A Dialogue With the Gates Foundation About School Reform
Once again, I would like to thank the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess and the Gates Foundation's Steve Cantrell for a dialogue on school reform. Here are my first thoughts on the conversations with Dr. Cantrell, as presented in Hess'Aftermath: My Note to the Gates Foundation.
Firstly, I am glad that we mostly stayed focused on stakes attached to standardized tests. There are numerous subjects we can argue over but, in my opinion, high-stakes testing is the issue most worth fighting over. It is a policy that is doing great harm to students and teachers, especially in poor schools. It is the policy that is most complicating and intensifying the battles over the other issues that Cantrell and I sidestepped. I believe that a consensus is rapidly forming among most educators and parents that this testing mania must stop. Then, we can move on to more humane and effective methods of accountability and school improvement.
In education, we are two peoples divided by a common language. Whenever I speak with reformers, I'm always struck by the way we and they use a very few words in slightly different ways, and how extreme and emotional misunderstandings result. The potential for miscommunication is greatest when speaking with persons with little or no teaching experience in the inner city.
In education, we are two peoples divided by a common language. Whenever I speak with reformers, I'm always struck by the way we and they use a very few words in slightly different ways, and how extreme and emotional misunderstandings result. The potential for miscommunication is greatest when speaking with persons with little or no teaching experience in the inner city.
My post explained why the predictable consequence of the value-added evaluations that Gates supports, even when balanced by "multiple measures," would be an exodus of teaching talent out of the most challenging schools (where it is harder to raise test scores.) I argued that the Measures for Effective Teaching (MET) project showed that effective teaching can be measured well enough to use value-added and other metrics for diagnostic purposes and for policy discussions. But, it provides no evidence that A Dialogue With the Gates Foundation About School Reform | John Thompson:
