There are a lot of things about Colorado Senate Bill 191 (yet another attempt to solve the problems facing education by revamping the way we evaluate teachers) to like. It has amped up the dialogue about education and, even though a lot of that dialogue seems ill-informed to me, any dialogue is better than none. It really does attempt to tie salary to student performance in a reasonable fashion. Instead of just looking at the end score of whatever new version of ITBS, or CSAP (pick your acronym), the proposed legislation intends to start with entrance scores for each student to more fairly assess individual GROWTH. Colorado's last four governors, all distinguished, well-intentioned men with fundamental disagreements, managed to all agree on and endorse the proposal.
There are little things that concern me. The idea that principal salary will be more closely tied to student performance on tests has engendered all kinds of visions of over-zealous, paranoid, and slow-witted principals showering their poor faculties with one lame faculty inservice after another in a lock-step, quotidian march to insure themselves another notch on the salary schedule. The reason teacher evaluation doesn't work now is because the ones charged with the task, that is public school admnistrators, aren't up to the task. I've worked with dozens of administrators in my career and, with a few notable exceptions, they are not a particularly bright group. I'm sorry, but truly great teachers rarely leave the classroom to become administrators. Administrators are by and large composed of individuals with undistinguished classroom credentials. Which is to say that most of the principals and assistant principals that have done my evaluations over the past 35 years wouldn't know good teaching from bad teaching if it crawled up and bit them on the ass.
But the main thing that concerns me is the whole idea that education is in a state of crisis and that the main thing we can do to alleviate that crisis is to get rid of bad teachers. It is like a conservative saying that tort reform will solve the problems of health care. It just ain't the case.
It seems to me there are three indicators conventional wisdom points to as evidence that something needs to be done to fix education: persistently low test scores, relatively high drop out rate, and a disparity of achievement between ethnic groups. I certainly agree that those are signicant problems that our country needs to address, I just don't agree that they prove a failure of education. Maybe they show a failure of the family.
I'm not a statistician, but I remember reading somewhere that as the size of a sample increases, the lowest standard denominator falls proportionately. When I took the SAT my senior year at Loveland High School, less than a third of my graduating class joined me. Now the percentage of Loveland graduates taking the SAT approaches 90. Guess what? The median score on the SAT for Loveland grads in 2010 is lower than the same score in 1966. Does that prove a crisis in education, or an all-american success story in the marketing of higher education?
That does not diminish the seriousness of the problem. But it does suggest that simply getting and retaining better teachers will be no more effective than our eight year long experiment with No Child Left Behind has been. NCLB was touted as an educational panacea and now we are touting a new educational panacea to replace the last panacea that didn't, as it were, pan out.
And then The Denver Post has the gall to call the Colorado Education Association "intractable" for not whole-heartedly endorsing the proposal. As is my want, I read the supposedly "intractable" position written by CEA's president. Instead of an irrational rant against the legislation as the Post would have me believe, I found a reasonable argument supported by fifteen (I counted them) statements of fact. Obviously, the Post defines as "intractable" anyone who stubbornly uses facts to support a position opposed to the Post's.
Okay, I will give the legislation the benefit of the doubt. Maybe getting rid of bad teachers will make everything better. So what are we talking about here? Jefferson County Schools has around 4000 teachers. For this to truly impact student achievement, there must be thousands of bad teachers we have to get rid of and replace with, according to Mike Rosen, one of the millions out there just chomping at the bit to get into the classroom. I'm probably overstating. You know, not being fair and balanced. Maybe there are just a thousand, or five hundred, or one hundred, or a dozen. Maybe I'm being intractable, but I just don't see how this is going to do much to cinch up the Race to the Top money that Governor Ritter is so hot for.
Now I'm really being cynical, but I believe the thinking behind Senate Bill 191 at its most basic is anti-union. Let me hasten to add that I have never been particularly impressed by the NEA or the CEA. I don't believe their number one priority is student achievement, nor do I think it should be. But I would suggest that teachers and their unions have done more to promote the welfare of young people in this state and country than all of their detractors put together.
Class size. Funding. Great teachers. Higher salary. Support from Higher Ed. Family counseling. Giving teachers the credit they ALREADY deserve. All of that has to happen to put our children in a position to have them profit from the high caliber education already being offered in every school and classroom across this country.
Let us have no more of this Captain Kirk leadership.
"Scotty, I need warp speed in thirty seconds or the Enterprise will be destroyed!"
"But Captain, the dylithium chrystals have been contaminated and won't give us the power we need."
"I don't have time for your excuses, Scotty. GET US OUT OF HERE!"
"I'll do the best I can with what I've got, Jim."
Teachers have been doing the best they can with what they've got for as long as parents have been sending their kids off to school.
So for all you educational critics out there. In the words of John Stewart, "Go fuck yourselves."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Every study that has analyzed the question has determined that lower class size results in a higher quality of education. This squares with basic commons sense: the more attention teachers can give each student, the better the result. I am ceaselessly amazed that politicians will open the public checkbook to pay for studies seeking a no-cost solution to the education problem, but will not pay for a solution that is obvious and inarguably effective.
It has been ever thus.
What are your thoughts on charter schools?
Katherine here. Charter schools play outside the rules from my point of view. They don't accept everyone. They remove students who don't succeed. They remove teachers without cause. I worked with a terrific primary teacher at Littleton Prep Center this year. A year ago the principal promised her a job permanently. This year the current Miss Colorado applied for the third grade position my teacher had been filling admirably. My teacher is a sweetheart, but she doesn't wear clicky high heels and carry a Prada purse like the principal. My teacher was released without cause and Miss Colorado was hired.
Charter schools often have what I call a "Nazi" curriculum. At LPC (see above), all classes are taught with a script provided by the conservative textbook company. There is absolutely no thinking outside the lines. These kids do well on achievement tests, but they do not show the signs that creative students do (asking questions that are worrisome, changing assignments and making them their own--stuff like that).
I do believe in magnet schools. The DPS magnets are working. DSA is wonderful. Kunsmiller (another arts approach) totally transformed its culture in a year. The Denver School of Science and Tech is making national news. Working with a child's interest first and building the core in conjunction with the interest. The problem is the huge numbers of kids who don't have parents who can even discover the interests their children have.
I'm incredibly weary of teachers being blamed for insufficiencies and the new Colorado bill that just passed the Senate gives principals more evaluating to do when they do NOT keep up as it is (it's hard to find a DPS principal that isn't pulled into Central admin meetings less than three days a week). Hard to run a building and be a hard core evaluator working only two days a week in your school.
I truly believe that teachers and principals are trying, but when kids have no stakes in the tests that drive this and are pretty much forced to promote students without skills, there will be no end to reform. Try not passing a student who doesn't pass an achievment test like CSAP and actually inconvenience folks and scores might improve. It won't happen because retention costs mega-bucks and parents fight you tooth and claw over it.
Thanks for the info on charter schools. It's interesting to see the situation from a teacher's standpoint.Charter schools started sprouting up in Utah a few years ago after the public schools made a crappy math cirriculum choice. I think there are 15 charter schools within reasonable driving distance from me. With 15+ schools to choose from, I found one my kids and I absolutely love. They offer art, music, gym, daily foreign language and a focus on multiculturalism. (All of this is nearly impossible to find in Utah). My first grader takes Mandarin, and my third grader takes Spanish. Most parents whose children attend speak at least 2 languages, and are willing to share their talents with the school. Parents are required to volunteer a significant amount, and most fullfill this obligation by creating afterschool activities. There's a flourishing drama department, robotics club, ballroom dance team, and elementary school orchestra. Every Friday they hold Wonder Days. A Wonder Day at the end of a third grade unit on Rome consisted of a battle between the Huns and the Romans (Chinese vs. Spanish students) complete with paper weapons and drawn out battle strategies. It was my job to tap the kids who "died" on the shoulder. Another Wonder Day involved the kids earning paper money for good behavior and saving it up all year to spend at a school store. At the end of the activity, the teachers showed the kids a video of the earthquake in Haiti, and talked about how kids just like them had lost everything. The teachers gave the kids a choice, to keep the things they'd purchased at the store, or to send them to the kids in Haiti.
I watched a lot of little second graders struggle with the choice. Not all of them gave their items back, but they all thought about it. I realize that not every school, charter or otherwise, is lucky enough to have enough parent help to pull activities like this off, but it works in my school. The cirriculum, as far as I know and have seen, isn't everything I could wish for. They do place a bit too much emphasis on phonograms (which irritates my 3rd grader, and helps my 1st grader), and I know there are politics involved from a teacher standpoint that may be less than desirable, but for now, I absolutely love my kids school.
Post a Comment