A teacher’s unusual evaluation of Arne Duncan — through the prism of Harvard basketball
Gary Rubinstein is a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York. He was a Teach For America corps member early in the organization’s existence but has become a serious critic of the organization as well as of the policies implemented over the last seven years under Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Here is an open letter that Rubinstein wrote to Duncan this year about the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion education initiative, Race to the Top, which allowed states to compete for federal funds by promising to implement Duncan-approved school reform. Rubinstein evaluates Duncan and his program in an unusual way — by applying the metrics that Duncan pushed states to use in the assessment of teachers to the Harvard basketball team that Duncan co-captained when he attended the university in the 1980s.
This letter makes references to accountability metrics that Duncan has championed, such as “value-added” measurement, or VAM, which takes the standardized test scores of students, plops them into a complicated formula and purports to discover how much “value” a teacher added to student performance on a single test. Rubinstein also refers to “growth” scores, which are calculated in a process that includes computer-based predictions of how students “should” perform based on past student scores.
He also refers to PISA, or the Program for International Student Assessment, which is given every three years to 15-year-olds around the world in reading, math and science. Many governments and school reformers — including in the United States — look at the scores as judgments of the quality of their education systems, though critics say the tests are flawed and the results should not be taken seriously.
A version of this letter to Duncan first appeared on Rubinstein’s blog. He has written other open letters to figures in the education world, including this one to TFA founder Wendy Kopp.
Here’s Rubinstein’s letter to Duncan:
Dear Secretary Duncan,
“Race To The Top” was intended to improve education in this country by finally holding accountable the schools and the “adults” who work in those schools — meaning the teachers — for their failure to get students to adequately grow academically. Under the program, “ineffective” teachers should be identified and fired, and “failing” schools identified and closed. Unfortunately, the entire program collapses without reliable metrics to judge which schools are truly “failing” and which adults are truly “ineffective.”
To illustrate the issues with the accountability metrics that have been the trademark of your tenure, I’ve applied them to something you know intimately, your senior year Harvard basketball team, the 1986-1987 Harvard Cagers. Were the 1986-1987 Cagers a “failing” team? Was Coach Peter Roby an “ineffective” coach? Were you and Keith Webster “ineffective” co-captains?
It all depends on which metrics you use.
Your last-place finish — a 9 and 17 record — is just one way to judge your efforts. Some would use it as the sole metric and declare this a “losing” season. But if you just look at points scored, you didn’t do so badly with 2,152, which was pretty close to the 1972 Harvard record of 2,221 points at that time. So if we look at just offense, the team was not failing. But you also gave up A teacher’s unusual evaluation of Arne Duncan — through the prism of Harvard basketball - The Washington Post: