The Search for Great Teachers

Bellwether Partners is a right-leaning pro-reform outfit that often comes across as the Fordham Institute's little brother. Like most such outfits, they like to crank out the occasional "report," and their latest is an interesting read. "No Guarantees" by Chad Aldeman and Asley LiBetti Mitchel is a look at the teacher creation pipeline that asks the subheading question, "Is it possible to ensure that teachers are ready on day one?"

The introduction sets the tone for the piece:

The single best predictor of who will be a great teacher next year is who was a great teacher this year.
The second best predictor is... Well, there really isn’t one that’s close. 

And that carries right through to the title of the first section-- "We Don't Know How to Train Good Teachers."

Let me be clear right up front. My own teacher training came from a not-so-traditional program, and my experience with student teachers over the decades does not make me inclined to give uncritical spirited defense of our current techniques for preparing teachers for the classroom. So I'm not unsympathetic to some of Bellwether's concerns. I just think they miss a few critical points. Okay, several. Let's take a look at what they have to say.

What We Don't Know

The authors note that teacher preparation has always focused on inputs, and those inputs include a lot of time and a buttload of money. But there's not much research basis to support those inputs. And they break down the various points at which we don't know things.

"We don't know which candidates to admit." Tightening admission requirements, checking SAT scores, tough admission tests-- these all seem like swell ideas to some folks, but there's no proof that  tougher admissions policies lead to better teachers. This makes sense-- why would things like SAT scores, which are not highly predictive of much of anything,

"We don't know what coursework to require-- if any." On the one hand, there are many teacher preparation programs that involve ridiculous, time-wasting courses. I'd bet that almost every teacher who ever worked with a student teacher has stories of playing that game where, during a supervisory visit from the college, the student and co-operating teacher pretend to be using some method endorsed by the university and implemented by approximately zero real live classroom teachers. On the other hand, if you think a teacher can be adequately prepared without any methods courses at all, or courses dealing with child development-- that any random assortment of courses is as good as any other assortment-- then you are just being silly.

"We don't know what the right certification requirements are." The authors don't have an actual point here other than, "Why shouldn't people who have been through a short-- say, five weekish-- training program be just as certifiable as people who studied teaching?" The reformster vision is deeply devoted to the idea that The Right People don't need any of that fancy-pants teacher training, and even when they are being relatively even-handed, they can't get past that bias.

"We don't know how to help teachers improve once they begin teaching."  This has been covered before, in the TNTP "report" The Mirage.The short answer is that the most effective professional development happens when it control of it is in the hands of the teachers themselves. The disappointing or non-existent results are not so much related to Professional Development as they are related to Programmed Attempts To Get Teachers To Do What Policymakers Want Them To, Even If The Ideas Are Stupid or Bad Practice.

What We Really Don't Know

What Bellwether and other reformsters really don't know is how to tell whether any of these factors make a difference or not. What they really don't know is how to identify a great teacher. Every one of the items above are dismissed on the grounds of showing no discernible effect on "student achievement" or "teacher effectiveness" or other phrases that are euphemisms for "student scores on standardized tests."

This is a fair and useful measure only if you think the only purpose of a teacher, the only goal of teaching as a profession, is to get students to score higher on standardized tests. This is a view of teaching the virtually nobody at all agrees with (and I include in that "nobody" reformsters themselves, who do NOT go searching for private schools for their children based on standardized test scores).

Bellwether's metric and criticism is the equivalent of benching NBA players based on how well their wives do at macrame. The Bellwether criticism only seems more legit because it overlaps with some issues that deserve some thoughtful attention. The problem is that all the thoughtful attention in the world won't do any good if we are using a lousy metric to measure success. Student standardized test scores are a lousy metric for almost anything, but they are a spectacularly lousy metric for finding great teachers.

So Let's Talk About Outcomes

Next up, we contemplate the idea of measuring teacher preparation programs by looking at their "outcomes." This has taken a variety of forms, the most odious of which is measuring a college teaching program by looking at the standardized test results of the students in the classrooms of the graduates of the program, which (particularly if you throw some VAM junk science on top) makes a huge baloney sandwich that can't be seriously promoted as proof of anything at all. This is judging an NBA player based on the math skills of the clerk in the store that sells the wife-made macrame.

Another outcome to consider is employment rates, which is actually not as crazy as it seems; at the lowest ebb of one local college's program, my district stopped sending them notices of vacancies because their graduates were so uniformly unprepared for a classroom. But of course graduates' employment prospects can be affected by many factors far outside the university's control.

Aldeman and Mitchel provide a good survey of the research covering interest in outcomes, and they fairly note that efforts at outcome-based program evaluations have run aground on a variety of issues, not the least of which is that the various models don't really find any significant differences between teacher prep programs. Focusing on outcomes, they conclude, seems to be a good idea right up to the point you try to actually, practically do it.

What Might Actually Work

All of this means that policymakers are still looking for the right way to identify effective teacher preparation and predict who will be an effective teacher. Nothing tried so far guarantees effective teachers. Yet there are breadcrumbs that could lead to a better approach. 

Aldeman and Mitchel have several breadcrumbs that strike them as tasty. In particular, they note that teacher quality is fairly predictable from day one-- the point at which teachers are actually in a classroom with actual students. Which-- well, yes. That's the point of student teaching. But I agree-- among first year teachers I think you find a small percentage who are excellent from day one, a smaller percentage that will be dreadful (the percentage is smaller because student teaching, done right, will chase away the worst prospects), and a fair number who can learn to be good with proper mentoring and assistance.

But Bellwether has four recommendations. They make their case, and they note possible objections.

Make it easier to get in

Right now getting into teaching is high risk, high cost, and low reward. There's little chance for advancement. There is considerable real cost and opportunity cost for entering the profession, which one might suppose makes fewer people likely to do so.

Drop the certification requirements, knock off foolishness like EdTPA, punt the Praxis, and just let anybody who has a hankering into the profession. Local schools would hire whoever they felt inclined to hire. Teachers might still enroll in university programs in hopes that it will improve their chances-- "add value" as these folks like to put it. But the market would still be flooded with plenty of teacher wanna-bes. And I'm sure that if any of these were open to working for lower pay because it hadn't cost them that much to walk into the profession, plenty of charter and private and criminally underfunded public schools would be happy to hire these proto-teachers.

The authors note the objection to untrained teachers in the classroom, and generally lowering the regard for the profession by turning it into a job that literally anybody can claim to be qualified for. The "untrained teacher" objection is dismissed by repeating that there's no proof that "training" does any good. At least, no proof that matches their idea of proof.  As for the regard for the profession, the authors wax philosophical-- who really knows where regard for a profession comes from, anyway??

What did they miss here? Well, they continue to miss the value of good teacher preparation programs which do a good job of preparing teachers for the classroom. But even the worst programs screen for an important feature-- how badly do you want it? One of the most important qualities needed to be a good teacher is a burning, relentless desire to be a good teacher, to be in that classroom. Even if a program requires candidates to climb a mountain of cowpies to then fill out meaningless paperwork at the top, it would be marginally useful because it would answer the question, "Do you really, really want to be a teacher?"

The teaching profession has no room for people who are just trying it out, thought it might be interesting, figured they might give it a shot, want to try it for a while, or couldn't think of anything else to do. Lowering the barriers to the profession lets more of those people in, and we don't need any of them.

Make schools and districts responsible for licensing teachers

Again, this is an idea that would make life so much easier for the charters that Bellwether loves so much. It's still an interesting idea-- the authors are certainly correct to note that nobody sees the teacher being a teacher more clearly or closely than the school in which that teacher works. The authors suggest that proto-teachers start out in low stakes environment like summer school or after school tutoring, both of which are so far removed from an actual classroom experience as to be unhelpful for our purposes. On top of that, it would seriously limit the number of new teachers that a district could take on, while requiring them to somehow bring those proto-teachers on a few years before they were actually needed for a real classroom, requiring a special school administrators crystal ball.

In other words, this idea is an interesting idea, but it will not successfully substitute for making sure that a candidate has real teacher training in the first place.

The other huge problem, which they sort of acknowledge in their objections list, is that this only works if the school or district are run by administrators who know what the hell they're doing and who aren't working some sort of other agenda. A lousy or vindictive or just plain messed up administrator could have a field day with this sort of power. Possible abuses range from "you'll work an extra eight hours a week for free in exchange for certification" to "you'll serve as the building janitor for free to earn your certification" to "come see if you can find your teaching certification in my pants."

Measure and Publicize Results 

Baloney. This is the notion of a market-driven new business model for teacher preparation, and it's baloney. We've already established that states can't collect meaningful on teacher programs, and Bellwether wants to see the data collection expanded to all the various faux teacher programs. They've already said that nobody has managed to scarf up data in useful or reliable quantities; now they're saying, well, maybe someone will figure out how soon. Nope.

Unpack the Black Box of Good Teaching

This boils down to "More research is required. We should do some." But this is problematic. We can't agree on what a good teacher looks like, or even what they are supposed to be doing. Bellwether becomes the gazillionth voice to call for "new assessments that measures [sic] higher-order thinking," which is just unicorn farming. Those tests do not exist, and they will never exist. And their suggestion of using Teach for America research as a clue to great teaching is ludicrous as well. There is no evidence outside of TFA's own PR to suggest that TFA knows a single thing about teaching that is not already taught in teaching prep programs across the country-- and that several things they think they know are just not true.

Another huge problem with unpacking the black box is the assumption that the only thing inside that box is a teacher. But all teachers operate in a relationship with their students, their school setting, their community, and the material they teach. The continued assumption that a great teacher is always a great teacher no matter what, and so this fixed and constant quality can be measured and dissected-- that's all just wrong. It's like believing that a great husband would be a great husband no matter which spouse he was paired up with, that based on my performance as a husband to my wife, I could be an equally great partner for Hillary Clinton or Taylor Swift or Elton John or Ellen Degeneres. I'm a pretty good teacher of high school English, but I'm pretty sure I would be a lousy teacher of fifth grade science.

Great teaching is complex and multifaceted and on top of everything else, a moving target. It deserves constant and thorough study because such research will help practitioners fit more tools into their toolbox, but there will never be enough research completed to reduce teaching to a simple recipe that allows any program to reliably cook up an endless supply of super-teachers suitable for any and all schools. And more to the point, the research seems unlikely to reveal that yes, anybody chosen randomly off the street, can be a great teacher.

Operating at that busy and complicated intersection requires a variety of personal qualities, professional skills, and specialized knowledge.

Bottom Line

There are plenty of interesting questions and criticisms raised by this report, but the conclusions and recommendations are less interesting and less likely to be useful for anyone except charters and privatizers who want easier access to a pliable and renewable workforce. Dumping everything into the pool and just buying a bigger filter is not a solution. Tearing down the profession and pretending that no training really matters is silly. We do need to talk about teacher preparation in this country, but one of the things we need to talk about is how to keep from poisoning the well with the bad policies and unfounded assumptions of the reformster camp.

There are some good questions raised by this report, but we will still need to search for answers.

NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands

The expert names for the New York teacher evaluation high speed overhaul panel are in, and it is, at best, a mixed bag.

* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.

* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.

* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices and looking through a stack of commencement programs.

* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure, too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.

I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:

* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.

* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."

* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systems for a few years now.

Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee seats are occupied by fans of reformy nonsense. But wait-- there's more.

Cuomo's insanely accelerated timeline (why get things right when you can get them done quickly) means that the usual 45-day post-draft comment period on proposed regulations is being waived because, well, if you had it, people might comment. Hey, it's not like anything else about supposed ed reform has suffered from being rammed through too quickly.

So NYSUT (which you may or may not love-- honestly, you New Yorkers and your intra-union alliances and battles) is on point when they say that everybody had better start making comments and making them now. President Karen MaGee says that folks need to speak up.

"NYSUT is well aware of the unrealistic deadlines contained in the governor's convoluted and unworkable plan, and the pressure that puts on the Regents and SED to try and mitigate the worst of it. Still, those deadlines do not absolve them of their responsibility to listen carefully to parents and practitioners and make any necessary adjustments to the draft regulations they wind up writing," Magee said. "One month is plenty of time for SED and the Regents to hold public hearings and still meet their deadlines."

So if you're a New York teacher or parent, it's time (right now-- the committee meets May 7) to get word to a Regent or the State Education Department. Tell them you want hearings on the draft. Tell them what you want in the evaluation system. Tell them why the stuff the committee is about to okay is a bunch of hooey (I'd suggest a more professional word than "hooey")


You can find a guide to individual Board of Regents members right here, complete with email links. You can find some NYSED phone numbers here and a whole department index starting with the A's right here. The clock is ticking. Time to make some noise. You might want to let the non-junk-science portion of the group know you support them-- they may be feeling a bit lonely soon. Heck-- you can even send word to Andrew Cuomo himself. It looks like this whole mess isn't going to be pretty-- but it doesn't have to be ugly and quiet both.

Closing The Educator Equity Gap

Because we don't have enough gaps to talk about in education, Kevin Zimmer at TNTP would like to talk about the educator equity gap. It would be a conversation worth having, if we were going to have it honestly. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Where's the gap?

We all know that highly effective teachers can have a lifelong impact on students. But we also know that too often, the students who need great teachers the most are the least likely to get them.

Yes, that link takes you to the entirely bogus Chetty research (incidentally, have any independent researchers ever checked or replicated that study?), but you know what? I'm going to go ahead and stipulate to the idea that having a good teacher is a Very Good Thing.

Unfortunately, we're not talking about Very Good Teachers. We're talking about highly effective teachers, and the definition of a highly effective teacher is "one whose students score well on the Big Standardized Test." And as long as we focus on that measure, this is a gap that can never be closed.

We know that the higher the poverty level, the lower the test scores. That means that any teacher teaching in a high poverty school will not be, by definition, a highly effective teacher.

Zimmer is referencing the newest in a long series of deadlines for states providing a plan for how they will shuffle teachers around so that highly effective teachers are in high poverty schools. Let's skip over the question of how this could be done (cash bonuses? trickery? rendering?) because it can't actually be done! 

Here's a classroom with no roof over it. Maybe it collapsed and nobody wanted to fix it. Maybe we saved money by never building it in the first place. But every time it rains, the water pours right into the classroom and the teacher and the students get soaked. "Well, there's your problem," says some bureaucratic wizard. "The students are wet because the teacher is wet. Get a dry teacher in there and everything will be super-duper."

And yet it doesn't matter how many fresh, dry teachers you put into that roofless classroom-- every time it rains, everybody gets wet. You can find the driest, most arid, most highly dehydrated teacher in the country, but when you set that teacher in your roofless classroom, she'll still end up drenched.

Could the gap be real?

Is it possible that high-poverty low-achieving schools really do have a lower quality teaching force? Although there's no real serious data, it would make sense that if you offer some teachers a job at a shiny well-funded school that offers strong teacher support, plenty of resources, and the teacher autonomy to make a real difference-- well, they might choose that over a job at a school where they'll be underfunded, provided insufficient supplies and books, and stripped of any autonomy. It seems intuitive that any professional would prefer a situation where they're given all the tools and support needed to be successful.

Of course, one might also argue that teachers who choose to teach in tough schools in a high-poverty setting would have to be highly motivated teachers who had no intention of just coasting along. So maybe our high poverty schools are actually housing the best teachers in the nation-- we just can't see it because a) they are hamstrung by bad management and funding and b) all we're looking at are BS Test scores.

But I do know this-- offering incentives to teach at high needs schools makes more sense than offering penalties. But penalties are what policymakers are offering when they advance ideas such as using test scores to punish or even fire teachers who don't make their numbers. It's hard enough to find volunteers to teach in the roofless room; if you add that we'll start penalizing any teacher who is found to be soggy, teachers have even fewer reasons to want to teach in the roofless room.

Zimmer has some other ideas about how to close the gap.

Staffing flexibility. He cites Memphis, home of the ASD that promised to turn the bottom 5% into the top 25% and has so far failed to do so. Principals in those bottom schools are given extra budget and first pick as a way to recruit and retain top teachers. I actually like these ideas. The problem, of course, is that topness is still rated by test scores. Principals are also free to hire and fire at will, a policy that is only as good as the principal using it.

New school structures. I have mixed feelings here. If we're talking about allowing public schools to play with structure and format, that's a great idea. Schools could be reconfigured to meet the particular needs and concerns of their community. However, if we're talking about letting charters float new marketing ideas, I'm not a fan. And if we're talking about restructuring that comes top-down, you're wasting time. And that includes, especially, telling a community that their definition of success must be "better test scores." But mostly, notice that this idea doesn't really have anything to do with getting higher-quality staff at all-- this is just a full on test score improvement strategy.

Promote data transparency and establish rewards and consequences for districts to eliminate their equity gaps. Ah, carrots and sticks. And data, as if the local school community has no idea what is going on within its walls. And the childlike belief that "equipping district and school leaders with data and empowering them to take action tailored to their unique context should help close equity gaps over time." Because weighing the pig always makes it heavier.

Share innovations. Zimmer likes Georgia's online portal for dialogue between districts. "States should serve as a clearinghouse for tools, resources and ideas." Again, even Zimmer can't keep straight the distinction between raising test scores and teacher quality. This is all about the former, not remotely about the latter.

So what should we be doing?

Well, fixing the roof is huge. Some reformsters try to slip this by declaring, "Why do you always blame the roof? Are you saying that kids in this room can't be as dry as rich kids is nice fully-roofed schools?" And they have part of a point-- we won't stop teaching just because it's raining. There has to be a two-pronged attack. We cannot wait for the roof to be fixed in order to start teaching, and we can't ignore the missing roof just because teaching is going on.

To close the teacher equity gap, I'd first look for a useful tool for measuring it. Checking test scores is not that tool. The BS Test doesn't measure anything except test-taking skills, which are directly tied to affluence, and we cannot pretend that the goal of educating students, especially our poorest students, is to make them good at taking standardized tests. Right now, we know nothing, really, about the teacher equity gap.

Stop assuming teachers are widgets. One of the great ironic pieces of white paperiness is TNTP's Widget Effect, which says that we have a problem with treating teachers like interchangeable widgets, but then proposes that they are, in fact, interchangeable widgets whose single distinguishing factor is how well their students do on tests. Reform has by and large ignored every other characteristic of teachers. This gives us features like the "reform" of New Orleans schools that principally seems to involve moving native, local African-American teachers out of the system and replacing them with transient white teachers with no knowledge of or investment in the community.

In truth, different teachers are better suited for different school settings. Zimmer seems to think that we could take a great 9th grade teacher from a small rural school and that teacher would be equally awesome in a 12th grade classroom in a large urban school.

But teachers don't teach in a vacuum; they teach in relationship with their students and community. It makes no more sense to say that a person would be a great teacher in all possible school settings that it makes to say that an individual man would be a great husband no matter which woman in all the world is his wife. Sure, there will be some exemplars for whom this is true, but for most ordinary humans, context is absolutely key.

It's a poor workman who blames his tools, but it's a terrible manager who does not give her workers the tools they need to be great. It's a lazy manager who says, "I won't try to help anyone become great. I'll just do a random measurement every six months and fire the bottom 10%." Any idiot can walk into the roofless room and fire the wet widget standing in front of the class. It takes considerably more gifted leadership and considerable resources to build a roof, hold an umbrella, and help the teacher be great.

TNTP Actually Has an Interesting Idea

Hold onto your hats, because I am about to mostly agree with something on the TNTP website. And not even in my usual snotty sophomoric sarcastic "agree" way. It's not that I love them any more than I ever did-- TNTP is one of my least loved reformster group because of their relentless devotion to tearing down job protections, pay and professionalism for teachers. No group has more relentlessly argued for all the different ways in which teaching can be turned into something less than a profession.

But I'm a big believer that you have to judge ideas on merit and not on the source. So I'm now going to tell you all about something I think Dan Weisberg at TNTP got right. I'll put my caveat at the end.

In his recent blog post "Not a One-Size-Fits-All Profession" Weisberg argues for a new model of how teaching could work. And he's not wrong.

Teaching has remained a profession in which people are expected to hit the ground running on Day One. As Weisberg correctly argues, doctors and lawyers don't do anything remotely like this. Both start at the bottom of a career ladder and work their way up to full responsibility for the whole job.

I have often imagined a school that works essentially like a teaching hospital (a real one, not one like the hospital in Grey's Anatomy) where practitioners gradually take on increased responsibility under the tutelage and guidance of masters in the craft. It would help teachers grow and develop into great teachers.

Great teachers do much more than engage students during class time. They are great lesson planners; they are experts at identifying challenging content for their students; they analyze data to understand student progress; they know how to design assessments that reveal whether students have mastered material; they are adept at keeping families informed and invested in their children’s education; they use lessons from developmental psychology to establish personal connections with even the most challenging students; and on and on.

Right now we expect teachers to do from the beginning with nothing under their belt but student teaching (Weisberg implies that only some teachers have that experience. I've heard this hint from so many reformsters that I'm starting to wonder-- are there programs other than TFA that don't include student teaching??). Weisberg proposes another way.


Imagine a school where the teacher’s responsibility is exactly what we think it should be: ensuring that all students get what they need to succeed. And instead of having to do everything themselves to make that happen, like other professionals, they manage a team: a lesson planner, a curator of content, a parent engagement specialist, a data analyst, an assessment designer, a special ed compliance specialist, maybe even a homework grader. Such a structure would serve multiple purposes. First, it would allow teachers to focus on their core responsibility. Teachers could spend the bulk of their time formulating and executing instructional strategies designed to meet individual student needs, while delegating tasks like completing paperwork or planning individual lessons that may not be as critical.

There are several things I like about this. The chance to develop teachers in the field. The support for classroom teachers (do you know what I could do with an extra fifteen-twenty minutes of not fetching copies every day). The enhanced team environment. And Weisberg is probably correct about enhanced status-- what do other respected professionals have that teachers do not? Answer: people who work for them.


Now, I do have some problems with Weisberg's model. He likes the idea that this would open up the career path to folks from all sorts of backgrounds; I worry that this would be another way to de-professionalize the profession. In fact, I worry that the entire model could be used not as a career ladder with the equivalent of physician interns and residents, but rather a single professional working through a staff of cheaper, more-easily-replaced para-professionals. Without a proper investment in money and support, that can easily degenerate into that doctor's office where you used to see four physicians, but now it's one physician who rarely sees you, supported by two physicians assistants (who are different people each time you go because they keep getting overworked and burned out).

Weisberg's response to the cost issue is also off the mark.

The threshold questions are about cost. Won’t hiring all these specialists break the bank? Not necessarily. These are entry-level positions with entry-level pay, not designed as long-term positions.

That assumes that entry-level pay would be lower than beginning teacher pay, but that pay is pretty entry-levelly already. In fact, one of the huge problems of the intern-resident-etc career ladders for doctors is that by the time they've climbed it, they're hugely in debt. The lower rungs of the ladder don't pay enough to live on. That's a huge problem.


And here comes the teacher-busting TNTP that I know and loathe:


And with such a support team and smart use of technology, individual teachers should be able to work with many more students than they can right now without any help.

Do I think Weisberg's basic model could be a good way to redesign the profession? I actually do-- if, and only if, the money was put into it to do it right. Using it to cut costs, or setting it up and subjecting it to Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts, would get us a system worse than the one we have. So I doubt that it could ever really happen. Put another way, if we right now had the dedication of money, resources and support that would be needed to make Weisberg's ladder system actually work, we could work wonders with the system currently in place.

Neither Weisberg nor I are the first to think of this model, and yet it has never been implemented in a big way in any school system, and that tells us something. But it's still an interesting idea.

TNTP Proposes New Tenure Plan

TNTP, the Reimagine Teaching people and generators of plenty of fancy-looking reformy nonsense, have some more ideas for the post-Vergara world. They have decided to stake out a middle ground on the tenure wars, claiming that we don't need to eliminate it-- just fix it. And to that end, they have eight proposals to create "a more balanced system." It's all in this very fancy "paper," which I am now going to "respond to" in this "blog post."

1. Lengthen the Tryout Period

Awarding tenure after two years is too fast, say the reformsters. Let's make it five years.

Well, let me blunt. If your administrator can't tell whether someone's a keeper or not after two years, your administrator is a dope.

But why five years? Could it be because that will guarantee a more steady turnover, allowing us to pursue our goal of fewer (or none) career teachers, thereby reducing the costs of our school business (goodbye pay raises, and goodbye pension costs). As always, I'm really waiting for fans of the longer tryout period to wrap up their argument with, "...and that's why nobody should hire TFA short-timers ever."

2. Link Tenure to Strong Performance

Today, the only performance requirement for earning tenure is not being fired. In most districts, any teacher who remains on the payroll for a given amount of time is automatically tenure.

First of, depending on what you think constitutes being fired, this is basically saying that the only way to not get tenure is by not getting tenure, which is either very zen or very dumb. At any rate, I can tell you that my own small district has let teachers go prior to awarding tenure. But look-- there's a hugely weird hole in this argument. If your problem is that your district doesn't get rid of teachers during the years they don't have tenure, what possible good will it do to have more years of teachers not having tenure. If your administrators are too dopey to let poor tenureless teachers go, how will you fix that with more tenureless teachers??

Teachers should earn tenure only after showing they can consistently help their students make significant academic progress.

How dopey is this statement? Let me count the ways

1) Do you seriously want to claim that when it comes to your seven-year-old child, the only thing you want out of her teacher is to drag better test scores out of your offspring? That's it? Are you saying that when parents, particularly parents of small children, use the phrase "great teacher" that has no meaning beyond "teacher who got my child to score higher on those tests."

2) You have no idea how to tell if a teacher consistently helped students make significant academic progress. What you mean is, "teacher got standardized test scores to generate, via some invalid disproven VAM method, numbers that look good."

3. Make Tenure Revocable

"Teachers who earn poor evaluation ratings for two years in a row should not be allowed to keep tenure." So this suggestion means either A) tenure should not actually be tenure, which is absurd, or B) teachers with tenure should still be fireable, which is already the case. Next?

4. Focus Hearings on Students' Interests

This one starts out rather bizarrely. The argument is that while "just cause" hearings say they mean the district has to prove a good cause for dismissal, in practice, "districts have been held to a much higher standard." You would think a fancy thinky tank style paper might offer some support for that assertion, but you would be wrong.

TNTP claims that arbitrators often consider the possibility of remediation as a factor, and TNTP says that's like requiring courts to convict only if they think the defendant is both guilty and likely to  repeat. It's an odd complaint, given that the justice system is just riddled with places where punishment and rehabilitation wrestle for the upper hand. From the juvenile justice system (predicated strictly on rehab) up to three strikes laws (too many repeats and the punishment increases), the justice system is absolutely loaded with considerations of both rehab potential and recidivism. But TNTP is in a hurry to draw a line between not raising student standardized test scores and becoming a convicted criminal, so there we are.

TNTP wants the hearing to focus on the potential harm to students if the teacher went back to the classroom. So, um, wait-- the arbitrator should consider how likely it is that the teacher will do a bad job again? As the argument ouroboros disappears into its own mouth, TNTP does note that superintendents should come down hard on any principal abusing the process through incompetence or bad intent.

5. Make Hearings More Efficient

Quicker is what we're looking for here. I don't think anybody at all disagrees with the notion of speedy hearings. "I'm so happy that I get to wait even longer to find out what's going to happen to my entire professional career," said no teacher ever. TNTP wants hearings to take a day, because screw complicated situations or a need for either side to present all of their information. But keep the proceedings aimed at producing speedy results? I think we can all get on board with that in principle.

6. Hire Independent Arbitrators

Arbitrators depend on school districts and teachers' unions for their employment, and so might be inclined to keep everybody happy. TNTP suggests using hearing officers such a judges to hear cases, because those guys never come with any biases, and because the court system is bored and empty with hardly any other work to do.

TNTP's complaint is not without merit, but as with much of the tenure argument, it assumes that unions have a real interest in preserving the jobs of bad teachers. That's generally not true. Teachers' unions have an interest in preserving the process, in making sure that there's no precedent by which a district can fire a teacher just because, you know, everybody knows he ought to be fired. The union's interest is in making sure that the district does its homework. That's all. It's not unheard of for unions to be quietly happy that they lost one and that Mr. McAwfulteach is out of there. But the process must be preserved, because contrary to reformster lore, there are not a gazillion bad teachers clogging schools nationwide.

7. Stop Tolerating Abuse and Sexual Misconduct

Well, other than framing this as a "When did you stop beating your wife" fallacy, there's nothing to argue with here.

8. Lower the Professional Stakes for Struggling Teachers

We should be able to fire teachers without taking away their licenses. That way, presumably, principals won't be so reluctant to fire teachers, and they will do it more often because they won't be "concerned about ending the careers of teachers who might perform well in other circumstances."

Which is an odd phrase to throw in there. I'm just trying to imagine a situation in which a tenured teacher deserves to be fired from one school, but would be a great addition at some other school. I'm having trouble.

Unless what we're hypothetically fixing here is the problem of high-poverty schools being career-enders under the reformster system. Because if you teach in a high-poverty school, you will have students whose standardized test scores are low, which means you will be judged to be ineffective, which means you will not get tenure or, perhaps, you will be fired for being ineffective. Given all that, nobody who understood the system would ever take a job in a high-poverty school ever. But if they knew that after they were inevitably fired, they could still get a job somewhere else, that would make it more appealing, maybe?

While TNTP's proposal has some worthwhile components, it still contains the basic outline of a system that throws out tenure and replaces it with a teacher employment system based on test results. That serves the interests of nobody (not teachers, students, taxpayers, citizens, or parents) except for folks who want to reimagine teaching as the sort of job that never becomes a lifetime career.

A Bad CCSS ELA Lesson Exemplar

TNTP recently posted an article in HuffPost that I've addressed elsewhere. But one portion of Rachel Evans' piece deserves its own look, because it's a great min-capsule of what is wrong with much so-called Common Core so-called lesson so-called planning.

Learning to teach to the Common Core standards is sort of like learning to cook a complicated dish, with a lot of ingredients that you can’t just throw together. Teachers new to the standards need a recipe of sorts—a series of steps to transform a blank planning template into the type of quality instruction they see in the exemplar videos. In my ELA seminar, we start with an anchor text (To Kill a Mockingbird, for example) and brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel. Then we analyze the standards and determine which ones are well-suited to be taught in this unit. From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what they are reading?” Those answers guide how we create text-based questions and tasks because, ultimately, the goal of the Common Core ELA standards is to empower students to better understand their world by understanding rich, complex texts.

Let's go ahead and stipulate that the complicated dish with ingredients "you can't just throw together" is an acceptable simile for this kind of lesson because it's a good simile for EVERY LESSON EVER. Why is it that Common Core cheerleaders so often talk as if they just now discovered teaching, a previously-unheard of activity that nobody else in the world has ever done successfully, ever?

Starting with a template.

Wrong. You are already in trouble because you are about to fit the material to your template instead of asking the question, "What are the goals I want to accomplish with this material, and how can I best achieve them?" Form follows function.

Do lots of practicing teachers do templates these days? Sure. A version of this is often part of alignment and other exercises in paperwork. And we do it the same way my fellow students and I used outlines for papers back in English class in the seventies-- we'd write the paper first, then retro-create an outline to go with it. The outlines didn't actually help us with the task; they were done after the task was completed.

Imitating the video.

Wrong. I've had a dozen or so student teachers over the years, and not once do I say, "Just imitate what I do." I'm a middle-aged man who has lived and taught in this community for decades. They are usually twenty-one year old females who just landed here. Often we have completely different personal styles, temperaments, vocabulary, areas of experience-- we're different persons, and teaching is personal.

There are certainly tricks and techniques we can pick up from other teachers, but to try to pattern an entire lesson on another teacher's practice is bad practice. And as with much of the bad reformsters advice we see, we already know this is wrong. Think of your five best teachers, ever. Would you say they all taught the same way, used the same approaches and techniques, and behaved the same in the classroom? Did they look like they were all imitating the same video of some Master Teacher? No, I didn't think so.

Supporting texts?

We're going to "brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel." Okay. Who decided what the "key concepts" of the novel we will be teaching? And will we really "brainstorm" that list? Because I'm betting that "brainstorming" looks a lot like "googling."

So, we're going to take the novel that's been selected to teach, and we're going to get on line and look for materials to use to teach it.

Analyze the standards

Yes, we all know this one, too. Go back to the list of standards and see which ones we can check off as "covered" by this unit. But from there we go to this:

From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what they are reading?” 

Not sure what the standards have to do with this, at all, but again I'm going to ask-- who decides what "deeply understand" looks like. Are we looking for a deep understanding of race relations of that day? Are we looking for a deep understanding of legal proceedings? Are we looking for a deep understanding of the kind of quiet heroism displayed by Atticus, or of social isolation, or of daughter-father relationships, or what it was like to have servants, etc etc etc etc? Who is making this professional judgment call, because in this fairly detailed breakdown of the process, this kind of professional judgment doesn't seem to appear.

You know what else doesn't appear?

Students.

Heck, from a reformster I would at least expect a step that says, "Get out your data sets from the testing done with your students and perform some needs assessment and personal strengths number crunching so that you can aim this lesson straight at your students' needs." But no, at no point in this process do we worry about students' previous knowledge, needs, interests, anything.

Is this a high-functioning class or a low-functioning one? Are we in Georgia or Alaska? Are my students mostly white or mostly African-American or mostly neither? Do we have students with developmental or social disabilities (because, Boo Radley)? Are we in a small town or an urban setting? Are we in an area where guns are common or uncommon? Have racial issues been in the news locally lately?

And am I supposed to believe that none of that would matter, and that this lesson would turn out essentially the same no matter what group of students I was working with?

And something else that doesn't appear

That would be professional judgment and knowledge. I could successfully complete the process that Evans has described even if I had never actually read To Kill a Mockingbird. I just grab my template, do some googling for materials with which to fill in the blanks, and I'm good to go. My list of key concepts comes from... somewhere. My teaching techniques come from Master Teachers I'm imitating.


This is what planning a lesson looks like if you are trying to redesign teaching into a simple job that can be performed by anybody at all. This compares to actual teaching just as McDonald's burger assembler compares to Cordon Bleu chef.

In other words, this is what reformsters need teaching to look like if we're going to transform it from a high-skills, high-knowledge profession into a low-wage, low-skill, easily-filled job.

TNTP Bravely Drowning In Irony

A recent HuffPost piece by TNTP's Rachel Evans is a fine example of the kind of bad argument being put forth in the world of ed these days. This is how Core supporters often work-- a construction of misdirection about how to use techniques we already know to combat problems we don't have.

Evans opens with a picture of the poor, tired first year teachers of her Arizona Teaching Fellows seminar. Arizona Teaching Fellows program is one more end run around teacher certification and training (they awesomely promise "you will be trained like a pro athlete") operating on the assumption that learning education theory is for suckers.

While traditional teacher preparation programs stress educational theory, TNTP Academy is designed to transform you into a great teacher through practical, classroom-centered coursework, with a sharp focus on core skills.

It's an interesting stance philosophically, given the Common Corey insistence that students focus on more than simple "how." As Evans herself writes later in the same piece, "Students are no longer expected to merely “do math”—they have to be able to explain the concepts behind the math." This principle apparently does not apply to teachers themselves.

Anyway, as Evans and her seminar were watching a video of a teacher teaching, she performed a brief trick of mindreading.

I knew in the back of their minds, these new teachers were all thinking, “I’m never going to be able to pull off that in my classroom.”

So, nobody was thinking "I wonder how much longer till lunch" or "This is a bunch of baloney," two responses that fake researchers have shown are among the most common in PD sessions.

But no-- Evans, her colleagues, and her charges are concerned about how first year teachers (with no previous significant educational training) can be set up for success with the Common Core and its super-rigorry standards. Evans would like to share some techniques that are totally working.

Invest new teachers in a common vision of excellence.

Doesn't that sound awesome? Far better than "standardize teacher expectations," which sounds more Borgian. Only it turns out that it's a piece of cake, because "luckily, new teachers are easily invested in the Common Core standards because they match their intuitive vision for strong teaching." So, see? New teachers intuitively want to teach the Core! It's like magic!

Of course, it raises a question. If all new teachers intuitively want to teach the Core, why didn't all the current old teachers want to teach the Core when they were new teachers? If new teachers intuitively want to do these things, why aren't we all already doing these things?

"No one signs up to be a teacher because they are passionate about passing out worksheets." And here we go with the straw teachers. The implication is that old teachers (who somehow lost their intuitive teacher chops) are all about the worksheets.

New English teachers imagine their students reading and writing about great literature. Math teachers dream of watching small groups of students use calculators and protractors to solve complex, real-world engineering problems. That’s the Common Core standards in action.

Well, no. No it isn't. It's teachers in action. English teachers do not need the Core to either have or implement reading and writing about literature. And the math example is even worse, because there are plenty of folks in the field who think math is not just for engineering.


Make the process linear, even if the product isn’t.

Teachers new to the standards need a recipe of sorts—a series of steps to transform a blank planning template into the type of quality instruction they see in the exemplar videos. In my ELA seminar, we start with an anchor text (To Kill a Mockingbird, for example) and brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel. Then we analyze the standards and determine which ones are well-suited to be taught in this unit. From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what they are reading?” Those answers guide how we create text-based questions and tasks because, ultimately, the goal of the Common Core ELA standards is to empower students to better understand their world by understanding rich, complex texts. 

You know what? This is so bad, I'm going to finish this post, and then I'm going to come back and write a separate post just about this paragraph. Then I'll link it and you go wade through that if you're game.

Plan great units together.

"Gone are the days when a single objective could be taught and assessed in one class period."  Well, yes. Also gone are the days when teachers had to worry about having enough starched collars to make it through the week, as are the days when women had to quit when they got married. Way to stay on top of those developments.

Evans actually references the three-day lesson on MLK's letter, and then offers the groundbreaking advice that if teachers know where they want to end up with a unit, they can work backwards to figure out their day-to-day planning. Good thinking, TNTP. You know who else knows about that technique? Everybody who studied in an actual teacher prep program in college.

Keep classroom culture front and center. 

Even the most immaculately planned lessons will fail if students are disengaged or feel unsafe taking academic risks. The “what” of the Common Core standards matters little without the “how” of skilled instruction. That’s why we still spend most of our summer helping our Fellows internalize basic skills, like giving clear directions and addressing student behaviors. 

Don't be thrown by the odd choice of "immaculately" (because, when planning lessons, I'm most concerned that the lessons be really clean). Instead be amazed that TNTP spends most of a summer learning the how of skilled instruction. Most of a whole summer.

Again, we arrive at a huge irony. Remember, in the Common Core, we're now going to spend three days on MLK's letter because to really learn, you need to spend lots of time. In the old days we might have covered it in just one period, but with Common Core, we now understand that more time and depth are required to really truly learn. However, in the old days, people who wanted to be teachers went to college for four whole years and took entire semester courses in teaching techniques. But nowadays we understand that a few weeks of training in the summer are sufficient to master teaching skills.

Some questions remain

No! Really? Because I thought that covered it all! But here are some of the questions. I'll save some time and answer them

How do you effectively remediate struggling students while still exposing them to grade-level content? (By first asking why grade-level content is more important than real remediation) 

What if the curricula mandated by a district is not Common Core-aligned? (Use your new teacher intuition? Thank your lucky stars?)

 How can teachers adapt pre-existing resources to meet the needs of their school and students? (Use professional judgment as you should all the freakin' time. If you are using ANY resources uncritically, you don't belong in a classroom)

 Like the Common Core itself, these questions are complex and a little daunting. (Wrong again. The Common Core isn't particularly complex. It's just a half-baked slapped-together bunch of amateur hour bad standards.)

In many ways, I find TNTP one of the more frustrating of the reformster programs, because there could be some real value in helping grown adults with life experience and interest work their way into a classroom. But cockamamie advice and instruction like this is not the way.

TNTP Lost on Search for Truth

Any time TNTP writes a blog piece with "truth" in the title, you know we are about to go down the rabbit hole. But not surprisingly, an unnamed contributor over at TNTP has decided to clue us in on "The Truth About Teacher Pay." How can that possibly end badly? Let's see what truths they have uncovered!

Fact: Most districts now have multiple high quality options beyond experience and credentials for making pay decisions.

At first they start out well:


Setting teachers’ pay strictly on factors like experience or academic credentials may have been the only option before most districts had tools in place to assess teachers’ performance.

Unfortunately, they immediately head into the weeds. The correct next sentence is "We still don't have any other reliable measures of teacher performance in place, but when someone comes up with those some day, we should jump right on those. Anybody working on a real teacher eval system? Anybody?"

Instead, they compare "lockstep pay" (which is emerging as the preferred reformster term for the traditional system) to paying basketball players by height. This could have been fun if they had gone to explain how their idea (evaluating teachers for "talent, hard work, and performance") resembles the way basketball players are actually paid, but, no. Also, shed a tear for all those students who had great young teachers untimely ripped away from them.

Which is a hard drum to keep beating, since one-year-experience teachers are the largest sector of the teaching pool, and also the section mostly likely to quit the profession. If we worried about that loss of bright young things, perhaps we could talk about retention, or at least see what the numbers are when we stack the Number of Teachers Who Are Unjustly Laid Off next to the Number of Teachers Who Get Out of Dodge Early. Do you have those Numbers of Truth handy, TNTP?

Fact: Very few districts have tried true performance-based pay, but where it’s been tried it seems to be working.

Who knew?  DC schools have made it possible to earn 100K in year four, and so teacher pay has dropped as a leading reason to get the hell out of DC schools. Wait. Doesn't that help prove that performance pay doesn't help retain teachers? And supposedly it's really helping in Tennessee, where this big report that, frankly, I'm still too jet-lagged to read in its entirety, but check out the abstract:

We report findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation of the recently implemented $5000 retention bonus program for effective teachers in Tennessee’s priority schools. We estimate the impact of the program on teacher retention using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We exploit a discontinuity in the probability of treatment conditional on the composite teacher effectiveness rating that assigns bonus eligibility. Point estimates for the main effect of the bonuses are consistently positive across all specifications, and for teachers of tested subjects the program appears to have an effect that is generally both statistically and substantively significant. Implementation concerns, including the timing of application process and observed noncompliance in bonus distribution, present obstacles for both the program’s effectiveness and its evaluation

Oh, guys, stop. You had me at "fuzzy regression discontinuity design."

Fact: Performance-based pay can easily be structured to value experience when it is accompanied by strong performance.

Hey! It's an actual fact. Way to go, TNTP!


Fact: The research base has become much stronger in recent years on the question of distinguishing levels of teacher performance. Evaluation systems that use multiple measures to rate teacher performance can help school systems recognize and reward those who are getting the best results in the classroom.

So much for facty stuff. Our single link of "proof" here takes us to that golden oldie, the Gates Foundation MET study. TNTP tells us that we need multiple measures (a phrase they use so often that I imagine it cropping up in odd contexts, like a reformy version of "that's what she said.") and to check with the community and make sure that administrators know what they're doing and give teachers a way to up their game and, hey, I already have that system finished. When is my gazillion dollar grant coming, anyway?

Fact: Teachers in the same school won’t be competing with one another for slices of a static pay pie because performance-based pay isn’t a zero-sum game.

Oh, TNTP. Mostly this blog of your has been an exercise of fuzzy discontinuity with the truth, but this is just a lie. Or you are dumb as rocks. One of those two. Your explanation is so short that I suspect you figured you'd better get out quick before you started laughing.

TNTP says "There is no cap." I look forward to watching them explain that to taxpayers. I want TNTP to come to a school district and stand before taxpayers to say, "There are so many awesome teachers in your district that you have no choice but to raise taxes ten mills to fund their performance-based pay levels." In referendum states, that will be particularly entertaining.

Or maybe we'll get to enjoy watching TNTP explain to a district, "We had to cut the arts program because the English teachers all get super-huge capless performance based pay."

Of course performance-based pay is a zero-sum game. School districts do not make more money when they do well. The pie is fixed by the tax rate. Performance-based pay means we must all get out the knives, either for the pie or each other.

Fact: School systems can implement performance-based pay by re-allocating existing funds.

See above.

This does get closer to the real motivation behind the new fix-the-pay initiative. See, we move to evaluation-based employment decisions. We up pay at the lowest levels. We rig the system to favor people who don't want to have a teaching career, because it reduces overall costs both in obvious and unobvious ways.

When we look at the spread of TFA, we tend to focus on how cheap they are to hire. Sometimes we forget the ticking time bomb in many states that is teacher pensions. Teaching temps aren't just cheap now-- they're cheap later, because No Pension Costs!

See, TNTP, when you say stuff like this:

School systems that decide to pay for great teaching can afford to do it because they will no longer be constrained by the rigid boundaries of lockstep compensation. 

It's hard to take you seriously. We're going to get rid of all the imaginary legions of allegedly crappy teachers and replace them with the best and the brightest, and we're going to pay all the best and brightest top dollar no matter how long they've been there.

IOW, it would be like a district under the current system where all teachers are long-timers who are on the top step.

How can that not be expensive as hell? Only if the top step becomes lower than it is under the current system, or if the school cuts programs, or raises taxes, or hires fewer teachers, or has no pension funding liabilities because all teachers leave within five years.

So thank you, nameless TNTP functionary, for searching for the truth for us. But I suggest you get back out there are search some more, because what you have brought back looks kind of old and dead and also smells funny.

TNTP Evaluates NCTQ

It's a rare day when one titan reformsylvania decides to critique another's work, but that's what we have over at the TNTP blog, where Karolyn Belcher suggests that the NCTQ evaluation of teacher programs could use some tweaks.

Mind you, they think that NCTQ is doing God's work, and doing it well. Their ratings will stir up controversy and "it's the right conversation to have on a critical issue." TNTP is also excited " to see NCTQ begin to put alternative programs on equal footing with traditional programs, and welcome the outside scrutiny." And they did okay, ratings-wise ("solid Bs").

So, really, they don't want to complain. But they have some suggestions, some things deserving of tweakery (aka some ways they would look better). Do tell! Let's see the list!

A more focused approach to evaluating teacher support.

NCTQ dinged TNTP for not providing a co-teaching period for their recruits. "That’s fine in principle, but there is little or no evidence connecting it to improved practice or student learning. Other approaches, such as focused coaching (even in virtual environments), have a broader research base."

I left the links in that quote so you could see TNTP's support. The first unfortunately leads to a log-in page. Next we get a study of literacy coaches in a Florida middle school, a coaching "experiment run in the NOLA RSD, and a study of coaching in choice schools. You can wade through them, or you can take my word for it that they are not exactly a mountain of compelling evidence.

A more nuanced view of content preparation.

TNTP agrees that teachers should know what the hell their talking about in their content area (I'm paraphrasing) but takes umbrage that NCTQ suggests more coursework and tests than the state requires, because the research doesn't support it.And by research, once again, we mean "proof that it raises test scores." Keep that in mind because number three is--

A stronger push for evidence of effectiveness.

We know that NCTQ shares our belief that the best measure of a program’s effectiveness isn’t what programs put into their candidates, but whether the teachers it prepares advance student learning. NCTQ rightfully incorporated value-added data in its assessments of programs where available. 

VAM is like the flippin' educational bureaucrat zombie. Kill it over and over again and it just keeps coming back. Take mountains of evidence of VAM's uselessness as a measure of teacher effective, and pile that mountain on top of VAM and it just claws its way out and stumbles onward.

But as bizarre as it is that anyone would think you could go a step further and evaluate the program that created a teacher based on the standardized test score of that teacher's students, it is even more bizarre that TNTP would insist on being judged by it, that they would stand there, in the middle of the street screaming, "Come here, zombie VAM! Come and eat OUR brains!!"

It's like insisting on playing Russian Roulette because you are certain you have a method to beat the game. It is at times like this that I suspect TNTP leadership does not have a brain in its collective head. Maybe they are Wile E. Coyote smart; perhaps they feel that public schools will take more damage than they will with this bogus instrument, or that their superior marketing will withstand it (after all, their titular launcher is a woman who still carries weight in the education world despite never having succeeded at anything in education except making money).

The article wraps up with general glad-handing. Glad to work with NCTQ. Everybody should do it (but bring your shiny evidence-like research). And in the meantime, don't forget that NCTQ is giving pretty much everybody a bad grade.

TNTP & The Unreal Lessons of Vergara

TNTP is the less famous faux-reform sibling of StudentsFirst, but like that other batch of corporate reformsters, they can be counted on to articulate their agenda in a more-transparent-than-they-probably-meant-to-be manner. Last week they brought their reformy skills to "The Real Lessons of Vergara," in which Tim Daly and Dan Weisberg reveal some of the huge holes in the reformster agenda.

Their thesis is not all that unreasonable.

Despite all the prophecies of doom during the trial, teachers need not fear this verdict. Everyone agrees that California’s children deserve an education that prepares them for success in college and life, and the state’s constitution guarantees it. Likewise, there is broad consensus that teachers should have reasonable and professional job protections. This case has always been about finding the right balance between the two.

That's what the case has always been about? Because if that's what the case was about, it was remarkably well-hidden by the plaintiffs, who seemed to be pretty intent on just plain wiping out tenure and FILO (as is StudentsFirst). But maybe we can read that piece of revisionist history as a signal that reformsters are willing to back off a bit.

But there are curious versions of alternate reality that run throughout the TNTP piece.

Throughout the trial, the plaintiffs exposed how California’s laws make it nearly impossible for schools to hire and keep outstanding teachers or dismiss teachers who simply aren’t up to the job.

I understand the argument about not being able to fire bad teachers-- but what exactly about California's laws made it hard to hire good teachers in the first place? Or are we suggesting that because young teachers have less job security, they are less likely to apply in California? In which case, the solution is even less job security? I feel as if I'm missing some crucial point here.

Daly and Weisberg suggest there are four key changes needed to properly balance the need for job protection with the need to provide the best teachers. Each one is problematic.

Give Teachers a Longer Tryout

Because the problem with FILO is that we have to fire too many of our best teachers, who are the young ones. So, we need more job protection for young teachers, except that we shouldn't give them any kind of tenure for at least four years. So, we need to not fire young teachers, but we need to make it easier to fire young teachers. Got it?

Keep Due Process, But Eliminate "Uber" Due Process

Oh, the devil is in the details, isn't it, boys. Daly and Weisberg accept that teachers should have protections for, say, outside political activities. The teacher evaluation should be given the benefit of the doubt, but teachers should be able to appeal if they think the process wasn't followed correctly, but teachers should not be able to appeal because they believe the finding of the evaluation is wrong, and the process should be allowed to go on for a while, but not too much of a while.

I actually agree that the process should not be hugely time and money-consuming, but I can only hope that trying to write this one paragraph gave these guys a sense of just how hard it is to write the rulebook that will keep the whole process under control. You can go ahead and say "The hearing process should only take one day" and isn't it pretty to think so, but how exactly do you force that to happen and keep things fair to all parties? Actual justice is messy.

Lower the Stakes of Dismissal

Daly and Weisberg say that a dismissal should not be a career-ender because "a teacher who’s a bad fit for one school might be a great fit for another school" and --gaaahhh-- do you see what you just said there, boys? Because one freaking premise of Vergara was that "bad teacher" and "good teacher" are absolute, solid state conditions and that the school in which a teachers is working is in no way related to the quality of that teacher's work.

The Vergara plaintiffs (and the StudentsFirst anti-tenure agitprop) aren't saying, "The state is failing to match teachers up with the assignments in which they will shine." The message is that there are a bunch of Good Teachers out there and a bunch of Bad Teachers, and the Good Teachers will be great wherever we put them and the Bad Teachers will be bad wherever they work, so we need to fire the Bad Teachers and put the Good Teachers in the classrooms that need them (where they will continue to be Good Teachers). You just blithely threw out the whole thing. Sloppy work, boys.

Let Schools Protect Their Best Teachers During Layoffs

Daly and Weisberg split a new set of hairs here, indicating that a great new teacher might be fired so that the district can keep a teacher who just has just a year or two more seniority. So, not the usual picture of the freshfaced twenty-five year old being thrown into the street by some washed-up fifty-something old fart.

Unfortunately, this new version brings into sharp relief just how corrosive this approach would be to the atmosphere of a school.

Principal: Hey, Chris. This is Pat, the new hire. Pat's almost your age, so I thought you could help Pat get acclimated. Also, Pat's pretty bright, so we think Pat might take your job at the next round of layoffs. Make Pat feel welcome.
Chris: Sure thing. So, Pat, here are some tips. The office really likes it when you show movies all the time. And don't turn your grades in till the last minute; they love that. Just remember-- don't ever ask me for any help or materials, and if you ever get in any trouble, I'll be in my room contemplating my mortgage payment and ignoring you.

Because you can pretend all day that these battles over teacher effectiveness will be washed-up old guy versus fresh-faced newby, but we have studies out the wazoo to confirm what we already know-- when it comes to teacher quality, it's years of experience that make the most difference. So in an effectiveness showdown, it will be young teachers versus young teachers. Unless, of course, management decides to weigh some other factor, like, say, how much the teacher costs the district. Oh, but this is all about getting great quality, not about making schools run cheaply by churning and burning teaching staff. Right?

TNTP always seems a bit more mellow than StudentsFirst, and this piece follows that pattern. There are some softer edges on the anti-tenure argument here, but the center of the argument is still shot full of holes, contradictions, and weaknesses. And that's only if I give them the very huge benefit of a very small doubt that this isn't really all about cutting personnel costs in school by turning into non-career status temp work. I'm not sure any of us know for certain what the lessons of Vergara will turn out to be, but I don't think TNTP is in the ballpark.

TNTP Enters the Evaluation Game

The New Teacher Project was a Michelle Rhee spin-off from TFA. While TFA is all about shiny new 22-year-old temps, TNTP has thrown its focus toward recruiting more mature candidates looking to change careers (people who have actually held a job). TNTP has long indicated that it believes that some teachers are better than others, and that public education needs a reliable tool for spotting the winners. This has been most thoroughly expressed in their two-- I don't know-- research projects? PR pieces? Prespecti? Ad campaign programs? The Widget Effect and The Irreplaceables.

TNTP has the same root problem with teacher evaluation as TFA-- they love testing, they love Value-Added, and they already think they know who the Good Teachers are, so the evaluation tool must give an answer that checks out against what they already believe to be true. (This technique is known as The Not Very Scientific Method).

These days TNTP shares TFA's desire to bring diversity to classrooms (which is, if nothing else, a more easily-defensible PR position), and like all good supporters of the status quo, they are determined to fight the status quo.

But today they have taken another step in their quest for the appearance of excellence by releasing the TNTP Core Teaching Rubric. And because it's a snow day in my neck of the woods, I've been perusing this document.

The TNTP Core Teaching Rubric streamlines today’s bloated rubrics to bring the same focus and coherence to classroom observations that the Common Core brings to academic standards.

TNTP's premise is that current rubrics are too big and messy and give the observationator way too much to do, and I can hear Danielson-burdened principals across the country say, "No shinloa, sherlock!" And let me give TNTP credit, because if their goal was to come up with a more light and airy rubric, they have scored a big win.

The rubric scores teachers across four areas. They are: 

·      STUDENT ENGAGEMENT: Are all students engaged in the work of the lesson from start to finish?

·      ESSENTIAL CONTENT: Are all students working with content aligned to the appropriate standards for their subject and grade?

·      ACADEMIC OWNERSHIP: Are all students responsible for doing the thinking in this classroom?

·      DEMONSTRATION OF LEARNING: Do all students demonstrate that they are learning?

So, okay. Students engaged? Fine. I know research says there's no actual correlation between engagement and learning, but my teacher intuition agrees with everybody else's-- student engagement is good.

But essential content? We're seriously proposing to evaluate teachers based on whether or not they are covering the CCSS. You're right TNTP-- there is not yet enough micromanaging of classroom teachers. Let's evaluate them on how well they allow themselves to be micromanaged.

"Are all students responsible for doing the thinking in the classroom?" Oh, good lord. I know somewhere in my head that these reformers prefer that teachers not think, but to just come out and say it is.... I don't know. Rude. Still, I think the taxpayers in my district would prefer that students not do ALL the thinking in my classroom. (And just to be clear, no, I didn't misplace the "all." If I say "I'll do the driving" or "She'll do the cooking," that does not indicate a shared task.) Later the document describes this element in terms tat make a little more sense, but that is an ongoing issue as well-- it's a short document, but it lacks internal consistency, as if each page was composed in a separate office.

Demonstration of Learning. And so we've hit all the basic reformer food groups. One part something that's supportable, one part bureaucratic nonsense, one part pedagogical nonsense, and now, one part something so obvious that only someone who knew nothing about teaching would think it needs to be pointed out. Oh, and twelve parts essential elements that have been left out because the creators don't know any better.

"Each performance has three components." We will be checking an essential question, descriptor language, and core teacher skills. The essential questions are close in wording to the descriptions above. The descriptor language is one more five-column rubric breaking all of these areas into specifics. As is typical of these holistic scoring tools, it takes an array of multiple details that allows for 152,633 possible configurations (I'm just roughly estimating here) and crams them into five different scores. For those of us who have been steeped in holistic scoring, it's not really as impossible as it seems.

The core teacher skills part is actually my favorite, because it's where the rubric backslides from its clean and simple lines. In this area, we try to reverse engineer what we think the teacher did in order to get the student behavior. For instance, if all the students demonstrate that they are learning, can we trace that back to teacher core skills of leading instruction, checking for understanding of content, and responding to student misunderstanding. Is it possible that, in keeping with the spirit of CCSS math, a teacher could arrive at the correct result, but not in the correct manner? At any rate, the teacher skills are not supposed to be part of the evaluation, but part of the conversation about the results.

As this is a pilot program, users are invited to "take what you learn from a pilot to inform ongoing training and norming. And please tell us what you learn" at an email address. You're invited to change the language of the rubric to fit your local and reminded that this should be one of "multiple measures of performance." You didn't think we were going to leave student test scores out, did you?

Is there a research basis for this? Why, sure. It's the standard reformy model. In this case, TNTP leans on their experience training teachers for the field, but the formula is the same. We know that these are Excellent Qualities because Excellent Teachers use them, and we can identify those Excellent Teachers because they are the ones using Excellent Qualities. Though it should be noted that only a very few should receive the super-duper seal of excellent excellence, modeled on the winners of TNTP's Fishman Prize (an absolutely awesome name for a prize even though I'm sure the actual trophy is nowhere near as cool as the one I imagine).

So there you have it. Not evil or nefarious. Just kind of sloppy, ill-considered, and generally mediocre. Once we all get our school districts to volunteer to do TNTP's field testing for free, we'll have yet another superlative tool for evaluating teachers into such a state of excellence that they won't know what hit them.