I used to be a legal historian. That did not mean I could practice law without a license, but I could be a pretty fair consumer of legal analyses. It also made me aware of how attorneys and judges think.
When the idea of incorporating value-added into teacher evaluations was first introduced, I checked with lawyers who I knew to have solid legal minds. Like me, they were offended by the idea of using such an algorithm for evaluating individual teachers. Almost all of my sources were confident that such evaluations would not withstand judicial review. Typically, their appraisals were based less on the details of the experimental statistical models than on case law.
Then, Oklahoma joined other states and passed a law mandating value-added evaluations, and the consensus changed. To defend decisions based on these new laws, systems only had to show that the terminations were not irrational. Unless a value-added model was used in a way that was arbitrary and/or virtually absurd, the court was likely to defer to a district's firing of teachers.
I read national experts' recommendations to advocates of value-added evaluations and, sadly, I had to agree with their judgments. Attorneys warned that the process of using statistical models to help fire or deny performance pay to teachers should be done carefully. As long as systems played their
Teach for America alumnus Ben Spielberg talks Vergara vs. California, teachers unions and why education reform without social justice isn’t possible.
TFA alum Ben Spielberg is now a leader of the San Jose Teachers Association.
EduShyster: Vergara vs. California, the landmark case that seeks to eliminate tenure for teachers, wrapped up this week. Do you think the plaintiffs made their case?
Spielberg: I’ve got to believe that they won’t win because their case was really bad. Even the experts they brought in to testify have found that there’s not that much disparity in terms of teaching quality between lower income and higher income schools, and because thestatutes in question apply equivalently to low income and high income schools, it would be really hard to prove that they affect lower income and minority students differently than they do higher income students. I think that large part of the plaintiffs’ intention had less to do with winning than with waging a PR campaign against organized labor. The people who are driving this are generally wealthy interests that really dislike the concept that there are due process protections for any workers, not just teachers. They want all employment to be at will and they don’t want a collective voice.
EduShyster:You’ve written extensively about Vergara and the claims being made by the high-profile and well-funded legal team, but I want to start by talking about your background
I have been asked for my “single best idea for reforming K-12 education”. When you only have one shot, you want to make it count. So I thought I would share my idea here, in case anyone has a brighter insight.
Root cause: factory model of management
To decide what is the single best idea for reforming K-12 education, one needs to figure out what is the biggest problem that the system currently faces. To my mind, the biggest problem is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust. “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.
Given that the factory model of management doesn’t work very well, even in the few factories that still remain in this country, or anywhere else in the workplace for that matter, we should hardly be surprised that it doesn’t work well in education either.
But given that the education system is seen to be in trouble, there is a tendency to think we need “better management” or “stronger management” or “tougher management”, where “management” is assumed to be the factory model of management. It is assumed to mean more top-down management and tighter controls, and more carrots and sticks. It is assumed to mean hammering the teachers who don’t perform and ruthlessly weeding out “the dead wood”. The thinking is embedded in Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind.
These methods are known to be failing in the private sector, because they dispirit the employees and limit their ability to contribute their imagination and creativity; they frustrate customers, and they are killing the very organizations that rely on them. So why should we expect anything different in the education sector?
When the problems have been caused in the first place by introducing the practices of “management”, then a more rigorous pursuit of this type of “management” only makes things worse. It is like medieval doctors trying to cure patients by bloodletting, using leeches, which only made the patients worse.
The inapplicablity of these methods is aggravated by the changes in the economy. Not so long ago, we could predict what jobs and careers might be available for children in their adult life. The education system could tell little Freddie or Janet what to study and if he or she mastered that, he or she was set for life. Not any more. We simply don’t know what jobs will be there in twenty years time. Today, apart from a few core skills like reading, writing, math, thinking, imagining and creating, we cannot know what knowledge or skills will be needed when Freddie or Janet grows up.
The best single idea for reforming education
Given this context, I believe that the single most important idea for reform in K-12 education concerns a change in goal. The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.
Implications of accepting the shift in goal
This is a shift from running the system for the sake of the system (“You study what we tell you to study, when we tell you, and how we tell you, and at a pace that we determine”) to a focus on the ultimate goal of learning (“Our goal is to inspire our students to become life-long learners with a love of education, so that they will be able to learn whatever they have to.”) All parties—teachers, administrators, unions, parents and students—need to embrace the new goal.
Once we embrace this goal, we can see that that many things will have to change to accomplish it. We can also grasp that most of the thinking underlying current “reforms” of the system can be seen in their true light as schemes and devices that are actually making things worse.
Some of the implications include:
The role of the teachers and parents: Education has to shift from imparting a static package of knowledge to a dynamic goal of enabling students to create knowledge and deploy skills to new situations, whatever they turn out to be. In this world, teaching by transfer of information doesn’t work well. Instead the role of teachers (and parents) becomes one of enabling and inspiring the students to learn, soas to spark their energies and talents.
The role of administrators: Administrators have to realize that managing the teachers through the control of a traditional hierarchy using carrots and sticks isn’t going to work any better than it does in industry. Unless teachers are themselves inspired, they are unlikely to inspire their students. The role of the administrator has to shift from being a controller to an enabler, so as to liberate the energies and talents of the teachers and remove impediments that are getting in the way of their work.
The role of tests: Instead of the teacher or the administrator being the judge of progress, there are explicit criteria where both the students and the teachers can understand themselves how they are doing (in real time) and thus learn how to improve.
Respecting Goodhart’s law: The current focus on testing has tended to make test results the goal of the system, rather than a measure. The change in goal means recognizing that a test is only measure. Using tests as the goal infringes Goodhart’s Law: when measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be an effective measure.
Themode of accountability: Instead of measuring progress through top-down tests and bureaucracy, the education system must be linked dynamically to self-driven learning of the students themselves. Education must abandon accountability through the use of detailed plans, rules, processes and reports, which specify both the goal and the means of achieving that goal. Instead, what is needed is “dynamic linking”, which means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the teacher sets the goals of learning for the cycle. (c) decisions about how the learning is to take place is the responsibility of the students; (d) progress is measured in terms of the questions the students are able to generate, not merely answers that they are able to regurgitate; (e) students must be able to measure their own progress—they aren’t dependent on the teacher’s tests. (The ELLI assessment tool is a promising approach to achieving these measurement goals.)
Communications shift from command to conversation: i.e. a shift from top-down communications (“the sage on the stage”) comprising predominantly hierarchical directives to horizontal conversations (“the guide on the side”) that helps the student discover new resources, solve problems and generate new insights.
An implementable agenda: Unlike many other ideas now being pursued in education, the shift in goal doesn’t require years of research or armies of consultants or vast funding. It doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel. Thousands of Montessori schools have been on this track for many years, with extraordinary results.
From outputs to outcomes: Implicit in the shift in goal is of course also an implicit shift from deliveringoutputs (numbers of students who pass a standardized test) to outcomes in terms of what students are able to do as a result of their education. At its heart, it’s a shift from a focus on things to a focus on people, and the true goal of education.
There is a common perception that charter high schools do a better job than traditional public high schools in preventing kids from dropping out. Is that true? Guy Brandenburg, who writes the GFBrandenburg’s Blog (which is subtitled “Just a blog by a guy who’s a retired math teacher”), looked at some data in Washington D.C. […]
One of the big disconnects in Common Core advocacy is that a lot of the people who think the standards are vital to the future of America and want to see them implemented in public schools everywhere send their children to private schools that have not adopted the Core. President Obama comes to mind: His […]
The Answer Sheet:All Week @ The Answer SheetThe Koch brothers’ influence on college campus is spreadingThere’s been a flurry of recent stories (here, here and here, for example) about the role the billionaire Koch brothers are playing in politics by backing conservative political candidates through a number of organizations that they fund. My Post colleague Matea Gold wrote in this story: The poli
What does the state budget bill do in regards inBloom and student privacy? Not much.
The budget bill, due to be voted on Monday, deals with student privacy in an inept and confusing way; the privacy provisions read as though they were written by a 3rd year law student at 1 AM in the morning, who understands nothing about the issue. We saw the language late last week, and provided lots of suggested improvements, none of which were taken.
Though it seems to ban inBloom, by preventing the state from sharing personal data with any “Shared Learning infrastructure service provider” or “SLISP” –that is, a company which is storing the information for the purpose of providing it to a data dashboard provider, inBloom is not described as such in the state’s service agreement. The state’s plan to share data with inBloom could presumably survive as long as it purports to be a storage facility for as yet unstated purposes, or to provide data for other specified uses, such as personalized learning tools. (The full language of the bill is here: just search “"SHARED LEARNING INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICE PROVIDER” to find the privacy section.) The best part is around the strong encryption standards, which are taken straight from the O'Donnell/Robach bill, and are the same as required by HIPAA in handling health care data.
On the other hand, as opposed to that bill, full indemnification for breaches is not required, and instead, the penalties are absurdly weak – for example, the maximum fine for failing to report breaches is $5000, which is pocket money for most vendors, including inBloom, built with $100 million of Gates money.
In addition, much of the language appears to be taken from the ALEC bill on privacy, including a privacy officer who would be appointed by
Here are the presenters at the opt-out forum that took place yesterday in Comsewogue. I got to meet and speak to a few of them. Second from the right is Beth Dimino, the intrepid President of the Port Jefferson Station Teachers Association. All the way to the left is Mercedes Schneider. In the center is Comsewogue Superintendent Joe Rella.
Rella spoke of a tribe in which the overarching question is, "How are the children?" This, to them, reflected on the community. In our state, according to Common Core testing, 70% of our children are failing. This is unacceptable. Rella, when I met him, likened himself to the conductor of an orchestra. He said the teachers were his musicians, that he didn't actually know how to play their instruments, and that couldn't do his job without them. For someone accustomed to the likes of Joel Klein, talking to him was revelatory.
I've read Mercedes Schneider's blog, and noticed her impeccable research. She told us she opposed Common Core standards because she had personal standards, and then called Common Core toxic for its failure to create a knowledge base. Then she told stories of how she'd give her high school kids said knowledge base via telling them stories, and it was very easy to believe. She's got a soft Louisiana accent and I do believe I could listen raptly while she read a telephone book. But she's also ridiculously intelligent, and that's apparent if you speak to her for more than one minute.
Beth Dimino is rapidly becoming one of my personal heroes, as she is a woman of action. She does not let the grass grow around her feet, and
Over 1300 witness forms against Common Core were delivered to the Senate Education Committee at the recent Common Core hearing on March 26. There were many that were turned in at the hearing as well, but 1335 witness forms were presented by Ron Calzone of Missouri First (thank you Ron) who received these electronically. These markers represent the areas from which they were sent. You can use your “critical thinking skills” (see, you really didn’t need Common Core to possess this skill) to determine that this is not an rural vs urban education issue.
If you missed sending in your witness form you might still have time as the hearing for SB 514 & SB 798 will be continued this Wednesday, April 2. We are asking if additional witness forms will be accepted. You can access a witness form at libertytools.com:
Send this link to anyone concerned about Common Core State Standards and encourage them to fill out a witness form. Make your voice heard and add your marker to this sea of red markers
My name is Melissa Katz and I am 18 years old. I am a freshman at The College of New Jersey studying urban education. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been asked, “Why do you want to go into education? Why do you want to be a teacher? Don’t you know how much more money you could be making in another profession?”
The answer to all of these questions is simple: I have an undeniable belief in and love for our public schools, because public education is the great equalizer among us.
As an urban education major, many people have asked me about my plans for joining Teach for America (TFA), and my answer is always the same – I will never join Teach for America because it is fundamentally flawed in its ideals. Imagine your teachers – those that have dedicated their lives to children, to the profession, and to educating the next generation of thinkers and creators –replaced by someone with only five weeks of training, and who is only obligated to stay for two years. Teach for America brings in some of the most inexperienced teachers and puts them into low-income schools and communities, the same places that need the most experienced and dedicated teachers.
They will never understand that these are the community’s schools, the livelihood of the community. Our schools are places that real learning happens. Our schools are places where students get involved in all different activities that they are interested
