Real Crisis in Education: "Reformers" Refuse to Learn
By John Thompson.
The Education Post is a school reform site that claims to seek a “better conversation, better education.” It supposedly wants to elevate the voices of teachers and others as an antidote to the “politicized debate that pushes people to the extremes.” However, many or most contributors to their blog repeatedly question the motives of persons who disagree with them.
I’m a teacher who seems to never learn. I keep trying to engage reformers in a constructive dialogue. I submitted a guest post and it prompted two rebuttals. I hoped to post a response to a response but, ultimately, it was rejected. This is the reply that the Education Post did not see fit to print.
On a recent episode of NPR’s Planet Money, the hosts told the joke about three econometricians who went deer hunting. The first fires and misses three feet to the right of the deer. The second shoots and misses three feet to the left. The third jumps up and down and cheers, “We got it!”
As NPR explained, economists aim to be within the margin of error, and that is fine when developing statistical models for studying social policy theory and economic trends. But, in a dubious effort to assess so-called performance “results” or student “outputs,” teachers across the nation are being evaluated with value-added estimates that are not reliable or valid for holding individuals accountable.
Educator Jessica Waters, in “Results Matter More than Practice” replied to my Education Post contribution with the claim that teachers should be evaluated by student “outputs.” She gave no evidence that this is possible or desirable. She seems to assume that it is possible to use test score growth to guess-timate the amount of students’ learning that can be linked to each teacher in every school across this diverse nation.
I wonder if Waters has read any of either the economists’ regression studies that were used to promote evaluations that supposedly estimate the “results” of teachers’ practice, or the social science which explains why those algorithms aren’t appropriate for evaluating individuals. She made no effort to address the likely scenario that this misuse of test scores will prompt even more destructive teach-to-the-test rote instruction and increase the exodus of teaching talent from schools where it is harder to raise test scores.
In “A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability,” I argued “federal interventions should favor ‘win-win’ experiments, not innovations that will inevitably hurt some children in an effort to help others.” I thought that was pretty clear. After all, it is hard to imagine an inner city high school teacher who hasn’t witnessed the harm done to poor children of color by the test, sort, and punish policies of the last 15 years. Even an educator who believes that test-driven accountability produced benefits in her own school must have also witnessed the damage that is widely imposed on so many children in a hasty experiment to help others.
Waters seemed to misunderstand my argument, however. She replied, “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a win-win experiment. I have never seen one as a science teacher or in my many practicum hours as an aspiring principal.”
So, I will further explain. In a sincere effort to improve schools, the federal government has encouraged experiments like value-added teacher evaluations, the Race to the Top (RttT), and School Improvement Real Crisis in Education: "Reformers" Refuse to Learn - Living in Dialogue:
