Some sort of reform position from the union

According to the New York Times, the National Education Association has an official policy on student evaluation outcomes in teacher evaluations: Use them, but only if they're good tests.  The article does a good job of sampling the union's position and laying out some of the big picture of what this means.  (Full disclosure: I am a proud member of a local affiliate of the NEA.  While I'm not a union shill, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking I was.)  From my perspective, the union's new policy feels like sense, and it resonates with my thinking on the matter. 

We need data to drive effective instruction.  We need good data about educational outcomes for students, and we need good data for educational outcomes for teachers.  (Someday we'll get to have the conversation about data for educational outcomes for administrators and school boards.  But in the meantime, teachers are the proxy for all those levels of the education machine.  And that's to put entirely aside the effects of poverty, parent responsibility, and all the other smoke screens we teachers like to release when people try to look at us too hard.)  This need for data means that we're going to have to include student testing in decision-making at some level; if data-driven decision making is going to be used to improve education, we need good data.

There are two key phrases: the more immediate concern is "good data."  Neither I nor any of my colleagues I've talked to about this (a pitifully small sample size; even if you count my former colleagues at my last posting, the total number of professional educators I've worked with adds up to less than 50, and the ones I've talked to add up to less than 15) trust any of the current assessments.  The disconnect between the assessments and educational reality is simply too great, for a lot of reasons, and it isn't necessarily because the ACT is "too hard."  It's not.  The reality is that assessments sample such a small number of learning goals, and do so in such a cursory manner, that drawing meaningful conclusions is tough.  Equally importantly, the current assessments are not really designed to evaluate the skill of instruction.  The good standardized tests assess really big ideas--critical thinking, drawing conclusions from data, things like that.  But they don't do it in a way that means a great deal.  Colleges have been de-emphasizing their focus on standardized test scores as an admission requirement, even as everybody else ramps it up.  The union's director of teacher quality makes a valid point: the Common Core curriculum might be a starting place for getting better standardized tests.

The second, long-term consideration about data is longer-term political.  I said, "if we're going to use data to improve education".  That wasn't a rhetorical flourish.  As trained professionals, many of us see the value in data (even if we lack the know-how, the resources, or the time to do anything about it).  But I for one don't trust the motivations of many of the people pushing "testing testing testing" as the new standard for teacher (and by extension public education) efficacy.  Many of them have a track record of being distinctly anti-public-education.  These are all the usual boogeymen for this blog: the Mackinac Foundation, private charter school management companies, people who think that a lack of officially-sanctioned prayer in school is de facto a reason to be against public education.  For many of these organizations (cue the "straw man" arguments, and I see your point), data-driven instruction may simply be another weapon to attack public education with.

Conversely, critics of the NEA (and, in this particular instance, I don't count myself among them) could argue a similar thing: In name, the union has accepted testing as part of teacher evaluations, while in practice rejecting any existing tests.  It will be at least a decade before the kind of tests the union wants are available, by which time this argument will likely be moot.  Good practice will show that high-stakes testing doesn't produce notably better education outcomes, and opponents of public education will move on to some other angle of attack.

So what's to be done?  Well, I can't do a whole lot about public policy right now.  Thanks to a recent vote in the Michigan Senate, my local union has less power than ever to do anything about teacher evaluations.  What I can do is this: use the (pretty crappy) data we have to make decisions about what's good for my students.  Make sure my learning goals are crystal clear in my head, and make sure my formative assessments are as good as they can possibly be.  Get the data that I need myself.  Make sure my class is so hard, when someone throws a standardized test at my students, they don't think twice about knocking it out of the park.  Make sure my support structures are so strong, that all of them get it.  Ray, I think you have the right idea:  What do you want students to know?  How are you going to help them learn it?  How are you going to know if they got it?  What are you going to do about it?  The key questions are the only ones that matter.

(Edited to fix spelling error in the title.  Thanks, Jamie.  Who's the English teacher around here again?)

Teachers' unions

I did a brief spiel on Cesar Chavez for Hispanic Heritage Month, and in it I emphasized the role of the National Farm Workers' Association.  My seventh-grade class, which often calls out anything I say which even hints at political overtones, asked me many questions which made it clear they'd heard that unions were bad.  My eighth graders just wanted to know what unions did for me. 

As I answered their questions, I tried to make it clear to them that I was a biased source of information, that everything I was going to tell them was pro-union, and that therefore I couldn't be trusted to provide the whole story.  (It's more important that they know valid information when they hear it than that they like teachers' unions.)  But it made me think again about what unions are, what unions do, and why unions are generally unpopular in the US and generally getting less so.

And then I came across this excellent post by Audrey Watters, about why almost everything they say about teachers' unions is wrong, or at least skewed.  I would only add the following things.

When teachers' unions oppose reform, it is not because we (the teachers, and the members of the unions) are opposed to improvements.  We are, however, opposed to being taken advantage of.  Part of what unions do is make sure that their members' working conditions improve over time, or at least not get worse. 

And part of the argument that a certain flavor of education "reformer" makes is that teachers do not deliver value for money.  The obvious solution to this is for teachers to increase their work load and complexity by an undetermined amount up to infinity without an increase in compensation in other areas.  They call it--and this might be the worst part--accountability.  (As this paragraph currently exists, it's awfully straw man.  I'll find some examples--well, honestly, probably when I retire and write my book in the history of education at the turn of the century.)  Unions (at their best) try to slow that process down somewhat, to force consideration of whether each change is going to actually improve the students' education experience, and whether it would place undue hardship on the teachers.

This is the take-away quote from this article:   "If unions oppose merit pay, it isn’t because they want to just reward long-time teachers with higher pay, quality of instruction be-damned. It’s because what counts as “merit” in these proposals is not the same as being a good teacher."

Insufficient answers to pressing questions

Bob Herbert describes extraordinary results in a charter school (2 charter schools, actually--a middle school, and a high school that they made in response to their initial success in the middle school). 48 of 48 students in the graduating class are going on to college. All of these students face the difficulties educators point to--poverty, first to attend college, etc.

Eduwonk (hat tip for the article) frames this as the reason to have charter schools.

But my fundamental question remains unanswered--why can't we do this with public education? Why don't we? I think Eduwonk would say "Teachers' Unions! Vested Interests! Education Lobbyists!" Is my industry so politically powerful? Is it so short-sighted that we'd betray our professional principles and destroy our credibility?

At the same time I write this post, I happen to be listening to a Smithsonian Folkways podcast about labor movement folk songs, and it occurs to me that I toe the Union line pretty strongly. So let me clarify: I, of course, celebrate the success of all the students of Gaston Prep Middle and the high school (unnamed in the article). I honor the tremendous effort and sacrifice, and admire the professional dedication, of Tammi Sutton and Caleb Dolan, the educators responsible for creating and driving the schools that have helped this graduating class. I look forward to continued success from these schools. I don't question that in another educational setting these students would not have met anywhere near the same degree of success. I look forward to continued success from these schools.

What I question is, why wouldn't these students have had the same degree of success in their local public schools? What did this school do that public schools don't do? Why don't they do it?

The heart of my criticism of charter school is this: Charter schools and similar reform efforts are based on the notion of competition between education providers. The theory runs thus: as charter schools show their worth, non-charter schools will have to reform and improve student services, or parents will choose schools that will do the best job by their students. "Free and open market forces" will decide the distribution of limited resources--the victors will survive, the failures will dissolve. With the failure of just a few schools, we'll achieve a much higher degree of educational efficacy in education. And maybe that's the case.

But we already have a system of distribution of limited resources. It's called the "public education system." It is not immune from criticism: It is a near-monopoly; it's a bulky bureaucracy with many share-holders whose objectives sometimes work at cross-purpses; change is nearly impossible; every rule change has a million unintended consequences. Public schools fail a huge number of students, and these students are disproportionately the ones who most need help from the public sector--minorities and special-needs students.

But, and here's the rub of it, I think, charter schools and other competitive systems of education reform seek to dilute pools of limited resources, in effect robbing Peter to pay Paul. This inevitably leads to incentivizing "trade secrets," which is the opposite of what we want. If a school finds something that works that nobody else is doing, we want people standing on the rooftops screaming about it. We want successful teachers to be rock stars, the subjects of articles and TV specials, teacher educators, article-writers. We want their techniques studied, spread, maximized. To that extent, anything that charter schools can do to make us better, I'm all for it. I remain extremely sceptical, however, that diffusing the nation's education resources is the best way to do that.