Is Mike Rosen Writing The Post's Editorials Nowadays?

Whenever we subject schools to more than our usual scrutiny, which is to say whenever an election is impending or contract negotiations are underway, we are shocked--shocked!--to discover them filled mostly with flawed people, you know, people like you and me and the clerk at the 7-11 and the ill-tempered nurse last time you went to the doctor and the guy in the cubicle down the aisle who spends entirely too much time on Facebook.  The Jeffco school board has just decided not to award pay raises to those teachers who have been rated partially effective or worse.  Gasp!  You mean to tell me that there are partially effective teachers in schools?  I guess I run around with the wrong crowd, but I don't know anyone who isn't partially effective.

The problem, of course, is determining what exactly it means to be partially effective and how an evaluator might spot partial effectiveness when it comes up to bite him/her on the ass.  Is there any institution in society that will look better when subjected to the kind of scrutiny that teachers and schools regularly see.  Haven't we all grown up scrutinizing our teachers?  And with a few notable exceptions, weren't our teachers easy prey?  Is there anyone who hasn't mimicked a teacher or been outraged by a teacher or been disappointed by one?  When Franny was in first grade and she learned the truth that there was no Malcolm in the lake close to Mrs. Spayd's house, she was furious.  I'm sure she still hasn't forgiven her.

We grow up familiar and therefore contemptuous of schools and teachers.  That's just how it works.  It is very difficult not to be contemptuous of anything we know that intimately.  We certainly can all find things about our parents, our friends, to be contemptuous about.  But just because we are familiar with something doesn't mean we know anything about it.  Look at today's editorial in the increasingly irritating Denver Post:  "Jeffco gets it right on pay increases."

The major thesis of the article is if Jeffco can't trust its principals to know a partially effective teacher when they see one, who can?  Therefore withholding incremental raises based on Jeffco's evaluation process is the right thing to do.  At first blush that sounds reasonable, but if the argument is subjected to the same scrutiny it is asking teachers to face, it doesn't hold water.

The first sentence says a fact-finder "allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good" when he recommended that raises not be tied to evaluations.  It sounds like Mike Rosen is writing the staff editorial.  The only loaded word missing is "liberal," as in "liberal fact-finder." I am ready to agree with the "goodness" of Jeffco's evaluation process when the rest of this article proves it to me, not because it was stuck inside a cleverly spun lead.

A few paragraphs later the essay casually dismisses the fact-finders recommendation as "bad advice." How so?  It's bad because even though the evaluation system is not perfect ("Perhaps not" the Post sneeringly says in response), it must be good.  That word "must" is my editorial comment because the tone of this article isn't focused enough to say that anything IS the case.  Mostly, the article just keeps ratifying its undying faith in the wisdom of Jeffco's school board.

There are evidently three reasons why the system MUST be good.  First of all, "either the district trusts its principals or it doesn't."  Secondly, ". . .they are, after all, trained to supervise and evaluate teachers."  Finally, "if they don't know who is effective within their buildings, it's hard to imagine who would."  This is beginning to sound like a DAILY SHOW routine.

I taught for 35 years.  I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 principals and maybe 20 assistant principals.  There were only a couple of that group who were not genuinely nice people.  Only two of them did I think were completely incompetent.  Many of them were smart and fun to be with.  But I can only think of two who really understood what it took to be a COMPLETELY effective teacher.

Just to illustrate the incoherence of the Post's and by extension the school board's argument, let us consider the bottom two paragraphs of the first column.  In the first paragraph the essay says that Snyder (the fact-finder) "admits" (does that sound like a loaded word to you?) no evaluative process can be perfect because some subjectivity is always present.  In the second paragraph the essay says Snyder contradicts himself by saying that "a teacher should receive the same rating no matter who performs the evaluation."  That doesn't sound like a contradiction to me.  Isn't it clear that Snyder's argument is that since all such systems will smack of subjectivity and since, for the system to be fair, the evaluations should be the same no matter who the evaluator, it follows that raises should not be tied to systems that are inherently unfair.

The Post goes on to conclude that even though it is obvious that Jeffco's evaluative process is fundamentally inconsistent it is still a "good one" and "will have to suffice."  Wow, that certainly makes me feel better.

Finally, the Post looks down its editorial nose at the whole situation when it claims that less than two percent of the teachers would be denied raises.  Not only that, the Post continues, but fully 45 percent of Jeffco's schools had no one (well, at least no teachers) who were rated partially effective or below. The Post's editorial staff is, to put it mildly, skeptical that there are so few partially effective teachers out there.  "Is it really possible, for example, that 45 percent of schools have no teachers who are partially effective or ineffective?"

As a matter of fact, yes, it is quite possible that our schools are filled with good, well-intentioned, hard working, partially effective human beings who still manage to kill in the classroom.  Too bad the same thing can't be said about the editorial staff at the Post.