Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Accountability Movement (aka: teachers aren't smart)

Politicians and policy makers rarely ask teachers what they think about school reform and I believe there is a good reason. 

Opinion 3: Teachers aren't smart. It's a very unpopular sentiment to hold. It's also true. You'll hear from time to time that teachers are on average better educated and therefore smarter than most of their peers. It's a lie. As a graduate of a graduate education program, I can attest to the low quality of graduate education education at our 2nd-3rd tier schools. Teachers may have more Masters degrees but they're also B students. Many of my peers were proud of their C averages in undergrad. They thought they had found some special system whereby they get all the benefits of college without any of the drawbacks. At least our graduate professors generally expected us to read (even though we didn't and didn't have to).

The non-exceptionalness of teachers extends into the classroom. We hear constantly of teachers being fired for harassment, embezzlement, sex with students, porn on the school computer, of running side businesses out of the "rubber rooms" in NYC, of refusing to teach evolution, of using the classroom as a pulpit for their political beliefs. In short: teachers are simply a subset of the general population. We're normal. Some of us are good. Some of us suck. Most of us are adequate. Why acknowledging this fact pisses people off is beyond me.

Okay, I lied: I blame Edward James OlmosMichelle Pfeiffer, and Hillary Swank.  Our society puts teachers on a huge pedestal and then is super mad when they can't perform. Go figure out what happened to the real people behind these made-up Hollywood farces. Answers (respectively): Died penniless in Bolivia, quit teaching to found an education consultancy, and quit teaching to found an education consultancy. Of course nobody knows that. They simply expect all their teachers to live up to the expectations set in our culture. Well, teachers aren't smart. We're just not that good. Of course, the same society also believes "those who can't do, teach". It's like our cognitive dissonance has cognitive dissonance. If we could get our heads straight about what we want our teachers to be, that'd go a long way toward recruiting and training "good" teachers.

And for the record: a commitment to social justice and to providing equal opportunities in your classroom doesn't make you a good teacher. Showing up every day doesn't make you a good teacher. Caring doesn't make you a good teacher. You can have the biggest heart in the world and still ruin kids' lives because you're a terrible teacher. I definitely encounter teachers who believe that they're great simply because of their line of work. I care and therefore must be good at my job.

I wonder if that kid got into college.

Policy makers and politicians in the 1980s and 1990s figured this whole "teachers aren't all that bright" thing out and the accountability movement was born. If we could just figure out who the bad teachers/principals/schools were, the argument went, we could get rid of them and put better people in the classroom/school. The eventual policy born of the accountability movement was No Child Left Behind. It was a sweeping education reform movement. One key factor for holding schools accountable was standardized testing. Over the decade following NCLB, standardized tests would be phased in at several grade levels. The purpose was to see which kids were actually learning and which schools were truly educating their pupils. When these test scores didn't improve (called Adequate Yearly Progress), schools were put on probation. If they continually failed to meet AYP, schools would be subject to punitive measures including: funding cuts, administrative layoffs, and state takeover. Teachers, as part of the deal reached to get Democratic support, weren't directly threatened with disciplinary actions if their students failed the high stakes tests.

The 6" binder containing standards
governing one teacher's curriculum.
They were (and are) still scrutinized heavily by their administrators with regard to their teaching of "Standards". Standards are basically everything a student is supposed to know by the time they take the standardized test in a subject area. Georgia's American Lit.Comp. standards, for example, can be found here. They include language like the following:
ELAALRL4  The student employs a variety of writing genres to demonstrate a comprehensive grasp of significant ideas in selected literary works.  The student composes essays, narratives, poems, or technical documents.
Standards must be placed on lesson plans and displayed prominently in the classroom. When administrators observe teachers, they often look for the current lesson's standards on the dry-erase board and they ask students which standards they're working on that day. The idea is to get students to think of the big picture. If they know what they're supposed to be learning broadly, they can understand why the lesson at hand is important to their educational success. Similarly, teachers should consider broad goals when creating lessons for class. Teaching the standards is now one of the primary factors in teacher evaluation.

Schools and teachers, by extension, are now held accountable for their students' success. Under NCLB, schools face scrutiny when their students don't perform well on standardized tests and teachers face scrutiny when they don't teach the standards laid out by the state. While the standardized tests are created from the standards, I'd like to point out that none of the standards specify content that will be on the test. Many have argued that teaching the standards is tantamount to teaching to the test. I don't think that's true because the standards are purposefully vague and don't give, for example, specific reading lists.

That brings us up to the present series of reforms and intended reforms, which I will post about tomorrow.

5 comments:

  1. There was a really long response in place of this, which the internets failed to post, so I'll just sum up my ramblings as succinctly as possible.

    1. Good points about national discussions being way overdue since it has been a decade since NCLB started. Republicans and Democrats are essentially the same though, because no matter which one claims to care about education more, they really just want to court voters to gain power and push the agendas that matter to the people in charge.

    2. I hate inspirational teacher movies, and any depiction of a person who sacrifices his or her marriage for a job (remember that before anything else, it's a job!) is idiotic. In any other profession, the kind of behavior you see in a movie like Freedom Writers would be frowned upon and obliquely referred to as a form of substance abuse.

    3. Yes, teachers are human just like the rest of us. It's foolish to be surprised when a section of them fail to meet the high expectations society sets for them because a section of the entire population would fail too. Human beings suck at meeting high moral and ethical standards, and teachers, being human beings, do too.

    4. James, this post was not boring at all, but I might be biased because I enjoy intelligent writing about topics that I care about.

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  2. James, interesting you point out the issue of "teachers on a pedestal" - I've been wondering why we do that. Teachers get grouped with police and firefighters as one of those professions it's cool to idealize. On the one hand, I understand having admiration for what may amount to a college-educated babysitter, having to deal with loads of kids and no adults all day long. On the other hand, speaking as someone in corporate America, teachers seem well-compensated on average when you take into consideration that they get guaranteed pay raises at predictable intervals. They may not be big, but they are steady (excepting the furlough day thing going on right now). So while a lot of people make a big deal over teacher pay, I see it as a profession where you trade potentially huge salary growth for guaranteed slow growth. Anyway, to get back to the topic at hand, I wonder why people are so eager to idealize teachers to begin with? Is it because of nostalgia? Everyone is remembering the ideal schoolmarm of yore? Is it because of inspirational movies, as you point out? Is it because the idea of teachers, the people we entrust our kids to, being anything less than extraordinary is too scary to contemplate?

    It would be nice if teachers were that great - then accountability wouldn't be necessary. I find that most teachers I talk to are VERY quick to place the blame anywhere but on themselves for students' performance. In the corporate world, of course we have accountability for our work. At the same time, my work is much easier to define than yours is. I know when I'm successful because my company makes more money. Simple. With the students, you have standardized tests, but it's strange that teaching is a field where your job performance depends on the "job" performance of others. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink and all of that. I would hate for my job performance to be judged by the lazy, bored person in the cubicle next to mine, spending her day texting. In your opinion, what's a fair way to measure a teacher's effectiveness?

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  3. Rachael, I think a good way to assess teachers would be to use multiple measures. Standardized test scores, plus administrative evaluation, plus peer evaluation, plus student (or parent) evaluation. I think that's a great way to address the entirety of a teacher's ability. Specifics are beyond me at this moment but ideally these kinds of things would be correlated. A good teacher would interact well with students, be acknowledged as proficient by peers, work well with the administration, and educate his or her pupils enough to pass a standardized test. I think this is already true to some extent, but none of these four components are necessary except having students test well.

    I'll also say, that I tend not to blame teachers simply because I already think they're mostly incapable of meeting the task set before them. If we somehow found a way to put a PhD in every classroom, we'd still fail tons of kids because our policies are crap.

    I think it seems like teachers are keen to blame the students because everyone else is blaming the teachers. There's a false dichotomy where it's either the teachers' fault or not the teachers' fault. From what I can see, teachers share a lot of the blame.

    I discussed my observation of somewhat racist or classist attitudes of the teachers at my current school when we had dinner a few weeks back. I definitely blame those teachers for their students' failure. They simply refuse to alter their teaching strategies in the face of a completely different demographic. And then they have the nerve to complain that they don't like teaching the "Mexican" kids!

    The biggest irony is that the county will be redistricting for a new HS that opens in 2012. The HS I work in may become a Title I school and the students will be 100% apartment-living. No neighborhoods at all. Which is interesting because this is freaking Roswell GA and there'll be a Title I school there. Needless to say, the people with means have already taken their kids elsewhere and the redistricting is largely being done to protect newer (whiter, more affluent) schools from having to admit any "brown" children who live in apartments and don't share the same culture. (In related news, the cities of Milton and John's Creek are facing lawsuits for diluting the black and Hispanic populations voting rights by splitting them between three cities.)

    So yeah, teachers should get called out for this BS. You teach EVERYONE because that's the way this works. We decided that our society would be better off if it were literate and numerate, no exclusions. You don't want to teach kids with poor English skills, or who don't look like you, or who don't act like you? Go somewhere else. Quit teaching in public schools. Move to Oregon - the whitest state in the country.

    Lastly, I don't think corporate America is a good model of efficiency. In fact, its not even a useful-but-flawed model. If the economic crisis has taught me anything, its taught me that the people who run our businesses are both inept and corrupt(big and small mind you - most real estate offices are small businesses, most banks are locally managed).

    Here's a link to a really good discussion about school reform:
    http://cafehayek.com/2010/04/ravitch-on-education.html

    The interviewer is Russ Roberts, a super, super libertarian economics professor. He has on Diane Ravitch, who hates the move to introduce free-market principals into schools. While they don't "solve the crisis", Russ Roberts makes the key point that schools aren't businesses, they aren't markets, and they aren't capitalist. So introducing market-style reforms in a limited way is basically just going to distort things. In this case, you can't be "kind of free market". Merit pay is great but it doesn't work without the other aspects of a market system in place.

    Thanks for commenting and for the questions.

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  4. James, thanks for the reply! I cracked up at Oregon being the whitest state in the nation. My dad is originally from Oregon, and he tells a funny family story about one of my uncles when he was like 5. He was with my grandpa at a store in Oregon and saw a black man for the first time in his life, and said, "Hey mister, what's wrong with your skin?!" One of the most embarrassing moments in my grandpa's life!

    Regarding the teachers who have issues with teaching kids of different races or socio-economic backgrounds, I was wondering what kind of training teachers get after they've become teachers? Meaning, do you know if school administrations give teachers regular training or retraining designed to give people the tools they need to teach the kids that they have? Then again, there's no telling if retraining would help, if personal attitudes are the issue. It reminds me too much of the "ethics" training we had at work the other day, when one of the most unethical employess in my company sat there and lectured us not to do things that he himself did all the time.

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  5. Well I recently attended a professional development training at my school. The entire staff was brought into an auditorium and told about a great new teaching strategy guaranteed to reach those hard-to-get students and really bring up their test scores: differentiated instruction. If you don't know how common and universal differentiated instruction is, ask Jason.

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