A newly released quicky study from the Hamilton Project reaches some conclusions about what education can-- and can't-- do for the economic situation in our country.
The study, by Brad Hershbein, Melissa S. Kearney, and Lawrence Summers, tries to take a look at what effects would actually follow an increase in the number of college grads. Folks keep saying that if we got everyone a college degree, flowers would bloom, riches would flow, and the economy would be fixed. The study says, not exactly.
It's an interesting team-up. Hershbein and Kearney are from the school of thought that to get widespread economic prosperity, "it will be imperative to increase the skill level of many in the population." But Summers recently noted in a Washington Post interview “to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.” So this is not exactly Thomas Piketty trying to once again prove that all we need is more college-educated people and the world will be perfect.
The premise for this "empirical simulation" was waving a magic wand so that 10% of the men who don't have a bachelor's degree suddenly did (they assure us that focusing on men was not a sexist oversight, but a recognition that these un-degreed men are the ones who took the biggest hit in recent decades). They also allow, toward the end, that increasing educational attainment could also mean making K-12 better, not just sending everyone to college.
Then they ran a bunch of magical econoformulas to see how earnings distribution would change. I'll tell the truth-- I can't quite follow all the economist gobbledeegook in this paper (and it's only five pages long, so I'm going to go ahead and blame me). But I'm pretty sure that the exercise involves redistributing the earnings that are already out there and not, as some proponents do, imagining that college degrees automatically make more money appear in the system.
The study offers three bottom lines:
1) Increasing the educational attainment of men without a college degree will increase their average earnings and their likelihood of being employed.
I am not sure what part of the magic formulae supports this conclusion. It seems as if so many imponderables have been lumped together-- will a guy with a BA in Art History be better employed than a high school grad who's a certified welder? One thing the researchers don't seem to have considered at all-- the degree to which college attainment, employment, and earnings are all a function of the economic status of their family of origin (consider the depressing research suggesting that poor college grads don't do substantially better than rich high school dropouts, or the John Hopkins Baltimore study that suggests family and neighborhood trump everything).
All that said, I'm willing to accept that in general, a college degree is more helpful than not.
2) Increasing educational attainment will not significantly change overall earnings inequality.
Simple explanation here. A college degree does not get you any closer to being in the 1%, and the gulf between the 1% and everybody else is so large, that shuffling everybody else around just doesn't matter. Put another way, if I have seven out of eight pieces of pie, it really doesn't matter how the rest of you slice up the remaining piece, because I still have seven pieces.
3) Increasing educational attainment will, however, reduce inequality in the bottom half of the earnings distribution, largely by pulling up the earnings of those near the 25th percentile.
In other words, if these folks are correct (see above for my argument about why they might not be), increasing educational attainment will not affect the rich, the pretty rich, or the middle, but will make some of the poor less poor. This dovetails with the notion that much of ed reform is not so much about fixing education as it is about "fixing" poor kids (because if we fix them with education stuff, then we don't have to take responsibility for any other causes or effects of poverty).
As with much education researchy stuff, I'm not sure if we've actually proven anything here. But the observation that educational attainment will not affect the largest chunk of income inequality in this country is worth mulling over.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
NY: Teachers Can Go To Hell, With a Heavy Heart
This has truly been the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. An unpopular proposal that guts teaching as a profession and kicks public education in the teeth, sails through the NY legislature.
Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.
NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.
I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.
Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.
But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.
Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.
If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.
My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.
UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.
Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.
NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.
I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.
Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.
But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.
Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.
If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.
My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.
UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.
LSU Botches Its Own CCSS Data
Another Common Core poll has been conducted, this one by the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, and while some of the results are interesting, various media outlets are already blowing the lead.
LSU would like the big takeaway to be that people support the Common Core if you don't call it the Common Core, thereby suggesting that the poor standards simply suffer from a branding problem. If you ask people about adopting standards, they think it's swell, but if you ask them about adopting Common Core, the rejection and mouthfrothing begins. LSU (and the outlets jumping on this story) have thereby concluded that it's just the name that people have been trained to hate.
Let's see if I can illustrate the gaping hole in their argument with a little play:
Harry: Honey, do you think men should wear hats?
Chris: Yes, I think hats make men look rather dashing.
Harry: (Exits, returns wearing neon blue possum poop hat) So shall I wear this to your folks?
Chris: For the love of God, no!!
It is a leap of Knevelian proportions to suggest that if one likes the idea of educational standards, one must therefor love the Common Core Standards. It is possible to think standards are, in principle, rather dashing and desirable and yet to also conclude that Common Core is the blue neon possum poop of standards.
And my theory is further buttressed by the LSU finding that far more people consider themselves well-versed in CCSS since the last time LSU asked. They have seen the hat. They have tried the hat on. They have decided. That is some bad hat, Harry.
LSU offered a series of True-False questions. If you want your poll to yield particular results or push a particular idea, TF questions are great, because one need not offer an actual true answer at all!
For instance, LSU asks if CCSS was developed by the Obama administration or state leaders. Oops! No correct answers here, although both of those groups financed and supported the development, one more openly than the other.
Or would you say that the federal government required their adoption, or was it voluntary? Again, we left the correct answer off. Adoption of the standards was voluntary in the same way your mortgage payments are voluntary-- not required by law, exactly, but certainly a good idea if you'd like to avoid punishing financial penalties.
Do you think state and local government chooses materials, or the feds? Brrrzzzpt! None of the above, again.
Do the standards set higher or lower expectations? Well, this is just deep philosophy that assumes that educational expectations can be measured along a single axis, like height or heat or number of angels dancing on head of pin. I've always been bemused by the high expectations thing-- we kind of all know what it means, but it's also super-complex, particularly if we mix all the various aspects of education together. But that's a conversation for another day.
Methodology? They called 980 adults on the phone-- some landlines and some cells, including some cells only (I am curious-- how did they get those numbers?). The response rate was 7% for landline and 6% for cells, making a grand total of 64 persons who completed the survey. Those 64 people were weighted "using an iterative process that matches race and ethnicity, education, household income, gender and age to known profiles for Louisiana found in the Census Bureaus American Community Survey." The authors do acknowledge weighting cannot fully compensate for non-response bias (IOW the 916 adults who DIDN'T finish the survey).
I could get into the results, but really, why bother. Sixty-four residents of Louisiana were asked badly-constructed questions about the Common Core. What else do we need to know?
LSU would like the big takeaway to be that people support the Common Core if you don't call it the Common Core, thereby suggesting that the poor standards simply suffer from a branding problem. If you ask people about adopting standards, they think it's swell, but if you ask them about adopting Common Core, the rejection and mouthfrothing begins. LSU (and the outlets jumping on this story) have thereby concluded that it's just the name that people have been trained to hate.
Let's see if I can illustrate the gaping hole in their argument with a little play:
Harry: Honey, do you think men should wear hats?
Chris: Yes, I think hats make men look rather dashing.
Harry: (Exits, returns wearing neon blue possum poop hat) So shall I wear this to your folks?
Chris: For the love of God, no!!
It is a leap of Knevelian proportions to suggest that if one likes the idea of educational standards, one must therefor love the Common Core Standards. It is possible to think standards are, in principle, rather dashing and desirable and yet to also conclude that Common Core is the blue neon possum poop of standards.
And my theory is further buttressed by the LSU finding that far more people consider themselves well-versed in CCSS since the last time LSU asked. They have seen the hat. They have tried the hat on. They have decided. That is some bad hat, Harry.
LSU offered a series of True-False questions. If you want your poll to yield particular results or push a particular idea, TF questions are great, because one need not offer an actual true answer at all!
For instance, LSU asks if CCSS was developed by the Obama administration or state leaders. Oops! No correct answers here, although both of those groups financed and supported the development, one more openly than the other.
Or would you say that the federal government required their adoption, or was it voluntary? Again, we left the correct answer off. Adoption of the standards was voluntary in the same way your mortgage payments are voluntary-- not required by law, exactly, but certainly a good idea if you'd like to avoid punishing financial penalties.
Do you think state and local government chooses materials, or the feds? Brrrzzzpt! None of the above, again.
Do the standards set higher or lower expectations? Well, this is just deep philosophy that assumes that educational expectations can be measured along a single axis, like height or heat or number of angels dancing on head of pin. I've always been bemused by the high expectations thing-- we kind of all know what it means, but it's also super-complex, particularly if we mix all the various aspects of education together. But that's a conversation for another day.
Methodology? They called 980 adults on the phone-- some landlines and some cells, including some cells only (I am curious-- how did they get those numbers?). The response rate was 7% for landline and 6% for cells, making a grand total of 64 persons who completed the survey. Those 64 people were weighted "using an iterative process that matches race and ethnicity, education, household income, gender and age to known profiles for Louisiana found in the Census Bureaus American Community Survey." The authors do acknowledge weighting cannot fully compensate for non-response bias (IOW the 916 adults who DIDN'T finish the survey).
I could get into the results, but really, why bother. Sixty-four residents of Louisiana were asked badly-constructed questions about the Common Core. What else do we need to know?
Equity for Some
Can we have equity for some, or are we in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good? How big a lifeboat should we build?
Andy Smarick has been slowly unspooling a series of Fordham blogs in which he considers the areas of tension between conservative thought and modern ed reform. His latest considers the issues of equity and reform, and while he accurately identifies some issues, he misses a pair of critical ones.
One of the reformster guiding ideals is "that every child have access to great schools." On the face of it, that's a noble goal. But it's not the same as the goal that every child attend a great school.
Mike Petrilli has famously defined the role of charters, saying essentially that their mission is to save some students, the students deemed worthy by charter operators. While charters exist who are willing (like actual public schools) to take all comers, many charters argue loudly for school's choice-- their right to select only the students that they want in their building. Arguments against backfilling, true random student assignment, and mandatory acceptance of more special needs students all boil down to the same thing-- most modern charters want to accept the students they want to accept under the conditions they want to accept them, and that's it. This is unsurprising; many (if not most) modern charter operators came to education from the world of business, and part of the baggage they brought with them is that nobody should be able to tell them how to run their business.
Charters do not want to take over the whole public education business-- just the parts they think they can make profitable.
Well, so what? If they can actually improve education in America in a cost-effective manner, who cares if they make money in the process?
And that's our problem. They can't make money and improve education and keep the total cost down-- not without redefining the mission of public education. And unfortunately, their redefinition is problematic.
We have an equity problem in education in this country, and I'm not sure it's all that complicated-- we don't want to spend enough money to get the job done. If education is a really good pair of shoes, we've said, "The government will kick in part of the costs. You'll have to make up the difference locally. If you can't, your kids will just have to wear cheap, ill-fitting shoes." Charter operators are the guys who say, "Give me that money. I've got a supplier who could get perfectly okay shoes-- as long as I only have to shoe the kids with regular-sized feet. The kids with flat feet or high arches or odd sizes-- they will cost us too much to get shoes for, so you just keep those."
Smarick asks a legitimate question-- is it okay to save the very, very needy if that means leaving the very, very, very needy behind? Unfortunately, that's not the choice we're facing.The piece includes this paragraph that backhandedly highlights the problems with charters and equity:
Newark's charters are extraordinary. But superintendent Cami Anderson is concerned these "speedboats" save only some passengers from "the Titanic" and might make the liner sink faster.
Problem 1: Newarks charters aren't extraordinary at all. Solid research shows that they serve a different population than Newark public schools (what is extraordinary is how they tried to use the courts to silence those researchers).
Problem 2: Those speedboats do make the liner sink faster.
One of the basic assumptions of a blended public and charter system is that we can operate two or more separate schools for the cost of one. We can't. Nobody can. (Auditors in Tennessee just certified that Nashville can't do it.) Smarick quotes Mother Teresa-- "If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." I don't think that applies. First, why can't we feed 100 people? We're one of the richest nations on earth. Second, why are we taking food away from ninety people so that ten people can eat better?
Smarick pulls out an old article in which Rick Hess suggests that fans of an equity-driven approach to schools "refused to confront its costs and unintended consequences." But so do the fans of the charter inequity approach. Opening charters in a city is an absolute guarantee that some schools in that city will not be fully funded.
This is what I find infuriatingly frustrating about the charter approach to "fixing" a school sysem. We walk up to a building where 100 students live, and we say, "This building is falling down, poorly maintained, and slowly crumbling. Let's take half the money being spent on it now, build a nice new building for ten of these students, and leave the other ninety in this now-even-more-undersupported crumbing mess." Why not fix the building with all 100 students inside? Because it would cost money.
If we push ahead as-is, some of these costs will be forced upon--in the short term at least--affluent families.
Well, yes. That's the problem, isn't it? Despite protestations to the contrary, we can't provide educational equity without at the very least changing how we spread around the money on the table for education, and likely not without coughing up more money, period. But we don't like that answer. Instead, we keep looking for ways to cut and resew a blanket that's too small to cover the bed instead of coughing up the funds to buy a full sized blanket that can cover everybody.
Financing public education is the very definition of a zero-sum game. Too many charter proponents have decided to abandon public education and the expensive-to-educate children who go to school there. Too many charter proponents are arguing that equity for some should be our goal. Smarick says that we don't discuss tradeoffs enough, but like most charter fans, he does not discuss the tradeoff of robbing Peter to pay for Paul's charter school. I understand the nobility of the impulse to rescue just one starfish, but the metaphor does not apply here unless we're talking about some bizarre deal where for every starfish that's thrown into the sea, ten must be stuffed in a bucket.
I believe that on the road to equity for all, we have to travel through the valley of equity for some. As long as we seem to be traveling in the right direction, I'm okay with that. But reformsters don't seem to have a plan beyond "Use charters to rescue some students by re-distributing the resources earmarked for all students." I understand that "Get unlimited money from a magic money tree" is also not an option. But equity for some is good enough. We need a better answer.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Andy Smarick has been slowly unspooling a series of Fordham blogs in which he considers the areas of tension between conservative thought and modern ed reform. His latest considers the issues of equity and reform, and while he accurately identifies some issues, he misses a pair of critical ones.
One of the reformster guiding ideals is "that every child have access to great schools." On the face of it, that's a noble goal. But it's not the same as the goal that every child attend a great school.
Mike Petrilli has famously defined the role of charters, saying essentially that their mission is to save some students, the students deemed worthy by charter operators. While charters exist who are willing (like actual public schools) to take all comers, many charters argue loudly for school's choice-- their right to select only the students that they want in their building. Arguments against backfilling, true random student assignment, and mandatory acceptance of more special needs students all boil down to the same thing-- most modern charters want to accept the students they want to accept under the conditions they want to accept them, and that's it. This is unsurprising; many (if not most) modern charter operators came to education from the world of business, and part of the baggage they brought with them is that nobody should be able to tell them how to run their business.
Charters do not want to take over the whole public education business-- just the parts they think they can make profitable.
Well, so what? If they can actually improve education in America in a cost-effective manner, who cares if they make money in the process?
And that's our problem. They can't make money and improve education and keep the total cost down-- not without redefining the mission of public education. And unfortunately, their redefinition is problematic.
We have an equity problem in education in this country, and I'm not sure it's all that complicated-- we don't want to spend enough money to get the job done. If education is a really good pair of shoes, we've said, "The government will kick in part of the costs. You'll have to make up the difference locally. If you can't, your kids will just have to wear cheap, ill-fitting shoes." Charter operators are the guys who say, "Give me that money. I've got a supplier who could get perfectly okay shoes-- as long as I only have to shoe the kids with regular-sized feet. The kids with flat feet or high arches or odd sizes-- they will cost us too much to get shoes for, so you just keep those."
Smarick asks a legitimate question-- is it okay to save the very, very needy if that means leaving the very, very, very needy behind? Unfortunately, that's not the choice we're facing.The piece includes this paragraph that backhandedly highlights the problems with charters and equity:
Newark's charters are extraordinary. But superintendent Cami Anderson is concerned these "speedboats" save only some passengers from "the Titanic" and might make the liner sink faster.
Problem 1: Newarks charters aren't extraordinary at all. Solid research shows that they serve a different population than Newark public schools (what is extraordinary is how they tried to use the courts to silence those researchers).
Problem 2: Those speedboats do make the liner sink faster.
One of the basic assumptions of a blended public and charter system is that we can operate two or more separate schools for the cost of one. We can't. Nobody can. (Auditors in Tennessee just certified that Nashville can't do it.) Smarick quotes Mother Teresa-- "If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." I don't think that applies. First, why can't we feed 100 people? We're one of the richest nations on earth. Second, why are we taking food away from ninety people so that ten people can eat better?
Smarick pulls out an old article in which Rick Hess suggests that fans of an equity-driven approach to schools "refused to confront its costs and unintended consequences." But so do the fans of the charter inequity approach. Opening charters in a city is an absolute guarantee that some schools in that city will not be fully funded.
This is what I find infuriatingly frustrating about the charter approach to "fixing" a school sysem. We walk up to a building where 100 students live, and we say, "This building is falling down, poorly maintained, and slowly crumbling. Let's take half the money being spent on it now, build a nice new building for ten of these students, and leave the other ninety in this now-even-more-undersupported crumbing mess." Why not fix the building with all 100 students inside? Because it would cost money.
If we push ahead as-is, some of these costs will be forced upon--in the short term at least--affluent families.
Well, yes. That's the problem, isn't it? Despite protestations to the contrary, we can't provide educational equity without at the very least changing how we spread around the money on the table for education, and likely not without coughing up more money, period. But we don't like that answer. Instead, we keep looking for ways to cut and resew a blanket that's too small to cover the bed instead of coughing up the funds to buy a full sized blanket that can cover everybody.
Financing public education is the very definition of a zero-sum game. Too many charter proponents have decided to abandon public education and the expensive-to-educate children who go to school there. Too many charter proponents are arguing that equity for some should be our goal. Smarick says that we don't discuss tradeoffs enough, but like most charter fans, he does not discuss the tradeoff of robbing Peter to pay for Paul's charter school. I understand the nobility of the impulse to rescue just one starfish, but the metaphor does not apply here unless we're talking about some bizarre deal where for every starfish that's thrown into the sea, ten must be stuffed in a bucket.
I believe that on the road to equity for all, we have to travel through the valley of equity for some. As long as we seem to be traveling in the right direction, I'm okay with that. But reformsters don't seem to have a plan beyond "Use charters to rescue some students by re-distributing the resources earmarked for all students." I understand that "Get unlimited money from a magic money tree" is also not an option. But equity for some is good enough. We need a better answer.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
NY: Have Evaluation, Will Travel
The situation with education as described by the New York State budget could best be described as fluid, like the contents of one of those lagoons of pig poop one finds near factory farms.
In the twitterverse some folks have declared the budget a huge win for education, but as the pig poop flows, it becomes seems that actual specific winning portions are as hard to locate as a tiny daisy at the bottom of, well, a lake full of pig poop.
Earlier today, my esteemed blogging colleague Daniel Katz pulled apart the issue of the outside evaluator, the element of teacher evaluation that's supposed to involve somebody outside the school descending, like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, to evaluate complete strangers in a completely unfamiliar setting.
Katz demolished each of the supposed sources of outside evaluators (principals with nothing in particular to do at their own schools, retired teachers who like driving around, college professors who aren't busy not teaching their own classes, or the five teachers who will be found highly effective under the NY system).
But it turns out those assumptions are so Earlier This Afternoon. Sharpeyed tweetists watching NY legislature proceedings have been tweeting the news that actually shouldn't be news to anybody who's been paying attention to the reform biz-- Outside Evaluators don't have to be educators at all.
This gives rise to some hilarious scenarios (what would teacher evaluation by, say, an out of work circus clown look like) as well as some practical ones (at last-- something for all those craigslist-hired test scorers to do in the off season). But we have seen this movie, and we know how it's going to end.
Should the amateur-hour outside evaluation idea stand, we will shortly see the launch of Pearson Teacher Eval R Us. Hell, all they have to do as is adapt the edTPA baloney that's already in place tosuck money from aspiring new teachers help launch bold young careers. They will scarf up a team of crack teacher evaluators (keep your eyes on craigslist), train 'em up right, and offer them to your district at bargain basement prices.
There may be other vendors who enter the market, but the effect will be the same-- more money flowing away from classrooms and toward corporate bank accounts while at the same time trashing careers with a rout of random vandalizing that New Yorkers will support with their hard-earned tax dollars. It will be just one more golden yolk to be extracted in the continuing drive to turn public education into a private profit opportunity.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Happier than a pig upwind of the giant poop lagoon.
In the twitterverse some folks have declared the budget a huge win for education, but as the pig poop flows, it becomes seems that actual specific winning portions are as hard to locate as a tiny daisy at the bottom of, well, a lake full of pig poop.
Earlier today, my esteemed blogging colleague Daniel Katz pulled apart the issue of the outside evaluator, the element of teacher evaluation that's supposed to involve somebody outside the school descending, like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, to evaluate complete strangers in a completely unfamiliar setting.
Katz demolished each of the supposed sources of outside evaluators (principals with nothing in particular to do at their own schools, retired teachers who like driving around, college professors who aren't busy not teaching their own classes, or the five teachers who will be found highly effective under the NY system).
But it turns out those assumptions are so Earlier This Afternoon. Sharpeyed tweetists watching NY legislature proceedings have been tweeting the news that actually shouldn't be news to anybody who's been paying attention to the reform biz-- Outside Evaluators don't have to be educators at all.
This gives rise to some hilarious scenarios (what would teacher evaluation by, say, an out of work circus clown look like) as well as some practical ones (at last-- something for all those craigslist-hired test scorers to do in the off season). But we have seen this movie, and we know how it's going to end.
Should the amateur-hour outside evaluation idea stand, we will shortly see the launch of Pearson Teacher Eval R Us. Hell, all they have to do as is adapt the edTPA baloney that's already in place to
There may be other vendors who enter the market, but the effect will be the same-- more money flowing away from classrooms and toward corporate bank accounts while at the same time trashing careers with a rout of random vandalizing that New Yorkers will support with their hard-earned tax dollars. It will be just one more golden yolk to be extracted in the continuing drive to turn public education into a private profit opportunity.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Happier than a pig upwind of the giant poop lagoon.
The Cage-Busting Life
If you have been anywhere remotely in the neighborhood of Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, you've heard the phrase "cage-busting teacher." Hess has a book by that title coming out, and he's been preparing the ground for the seeds that book is meant to plant. You can find bits and pieces of the cage-busting idea in various bits of his writing lately, but a good cage-busting primer is on AEI's website, with excerpts from the book itself.
Busting Cages by Leaning in with Gritty Bootstraps
Cage-busting shares a great deal with the conservative ideas expressed by proponents of grittology and the book Leaning In. The underlying idea-- that people should step up, get tough, exert their power, and generally stop waiting for help is a hard one to talk about.
"Get tough. Find a way. Set a goal and work toward it. Don't depend on help. Figure out a solution you can pursue with the tools at hand."
As advice to yourself, this can be powerful and exceptionally useful. As advice to others, particularly others over whom you have power and administrative control, it can be dismissive and unhelpful. As an excuse to withhold assistance and support from those who need it, this stance is morally and ethically reprehensible.
As self-talk, this is useful stuff. "What can I do with the goals that I have and the resources that are available to me?" is powerful, far more powerful than "Well, there's no use trying because I'm boxed in on all sides." For decades, I have described teaching as a kind of guerilla warfare, where there are many people who don't want you to do your job (including people who should be supporting you and who are, technically, in charge of you) so you have to be willing to get your job done through whatever means you can come up with. So it's possible that I am already a cage-buster of sorts.
And yet I have misgivings about Hess's description. While I have seen him occasionally acknowledge that some teachers inhabit cages that are wrapped in barbed wire, covered by machine guns, and electrified, mostly he doesn't. His examples include a teacher who defied a school policy of only giving ACT info to top students via the guidance office by handing out ACT info himself to any and all students who asked. The story has a happy ending-- even though the guidance counselor was furious, the administration ultimately shifted stance. But the end of the story could have as easily ended with the teacher being ripped a new one by a principal and charges of insubordination.
Hess's examples are, in fact, pretty tame, and likely to remind many teachers of the time an administrator "empowered" them by saying, "You can address this issue with any ideas you like as long as you do the work on your own time and it doesn't cost the district a cent." That's not nothing, but it's not exactly earth-shattering, either.
Cage-Busting Entrepreneurs
While Hess likes classroom teachers whose cage busting nibbles around the edges of policy, he really loves cage-busters who are entrepreneurs finding great newprograms to market ideas to shift education. He says that "cage-busters know they sometimes need to step out of their schools or classrooms to do their best work." His examples are the founders of EMERGE and LearnZillion, and they illustrate the difficult gap between cage busting and just plain cage leaving. Of LearnZillion founder Eric Westendorf, Hess writes:
Sure, Westendorf has left the classroom to tackle this problem. But a cage-buster would have a hard time suggesting that he’s left schools, teachers, or students behind.
Okay. But is the problem unintentionally revealed here that teachers have to leave the classroom to have real effects on schools?
One Person's Cage-Buster
Cage-busting and rabble-rousing are, for Hess, two different animals. In a recent interview with the Colorado edition of Chalkbeat, Hess has this to say.
…[W]hat’s happened is to a large extent…there are these teachers out there who are doing amazing things and speaking up, there are lot of teachers who are just doing their thing in the middle, and then you have teachers who are disgruntled and frustrated. These teachers in the backend, the 10 percent, they’re the teachers the reformers and policymakers envision when they think about the profession. They’re the ones who are rallying and screaming and writing nasty notes at the bottom of New York Times stories.
Now, make no mistake-- when it comes to calling out fellow reformsters on their bad choices, their misreading of the field, and their just plain lies, Hess is in the forefront. His picture of the education field is complex and careful, but absolutely geared toward the corporate conservative values that he and AEI back. But he does not reflexively slam teachers, nor does he automatically support anyone who is on His Team.
But he does seem to prefer his cage-busting within certain boundaries. When Newark students, frustrated with a school superintendent who literally refused to meet with the citizens and students of Newark-- when those students followed Cami Anderson to an AEI event to confront her, Hess was not impressed by their cage-busting spirit. Instead, he called them rabble-rousers.
Nor do I look for him to come out in support of teachers supporting the opt-out movement as a way to try to effect policy change. Hess's cage-busters seem to be primarily supporters of favored reform programs.
In fact, most of Hess's examples seem to be ways in which teachers can step up and help the school more effectively pursue the policies it is already pursuing. Hess's Cage-Busting comes perilously close to Cage-Redecorating.
So, Can We Bust a Cage
Hess's basic advice-- step up, do what you can with the resources you have, and don't be afraid to cross some lines to do it-- that's advice I endorse. I'm not sure that Hess fully endorses it, or really wants teachers to bust only certain cages only in certain ways, but that's okay-- the fact that he might not fully embrace the implications of his own advice doesn't make the advice bad. We can still take cage-busting steps.
Teachers really do ask for permission more often than we need to. One of the best ways I know to sell a program is to do what you can with what you've got and then present it to the Powers That Be, saying "See how successful we were with peanuts! Don't you want to give us more resources so we can do more?"
Private industry is loaded with people who fight the system. Teachers often have a natural reluctance to break the rules, even when we know they need to be broken. But sometimes in the service of education or our students, we need to just go ahead and work around the system, push the system, find ways to coax the system into new shapes, or just plain poke holes in the system.
But you have to know the territory. You have to know which line-crossing will lead to Very Bad Consequences, not just because VBC are hard on the recipient, but because you won't achieve your objectives if the VBC are raining down.
You have to recognize the possible consequences. As with Hess, lots of people like the idea of a rebel, as long as they're rebelling against the right things in a proper politely rebellious manner.
And while I appreciate that Hess's book is directed at teachers and not, say, policymakers, I would hate to see it used by policymakers as an excuse. Grit, leaning in, cage-busting-- these are all ideas that are sometimes used by people in power to avoid facing their own responsibility for finding solutions. The value of bootstrapping strategies depend completely on context. Deciding, "We'll just eat rats and plants," is a fine survival strategy for a starving person to choose for himself. But looking down at a starving person from your seat at the Endless Buffet and saying, "Well, you should just eat rats and plants" is indefensible.
Teachers should be problem-solvers who take initiative regardless of what resources and support they may or may not have. As Hess acknowledges, every school in the country has cage-busting teachers in it and always has. But the existence of cage-busting teachers does not excuse cage-welding administrators, politicians, and policymakers from their own obligations to help solve (and to not create more) problems.
Busting Cages by Leaning in with Gritty Bootstraps
Cage-busting shares a great deal with the conservative ideas expressed by proponents of grittology and the book Leaning In. The underlying idea-- that people should step up, get tough, exert their power, and generally stop waiting for help is a hard one to talk about.
"Get tough. Find a way. Set a goal and work toward it. Don't depend on help. Figure out a solution you can pursue with the tools at hand."
As advice to yourself, this can be powerful and exceptionally useful. As advice to others, particularly others over whom you have power and administrative control, it can be dismissive and unhelpful. As an excuse to withhold assistance and support from those who need it, this stance is morally and ethically reprehensible.
As self-talk, this is useful stuff. "What can I do with the goals that I have and the resources that are available to me?" is powerful, far more powerful than "Well, there's no use trying because I'm boxed in on all sides." For decades, I have described teaching as a kind of guerilla warfare, where there are many people who don't want you to do your job (including people who should be supporting you and who are, technically, in charge of you) so you have to be willing to get your job done through whatever means you can come up with. So it's possible that I am already a cage-buster of sorts.
And yet I have misgivings about Hess's description. While I have seen him occasionally acknowledge that some teachers inhabit cages that are wrapped in barbed wire, covered by machine guns, and electrified, mostly he doesn't. His examples include a teacher who defied a school policy of only giving ACT info to top students via the guidance office by handing out ACT info himself to any and all students who asked. The story has a happy ending-- even though the guidance counselor was furious, the administration ultimately shifted stance. But the end of the story could have as easily ended with the teacher being ripped a new one by a principal and charges of insubordination.
Hess's examples are, in fact, pretty tame, and likely to remind many teachers of the time an administrator "empowered" them by saying, "You can address this issue with any ideas you like as long as you do the work on your own time and it doesn't cost the district a cent." That's not nothing, but it's not exactly earth-shattering, either.
Cage-Busting Entrepreneurs
While Hess likes classroom teachers whose cage busting nibbles around the edges of policy, he really loves cage-busters who are entrepreneurs finding great new
Sure, Westendorf has left the classroom to tackle this problem. But a cage-buster would have a hard time suggesting that he’s left schools, teachers, or students behind.
Okay. But is the problem unintentionally revealed here that teachers have to leave the classroom to have real effects on schools?
One Person's Cage-Buster
Cage-busting and rabble-rousing are, for Hess, two different animals. In a recent interview with the Colorado edition of Chalkbeat, Hess has this to say.
…[W]hat’s happened is to a large extent…there are these teachers out there who are doing amazing things and speaking up, there are lot of teachers who are just doing their thing in the middle, and then you have teachers who are disgruntled and frustrated. These teachers in the backend, the 10 percent, they’re the teachers the reformers and policymakers envision when they think about the profession. They’re the ones who are rallying and screaming and writing nasty notes at the bottom of New York Times stories.
Now, make no mistake-- when it comes to calling out fellow reformsters on their bad choices, their misreading of the field, and their just plain lies, Hess is in the forefront. His picture of the education field is complex and careful, but absolutely geared toward the corporate conservative values that he and AEI back. But he does not reflexively slam teachers, nor does he automatically support anyone who is on His Team.
But he does seem to prefer his cage-busting within certain boundaries. When Newark students, frustrated with a school superintendent who literally refused to meet with the citizens and students of Newark-- when those students followed Cami Anderson to an AEI event to confront her, Hess was not impressed by their cage-busting spirit. Instead, he called them rabble-rousers.
Nor do I look for him to come out in support of teachers supporting the opt-out movement as a way to try to effect policy change. Hess's cage-busters seem to be primarily supporters of favored reform programs.
In fact, most of Hess's examples seem to be ways in which teachers can step up and help the school more effectively pursue the policies it is already pursuing. Hess's Cage-Busting comes perilously close to Cage-Redecorating.
So, Can We Bust a Cage
Hess's basic advice-- step up, do what you can with the resources you have, and don't be afraid to cross some lines to do it-- that's advice I endorse. I'm not sure that Hess fully endorses it, or really wants teachers to bust only certain cages only in certain ways, but that's okay-- the fact that he might not fully embrace the implications of his own advice doesn't make the advice bad. We can still take cage-busting steps.
Teachers really do ask for permission more often than we need to. One of the best ways I know to sell a program is to do what you can with what you've got and then present it to the Powers That Be, saying "See how successful we were with peanuts! Don't you want to give us more resources so we can do more?"
Private industry is loaded with people who fight the system. Teachers often have a natural reluctance to break the rules, even when we know they need to be broken. But sometimes in the service of education or our students, we need to just go ahead and work around the system, push the system, find ways to coax the system into new shapes, or just plain poke holes in the system.
But you have to know the territory. You have to know which line-crossing will lead to Very Bad Consequences, not just because VBC are hard on the recipient, but because you won't achieve your objectives if the VBC are raining down.
You have to recognize the possible consequences. As with Hess, lots of people like the idea of a rebel, as long as they're rebelling against the right things in a proper politely rebellious manner.
And while I appreciate that Hess's book is directed at teachers and not, say, policymakers, I would hate to see it used by policymakers as an excuse. Grit, leaning in, cage-busting-- these are all ideas that are sometimes used by people in power to avoid facing their own responsibility for finding solutions. The value of bootstrapping strategies depend completely on context. Deciding, "We'll just eat rats and plants," is a fine survival strategy for a starving person to choose for himself. But looking down at a starving person from your seat at the Endless Buffet and saying, "Well, you should just eat rats and plants" is indefensible.
Teachers should be problem-solvers who take initiative regardless of what resources and support they may or may not have. As Hess acknowledges, every school in the country has cage-busting teachers in it and always has. But the existence of cage-busting teachers does not excuse cage-welding administrators, politicians, and policymakers from their own obligations to help solve (and to not create more) problems.
Monday, March 30, 2015
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.
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.
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