Beam Me Up Scotty

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."