Love the One You're With

I've listened, read, and watched a lot of debates and opinions on how to improve education over the past few years.  There's lots of disagreement over many, many things.  Two things that are irrefutable and backed by the data of many studies are:

1.  Student socio-economic status is the factor that correlates highest with achievement in school.
2.  The quality of the teacher in front of a student is the largest in-school factor in his/her achievement.

Since the focus of this blog is not on decreasing poverty, teaching parenting skills, nor building stronger relationships between parents, I'm not going to talk about the first statement above.  I'll simply state that if we are serious about improving education in this country, we had better not ignore the fact that poverty in the United States is at its highest point in decades.

Flickr/McConnell Center

I would like to focus on the second statement, though.  We've known that the quality of our teachers is important for a long time.  We've known since well before No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the charter school movement, union-bashing, and the push for school vouchers.  In all that time, we've never focused on making teachers better.

We hear talk of firing bad teachers, using student test scores to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher, and eliminating collective bargaining rights.  We focus on "accountability."  We never focus on developing our teachers and making them better.

Imagine a farm where the farmer tried to make his pigs larger by weighing them more often instead of feeding them.  Imagine a greenhouse that tried to grow larger plants by measuring them more often instead of giving them more fertilizer. 

We hear "experts" claim that getting rid of the bad teachers is the answer, however we know that we are facing a national teacher shortage in the future.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics we will need 1.6 million new teachers in the next few years.  It's time to start looking at how we can improve the teachers we have.  To borrow from Stephen Stills, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

It's difficult to determine how much money we've spent on standardized testing in the United States in the past decade.  If you look at only the cost of developing and administering the tests, the figure is somewhere between 5 billion and 10 billion dollars.  If you include the costs districts and schools are forced to spend to buy test preparation materials and meet the federal mandates, the cost rises much, much higher.

What if we spent that money on developing our teachers and improving teaching in this country?  What if we used it to identify great teachers and develop mentorship programs with those new to the profession?  What if we used it to provide time and opportunities for teacher collaboration so that the best ideas were spread to as many classrooms as possible?  What if we created exchange programs where teachers from struggling schools could spend a year in a high performing school?  What if we made teacher improvement our focus by bombarding our teachers with professional development opportunities the way we bombard them with standardized testing pressure?  What if we spent our resources developing our talent instead of hoping that talented teachers will suddenly appear if we keep turning over our faculties enough times?

What if, instead of looking for one to love, we started loving the ones we're with?

Do that and you'll see the improvement in learning that we are all hoping to find.

Accountability and Teacher Evaluation

Like other parts of the country, New York City is having problems with obesity.  According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, childhood obesity is an epidemic, and 1 in 5 New York City kindergarten students are obese.
 

Photo: Flickr, Citizenactionny


Because of this, New York City is seriously looking at the lack of performance by city doctors, and demanding accountability.  A new test is being developed that will be taken by patients that will measure doctor effectiveness, and allow the city to get rid of the worst performing doctors.  These tests are meant to both evaluate doctors and create a system of accountability which will force doctors to do their jobs better. 

Every year patients will be given a Body Mass Index (BMI) test to determine how healthy they are.  At the end of the year, patients will be given the same test to see if their doctor has been effective in making them healthier.  Doctors who do well on the evaluations will be given bonus checks.  Doctors who have patients who score poorly on the evaluation for two years in a row will be banned from practicing in New York City, since they have proven to be ineffective.

If you haven't noticed by now, the above two paragraphs are total fabrication.  The very premise that we would evaluate doctors based on such tests is absurd.  To start with, the tests would define "health" in a ridiculously narrow way (only using BMI).  There are many factors that are out of the doctors' control when it comes to their patients' progress in staying healthy.  It would force the best doctors to ignore the patients who need them the most, since bad evaluations would mean less money and less job security.  Many doctors would choose to practice somewhere outside the city.  In all ways, this would be a terrible idea, and lead to a worse health care system for the city. 

Photo: Comstock/Thinkstock

Yet, this is exactly what New York City is proposing to do to evaluate teachers. 

If you want to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher, evaluate their teaching.  I've heard the arguments against this:  it's too costly, administrators don't do a very good job at evaluating teachers, there's no way to hold teachers accountable if we don't in some way quantify their effectiveness with a number.  These are all hollow arguments.

If you want to get data cheaply, you get cheap data.  We should be using the best data to drive our instruction, not the cheapest and/or easiest to obtain. 

If administrators are doing a lousy job of identifying teachers who are using best practices, that's a good reason to put pressure on administrators to do a better job of evaluating teaching.  It's not a good reason to take away more learning time for our students to take tests and prepare for them. 

Some jobs do not relate well to the business world, and can't be quantified easily.  You can't judge the effectiveness of police officers by the number of arrests they make.  You've got to look at how well they deal with situations they face.  You can't judge the effectiveness of firefighters by how many fires they put out.  You've got to look at how well they fight the fires with which they are faced.  You can't judge teachers by how well their students do on standardized tests.  You've got to look at how well they teach the students that they are given.  Those students come with a variety of home situations, emotional issues, economic issues, and a plethora of other baggage that may affect how they score on tests.

The most important things we do in school can't be measured on a test.  Show me someone who disagrees, and I'll show you someone who doesn't know what's important.