right choices.  We also need to support those kids whose parents don’t care, are too busy to be involved, or who simply aren’t present. Here’s how:

1.     Serve as a local school council liaison for overwhelmed parents in your community and fight for their kids (their success may save you taxpayer dollars, so you even have an incentive beyond altruism).  Particularly, fight the temptation to segregate students by “intelligence” or test scores, as a child put on a low track is likely one to end up there.  Support school feeding programs three times a day so that kids are fully nourished and ready to learn.

2.     Provide guidance to a working parent you know to help them truly understand the choices they have to advance their child and encourage them to do as well as possible in school.

3.     Serve as a mentor to the poorest or least supported kids in your community so that they don’t get lost in the parental choice struggle for lack of a parent.

4.     Help afterschool or on weekends or in the summer at a school to provide all kids a chance to continue learning during those large hours when they are not receiving instruction in a classroom.

5.     Help register low-income parents and get them to the polls so that they can vote for politicians that support policies that improve public schools rather than letting them atrophy.

6.     Create or support third spaces (libraries, tutoring centers, safe parks, etc.) that allow kids to remain engaged outside of the classroom.

Speak out!

What other categories do you think impact a parent’s ability to be empowered by choice programs and improve their child’s educational achievement?

What policies or volunteer opportunities might help students to succeed if they are not able to benefit from policies like those promoted by the parental choice movement?

Should Teachers Be Paid for Performance?

Paying teachers for performance should be a great idea, right?  In the corporate world, paying based on merit seems a great way to incentivize someone to do a better job.  For some reason, however, most teachers are against so-called “merit pay.”  I have to say, I was very surprised by this reaction.  My thoughts were similar to many critics, “Well, if you are doing a great job, you should have no worries and should welcome the recognition of your work.  So, it seems like the worst teachers would be the biggest critics, not being able to perform or having to work harder.”  I started to realize that a lot of teachers were quite against merit pay.  Not only that, but unions, who traditionally fight hard for increases in teacher pay, were also against it.  In this post, I hope to identify the arguments for and against merit pay to better understand whether it is a way to improve student achievement and teacher retention, among other things.

The Arguments for Merit Pay

Teachers are often severely underpaid and underappreciated, and the position is not attractive to people with large student debt.  There are some very compelling reasons why merit pay could strengthen public education:

1. After Michelle Rhee implemented bonuses for teachers being rated “highly effective” for two years or more, one such highly effective teacher who was considering leaving the District to teach elsewhere decided to stay. 
2. Paying good teachers more should make the profession more attractive to more highly educated individuals.
3. The private sector has, for years, used merit pay to improve efficiency and allow people to advance for performance rather than simply for working a long time or taking shallow credentialing.
4. Merit pay can be adjusted to reflect the goals we want to elicit out of the system: you can design the weight that standardized tests have in determining performance; what kinds of training or activities are deemed best practices, etc.
5. The way teachers are currently rewarded (premiums for having an advanced degree) has not been shown to correlate with gains in student achievement.
6. Being paid for performance has the potential to encourage teachers to be more creative in how they teach, trying to improve outcomes to earn these incentives.

The Arguments against Merit Pay

While rewarding and retaining quality teachers seem like pretty strong arguments, I have to give pause to some of the incredibly strong arguments against merit pay:

1. What if merit pay doesn’t work? According to a Harvard study of a New York City merit pay program, merit pay did not affect teacher behaviors, student achievement (in the areas measured: English and Math tests) actually declined, and made only negligible improvements in other measures like student attendance, behavioral problems, graduation exam scores, and graduation rates.  Fryer, the economist who conducted the study and was initially supportive of merit pay, noted that the literature was mixed on the effects in other countries, but that NYC’s $75 million investment was not worth it.  Research on performance pay continues to show that it does not work, not even for CEOs in the private sector.
2. How do you measure merit? In a letter to the editor of St. Louis Today, it was noted that measuring merit is usually largely determined by test scores.  As I noted in my post on standardized testing, this is not a measure of real learning or of good teaching, but of shallow learning and uninspired teaching.  The more test scores are used to determine pay, the more we are incentivizing mediocre instruction.  
3. Is merit consistent across all teachers? The St. Louis Today letter also noted that just because a dermatologist performs better than an oncologist in terms of number of deaths, you would still not want the dermatologist to treat every illness.  Likewise, a kindergarten and Junior Math teacher need two very different skill sets in terms of subject matter expertise and classroom management skills. 
4. Are the student’s entering competency and personal challenges accounted for? Just as it is more likely for someone treating cancer to have more patients die than a podiatrist, it is more likely for a teacher in a poor district to have lower test scores because students enter with lower test scores.  It is unreasonable to expect a teacher in a rich, suburban district to end up at the same place as someone from a poor, urban or rural district.
5. Are teachers (good or bad) offered the assistance needed to improve? The Washington teachers’ union criticized merit pay (the IMPACT program) in DC because it is used more as a stick (to fire bad teachers or simply offer a cash bonus to teachers who do well) rather than to provide tools to facilitate a teacher’s improvement.
6. Do teachers want merit pay? According to a survey of American Federation of Teachers members, there is limited support for merit pay based on improvements in portfolios of students’ work, but virtually no support for merit pay based on test scores.  Teachers were far more inclined to think that experience or taking on additional responsibilities are better reasons to extend a bonus to a teacher.
7. Is it redundant? Studies show that more experience tends to make teachers more effective in the first five years of teaching, so wouldn’t the natural increase in teacher’s salary for tenure that is in place already reward improved performance? Further, most teachers I know aren’t really in it for the money, so there is the question of whether it would elicit more performance or dedication from someone who took such a grueling job that pays so little in the first place.
8. Is bad teaching is the root of all problems in the American education system? As I noted in my post on some rather bombastic solutions for how poor kids can help themselves succeed, there are many problems that go beyond the ability of a good teacher.
9. Does merit pay serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Psychology shows us that people respond more to positive feedback than to extrinsic rewards, and this article in the Washington Post raises good concerns about whether merit pay undermines the intrinsic value teachers have for their craft and if the pressures of constant focus on testing improving might make a good teacher perform worse.

Different Ways of Structuring Merit Pay

To be honest, I was surprised in writing this post to have my opinion changed so fully.  Merit pay seems like a brilliant way to infuse the system with new creativity, to get rid of those bad apples, and to reward actual work.  That said, the most salient point for me was that it simply hasn’t worked all that much, even in the private sector.

That said, I think teachers who do have a proven track record do deserve recognition.  I would urge that some of the following points be considered in structuring merit pay programs:

1.     Merit pay should be designed on improvement during the time the teacher is with the student. It is unfair to say “your students still read below grade level” if they entered two or three grade-levels below average in the first place. 

2.     As a corollary, teachers should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging classrooms, as that is where gains really need to be made.  If you just base merit pay on testing, teachers are incentivized to work in the classrooms where kids already start at or above level, which effectively entrenches or worsens the problem of teaching quality in the most struggle student populations.

3.     Merit pay should compare apples to apples.  Comparing an art teacher to a math teacher or a 1^st and 11^th grade teacher is not fair, as the positions require different skills to be successful.

4.     Merit pay should not be informed greatly by standardized tests.  We already have seen the deleterious effects of tests in my last post, and to reward teachers for producing bubble-filling automatons that have not learned any significant skills is an awful idea.

5.     Merit pay should be linked to programs to help teachers improve and work together.  An interesting model was one that rewarded a whole school’s teachers for improved performance, thus creating a sense of teamwork to improve all kids’ education.  Nobody thinks bad teachers should be in the classroom, but if the system offers only back-handed financial rewards and creates competition, it is not creating a healthy environment for students.  Further, students spending 6-8 years in a school will need all their teachers, not some of them, to be good, so creating whole schools with great teaching is key.

6.     Merit pay can include experience for the first five years to incentivize teaching retention, but this factor should lose weight after 5 years, as most studies agree that there are no benefits to experience after that point.  

7.     Merit pay should not be viewed as a panacea, as teachers—particularly in the poorest environments—are not going to be able to overcome the gaps in basic needs like proper nourishment and parental support that many kids bring to the classroom.

Speak out!

What are your thoughts on merit pay? Do you have an experience with merit pay (in teaching or elsewhere) you can share? In your opinion, what are the limits of merit pay?

What ideas do you have for how to structure merit pay in an effective manner for teachers so that quality teaching is rewarded and students are given access to the best quality teachers possible?

Because Every Parent Wants a Standardized Child

Testing can be a very useful tool to help students cement learning and help teachers to better design their lessons. Testing, in its ideal form, is a form of reinforcement, which is a critical component of learning something. When I posted on teaching foreign languages, I noted that tests are a great way for students to have to use the skills they have been recently taught, apply them, and commit them to memory.

Just like using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, however, tests can also be misused and have deleterious effects. Tests can be used only to gauge and not to reinforce learning. Tests can be poorly designed to cover what students have learned. Tests can be designed so that the student doesn’t need to know the material to do well, but merely needs to know test-taking strategies. Tests can be timed in a way that does not reinforce learning. Tests can be designed to trick, rather than to teach. Tests can be designed in ways that disadvantage certain segments of society (while many debate whether there is an ethnic bias of tests and there are certainly exogenous factors, it is worth noting that Asians consistently do better on SAT math, whites consistently do better on reading/writing, and those with an A- or higher high school GPA do better on tests in general, suggesting some kind of bias). When a test is standardized and administered from afar at an arbitrary time, the likelihood is that the more negative side of testing emerges.

This is a real shame because under President Bush’s signature education bill “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), standardized testing became a mandatory component of our education system. Now, this is not just problematic because it increases the likelihood of the dark side of testing. It is worse because it appears that the bill is largely a boon to giant multinational corporations that make a fortune, but have very little accountability for the tests that determine whether your son or daughter—or your child’s school—is a failure. According to a very comprehensive article by Barbara Miner at the onset of NCLB, required testing could cost $2-6 billion a year in direct costs and up to 15 times that amount if you factor in wasted class time and test preparation. Worse yet, not all the NCLB-required testing was funded by the federal government. Because all multiple choice tests cost about $1 to grade while those including essays can go up to about $7, State and District Departments of Education may have an incentive to administer the least useful kinds of tests when they are strapped for cash (as they have been for quite some time).

When you hear the names of the companies that administer these tests, your blood should run cold: McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Riverside and Harcourt. Now, it is slightly odd that something that is “standardized” is administered by several competitors nationwide and that the type of test can vary from all multiple choice to a heavier focus on short answers and essays. Aside from having very deep connections to the Bush family and to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, these companies also may sound familiar to anyone who has ever used a textbook or taken a college entrance exam. Why does this make my blood run cold? A multinational company with insider political clout could decide what materials are taught in your child’s class, what metric their worth as a student is evaluated along, and what college they get into. If your child isn’t a good test taker or isn’t a strong English speaker (but is otherwise quite brilliant), your child could be doomed from the get-go, as no part of their career is untouched by a major testing company or its parent corporation.

Diane Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education and prominent voice in the Education Sector, went from supporting to opposing NCLB as she saw the increased testing used not to improve faltering schools, but to simply shut them down. The majority of schools shut down were in low-income, minority, and non-English speaking communities. Rather than accept that poverty and achievement are deeply connected, these policies further entrench the achievement gap between wealthier and poorer children. Further, they close schools in these neighborhoods, reducing the sense of community that was once present and the connections between parent, child, teacher, and school. And while I noted the link between two Republicans—Bush and Romney—to these testing conglomerates, Ravitch makes the very good point of noting that Obama’s “Race to the Top” program very much continues in the same pro-privatization and –testing vein as Bush’s policies (and to be fair, Obama does have a responsibility to enforce NCLB until it is revamped by Congress).

As I mentioned in my post on charters, unions are often the scapegoat for failing schools. The logic goes that intransigent teachers who are lazy and inept band together to keep failing their students while extracting higher and higher pay and benefits. In my home state, Illinois, for example, the majority of education costs are now flowing into paying pensions. This simplistic line of reasoning that selfish, unionized teachers are failing our kids and taxing the system ties everything into a nice neat bow and makes you just want to move all children into non-unionized charters with their non-union Teach for America staff, right? WRONG. Turns out, the state with the highest test scores is Massachusetts which is 100% unionized. The country with the highest test scores is Finland, which is also 100% unionized and administers only one standardized test towards the end of high school with a random sampling taking the internationally administered PISA test. (And the reason why pensions are such a large part of education spending in IL is largely because corrupt politicians have not been paying into pension funds for years, compounding the debt to rather poorly paid teachers.)

Washington Post Education Blogger Valerie Strauss notes that there are some unfortunately misguided assumptions behind standardized testing in theory:

• A sample of material that arbitrarily ends up on a 45-question test (especially multiple choice) can assess the quality and amount of what a child is learning.
• High test scores of students at any particular school prove that there is high student achievement and quality teaching at the institution.
• Teachers are motivated to improve by punishments or rewards based on test scores.
• Test scores better reflect student learning than any other form of assessment.
• High enough stakes to a test motivate people to worker harder to meet the challenge.

Unfortunately, as Daniel Koretz notes, test scores “usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.” Further, Gerald Bracey has made a pretty compelling list of things that a standardized test cannot measure and that a teacher that teaches to a test may never instill in his or her students, which includes “creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity. “ I find that I use most of these characteristics far more at work, on this blog, and in life than I do my ability to define an archaic word or to select a poor approximation of the “main idea” of a boring short story.

On a more personal and anecdotal level, I would note a few things about my standardized testing abilities:

• As I got older and learned to think more critically, I went from being amazing at Standardized Tests to being above average, but not particularly stellar. At the same time, I had learned how to speak five languages.
• I retook my SAT and got a 150 point boost by using testing preparation booklets to learn strategies, rather than actual knowledge. Now, how can a test score vary by so much in a couple of months and be considered reliable as an assessment of what I know?
  
• My teachers and I never received any meaningful feedback from a standardized test that allowed us to improve my learning or better identify how I learn.
• I took my GRE after spending 9 months in three different countries speaking Italian, then Spanish, then Arabic and did way better in math than in reading/writing, even though I am not a big fan of math and have much more experience and instruction in reading and writing related courses. My grades were always much stronger in English and Social Studies than in Math or Science.
• As someone who is rather fidgety, every day-long test I took was maddening and made me want to jump out of my skin.

Beyond my personal experiences with tests, an Education Week article written by Alfie Kohn and published in September 2000 (pre-Bush, pre-NCLB) warned of the rise of testing with some rather disconcerting facts:

1. About 89 percent of differences in state testing scores were statistically found to be tied to parents’ educational background, number of parents living at home, type of community, and poverty), which have nothing to do with instruction and everything to do with the need to address systemic inequalities that affect students before they enter the education system and when they leave school each and every day.
2. Standardized tests measure superficial thinking.
3. Most standardized tests were designed not to test learning, but to rank students and separate them, with some tests containing as many as half of their questions designed so that most people couldn’t answer correctly.
4. Time spent to prepare students for and then administer tests comes from other instruction (and I’d add that as testing rises, our system is stagnating and doing worse, so let’s think for a moment).
5. Many good teachers, seeing this negative trajectory, are leaving a system that they find increasingly poisonous and harmful to children.
   
6. Most specialists even in 2000 agreed that children should not be tested at too young an age.
7. Our children are being tested more than any other time in history and more than anywhere else in the world.

Some of these concerns will prompt California Governor Jerry Brown to make a laudable call for less class time wasted on standardized testing today, according to the Sacramento Bee. Brown also noted that testing tends to cause instructors and schools to shift their focus to what is being tested, which is usually limited to Math and English, but little else. Even if good teachers manage to avoid "teaching to the test," most students, taught to be validated by grades and scores and eager to do well, will take the hint and shift the focus of their studies. Even as a smart kid who loved to learn, I would take to heart the words "you won't be tested on this."

We need to eliminate nearly all of these tests. We need to ensure accountability for the ones that we keep. We need to ensure that the tests are used to reinforce learning and support struggling schools, not to rank children, punish teachers for teaching the most underprivileged, and close schools in ways that disproportionately affect minority and low-income communities. And we need to decide as a society that we are not going to accept poverty as an excuse for failure but that we are actually going to make meaningful changes that mitigate the effects of poverty rather than bullying teachers into being responsible for a child’s background and upbringing.

At the end of the day, real life rarely has one clear, obvious answer…so should our kids be molded and assessed by an instrument that does?

Act on it!

1. Teach kids some of the greater values of empathy, critical thinking, and creativity at any chance you get, be it through parenting or volunteering to mentor a child to supplement for the decreasing amount of classtime dedicated to such values.
2. Write your Congressmen (federal and state) and tell them what you feel about standardized tests, what you think can be done to improve student assessment, and demanding that testing companies be more accountable and student-oriented.

Speak out!

What is your experience with standardized testing? What are the pros and cons that you see with the use of testing nowadays?

What are some better ways to assess children’s learning and teachers’ or schools’ performance? Should these be jointly assessed?