Back when I was a graduate student, I would have been kicked out of my program for playing fast and loose with words and data the way that so many in the education reform debates do. These falsehoods are debasing what should be meaningful conversations about helping kids, teachers, and our public school system do better.
Myth #1: Teaching is the only profession whose employees are not held accountable for results.
The argument goes: Teachers never get fired, they are treated like widgets even though some are better than others, and this is outrageous since obviously "every other profession" pays, promotes, and fires their employees based on their "results," right? On the contrary, teaching is the only profession for which laws are popping up almost daily, that seek to evaluate employees based on creating complex changes in another human being. If student achievement is a crisis in this country as it is claimed to be, certainly health, addiction, and obesity are national crises as well. So where are all the laws limiting pay raises to only those doctors who cause their patients to stop smoking, eat healthily, and maintain a healthy weight?
I am all for reforming the tenure process and making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. But if we could so easily achieve change in socially complex behaviors by using monetary rewards and punishments, we would have already been doing so in other professions, and the countries whose achievement records we so often tout would be doing so in their education systems, but we don't and they aren't.
Myth #2: We haven't gotten our money's worth in the education system, because investment has increased, yet achievement scores have remained flat.
Bill Gates himself penned an article in the Huffington Post charting education investments against NAEP scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress). This chart, and every conclusion that could be drawn from it, range from the misleading to the patently false. Most importantly, the NAEP trends are not flat. There have been modest but statistically significant improvements of a size that would be expected due to real improvements in achievement. Can we also agree on the ridiculousness of depicting one number in the thousands in the same chart as another number in the single and double digits? It's like comparing two travel distances when one map is zoomed in and the other is not. Something tells me that Bill Gates might be pretty good with numbers and therefore has no trouble understanding this.
The question of whether an investment vs. test score gain comparison even makes sense in the first place is another matter. A more meaningful question might be about educational investment vs. the drop-out rate. According to the Institute for Education Sciences the drop-out rate has declined significantly since the early 1970's for all income groups. If you are concerned that today's rates or remaining disparities between the races and classes are still unacceptably high, you get no argument from me. But to say that we have not achieved a return on investment is downright mythical.
Myth #3: Anti-testing advocates think the status quo is fine, don't care about results or kids, and only care about protecting teachers and unions.
This myth is based on overlooking the simple fact that statistical errors always cut both ways. That is, value- added estimates can overestimate teachers just as easily as underestimate them. One of the founders of value-added modeling admits, "Can you distinguish within the middle? No, you can't. Not with the most rigorous and robust value-added process you can bring to the problem." Research has confirmed this caution, showing that a full one-fourth of teacher ratings will be wrong -- in either direction. Thus, you might even say that test-based evaluation is "soft on accountability" since it protects many ineffective teachers.
Test-obsessed reformers have my greatest fear exactly wrong. I am not worried that hoards of qualified teachers will be fired, but rather that the uninspired ones will be left alone. Although the Gates study is conducting observations in classrooms, the youngest grade examined is fourth. Thus, despite having no evidence that our children will be protected against a "by any means necessary" approach to teaching, new laws in several states like Colorado and Missouri mandate that teacher evaluations based on student achievement growth extend down to kindergarten or even preschool. Don't believe anyone who tells you that the non-test based portion of the evaluation provides such protections. After all the exaltation of test scores as the only objective measure of teacher performance, do you really think disciplinary actions for teachers with good test score growth but poor teaching practices would pass the sniff test?
Myth #4: Since the system is broken, and teachers are so important, they must have broken it.
I have no doubt that the top 10% of teachers are so skilled at their craft that they are producing achievement gains despite dwindling resources, increasing class sizes, and no mentoring support. The others may deserve to be subject to a watchful eye or even dismissed, but this is not reform so much as yelling the old rules more loudly. Reformers need to get their argument straight: Is the system broken and therefore needs a radical change, or does the system work just fine as it is so long as you add more enforcement?
Yes, ultimately, innovation and quality control will both be part of the solution, but blaming teachers for the problem only makes sense if the system has given them every possible opportunity to succeed. A recent New York Times op-ed piece made this point well when they compared teachers to soldiers, explaining that when military endeavors fail "we don't say 'it's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefit plans!'" but rather we look to bigger-picture infrastructure and higher-up leadership for the reasons for failure. We also don't say that the success of some soldiers proves that that the unsuccessful ones are at fault. We also don't create unnecessary competition among soldiers, leading them to withhold their good ideas from their platoon.
We don't say or do any of these things because, as techniques for creating positive change, they are not only mythical, they are absurd, ineffective, and immoral.
I know, I know -- I'm just a whiny myth-debunker with no solutions. For some good ideas about what to do instead of perpetuating myths, see Kevin Welner's column about his and Carol Burris' recommendations to Arne Duncan. In future columns, I'll be writing about innovative, evidence-based practices being used in preschool and the early grades to increase the quality and rigor of early education.
Michael J. Petrilli: One Size Fits Most
I imagine most people also know that in the U.S., there are more doctors and lawyers that lose their licenses or are disbarred each year than there are teachers who are simply dismissed from their jobs for performance reasons. I suppose you could argue that teachers are just more naturally competent, but I think that's a hard case to make given the comparative difficulty of making it through medical or law school and becoming licensed or admitted to the bar.
Jan of Michigan
We as teachers need to take the reigns from the "refomers" and move things forward as the experts in the field that we are. No one is saying that there are not teachers out there that should be replaced. That is just one relatively small factor in a host of factors that must be addressed. And where is the accountability when it comes to parents?
All of the scrutiny in education seems to be coming from the bottom up. We scrutinize the teachers and blame them for so many ills, and yet your comparison to military structure is remarkably accurate.
Rather than scrutinize from the bottom up, we should be looking at the top and going down from there. If we change the culture of "test, test, test" at the top, perhaps it will spread throughout the rest of the profession and revitalize those teachers who know that test scores are not the be-all-end-all of student assessment.
The way we do things now is a lot like how a CEO runs a corporation - if the head honcho spots something wrong at the bottom, he makes changes to fix it. The problem, as you mention, is that the solution from the top doesn't necessarily take into account what's going on at the bottom, so the "solution" may not actually be one. The solutions for a lot of school problems can come directly from the teachers - or (heaven forbid!) the students themselves!
This isn't to say solutions can't come from the top, but I would argue that in many, many more situations, the solution to a school's problem can be found at the bottom, with the teachers and students.
Mimi Rothschild
CEO, Learning By Grace, Inc.
Mimi Rothschild
To name a few more ways that the public school system is broken.... curricular agendas, social agendas, political agendas, corruption, misappropriation of funds, conflicts of interest, monopolistic restraint of free trade, lack of free market principles to control quality and price, bribery, extortion, embezzlement, payoffs, abuse of power, misuse of public monies, false curricular content, mistreated children,inaccurate special ed labeling, salaries not commensurate with job descriptions, discrimination, tenure practices, lack of respect for the child and parental authority, denigration of parent's role, and last but probably first, the removal of God and prayer from all things school.
Just saying,,,,
Mimi Rothschild
www.LearningByGrace.org