12 Reasons To Evaluate Teachers

Like giving students standardized tests, evaluating teacher is one of those things that the vast majority of people believe that you do because, well, of course you do. Reasons. You know. Federal policy has required it, and required it with fairly specific provisions, for the past few administrations. Reformsterism focused for quite some time on collecting teacher data in order to fix education. Meanwhile, plenty of principals will tell you that doing the teacher evaluation paperwork and observations and whatever is a big fat pain in their ass and they already know plenty about the people in their building and can they please get back to work on something useful now and they've already got twelve meetings today and no time, really, to go sit and listen to Mrs. McTeachalot run through a lesson about prepositions when they already know damn well how good a job Mrs. Teachalot does.

Recently both Fordham and Bellwether thinky tanks released reports on teacher evaluations. Bellwether focused more on teacher eval as a method of steering professional development, while Fordham focused on the old reformster question, "If we're evaluating teachers, why aren't we firing more of them?" There's a conversation between the two groups of researchers here at Bellwether that is semi-interesting, and reading it got me thinking again about the actual point of evaluating teachers.

Teacher evaluation has a variety of historic and theoretical purposes.

1) Identify bad teachers so you can fire them.

Some people remain convinced that you can fire your way to excellence. Other people (like NY Governor Cuomo) are dopes who think that if 50% of your students are failing the Big Standardized Test, 50% of your teachers must suck. This is dumb on so many levels, like assuming that a 20% mortality rate at your hospital means 20% of the staff stinks, or a 10% crime rate in your city means 20% of your police are incompetent. But not only can you not fire your way to excellence, but when you make teacher evaluation a process about delivering punishment and doom, you guarantee that your staff will do everything in their power to game, cheat and otherwise work around the system. The data gathered by such a system is guaranteed crap, not helpful to anyone.

2) Identify bad teachers so you can help them.

Well, there's a thought. It's certainly cheaper than steadily churning, hiring, and training new staff. It does, however, require a real commitment to actually helping people, and it requires a culture of trust and support-- nobody wants to make themselves vulnerable by letting their weakest traits show. That means that you can have #1 or #2 on this list, but under absolutely no circumstances can you have both. This also opens the question-- if you are evaluating in order to pinpoint and assist problem teachers, exactly how often do you need to evaluate, and who really needs to be evaluated?

3) Find out where the teacher can be improved, the better to plan your professional development.

Every teacher worth his or her salt is working on something. Every decent teacher I have ever known can tell you the areas in which she needs work and improvement-- and she can probably tell you right off the top of her head because she thinks about these a lot. One of the classic traits of a less-than-stellar teacher is the insistence that she has everything down to science and there is nothing, really, that she needs to work on. The professional development challenge, of course, is designing something that meets the different needs of 100 different teachers. The other challenge is that state governments, sometimes under federal pressure, have a history of defining what professional development is acceptable. Cue the boring PD vendors and the sessions that don't serve anyone at all. The other evaluation question here is, do we really need evaluations to tell us what PD is needed? Will that really work any better than, you know, just asking?

4) Prove to taxpayers they are getting their money's worth.

A political favorite and a common reason given by reformsters demanding accountability-- the taxpayers must know what kind of teacher bang they are getting for their buck. I'm sympathetic to this point of view-- I'm a taxpayer, too. But we immediately run up against the problem of the vastly different expectations of the various taxpayers when they say, "So, are our teachers any good?" We either end up with a fairly specific accountability system that leaves many taxpayers saying, "Well, I don't really care about that," or more commonly, we lump a bunch of stuff together and answer taxpayers with, "Yeah, sure, they're pretty good" and ignore that "good" means completely different things to everyone in the conversation.

5) To find awesome teachers to give merit bonuses to.

Well, we know that merit pay doesn't work. We also know that, since school districts don't turn a profit, the traditional model of merit pay in which workers share the company's spoils doesn't apply. I someone going to tell taxpayers, "We have so many great teachers this year that we need to raise taxes to provide fair merit bonuses?" Yeah, I didn't think so.

But even beyond all that-- a merit bonus system will twist and warp the school. Because the merit will be based on something easily measurable, and that means some teachers will twist their practice toward that practice, even if it's bad practice. To see what I mean, just imagine a merit system in which a teacher got a bonus for every student in her class who got an A in that class. What do you imagine would happen next? All merit pay systems are either a variation on that approach, or systems based on elements over which the teacher has no control at all and which therefor don't effect anything except how powerless and demoralized teachers feel.

6) Prove to politicians/bureaucrats that current regulations are being followed.

Ah, the culture of compliance. What is Big Standardized Test based accountability except the state and federal governments saying, "You'd better teach that Common Core stuff, and if you don't, we're going to catch you and teach you a lesson."

7) Let teachers know whether or not they are meeting expectations.

One of the uniquely unnerving things about teaching, particularly when you start out, is that nobody ever tells you what exactly you are expected to do. Go in your room, and teach kids some stuff. Some schools are terrifying in their non-directedness. Let me tell you a true, amazing thing-- I have been in my school district as either a student or a teacher since 1969, and not once in those 47 years have we had an actual functional curriculum for the English department. Seriously. And I know we're not alone- plenty of districts have things on paper that are in no way connected to reality.

Nobody hands a teacher a job description. Administrators rarely set teachers down and say, "This is what we expect of you." So teachers acquire official or unofficial mentors, tune in to the school culture, use their own expertise and acquired experience, and listen as administrators and school leaders convey expectations in less formal and structured ways. I know this level of freedom horrifies some people; I think it is one of the strengths and glories of many districts. But could it help teachers to have a more formal expression of how they do or do not meet expectations? Sure.

8) To implement somebody's cool new idea about how to make teaching more awesome.

Oh, good lord! Principal McNerburger went to a conference and now he's all hyped up about freakin' Madeline Hunter.

9) To protect teachers.

God save us from sucky administrators who want to fire Ms. Whipple because he doesn't like the way she wears her hair or Mr. Whinesalot because he's a political activist for the wrong party. God save us from the school board member who's mad that some teacher won't play his kid on first sting or give his kid the lead in the school play or won't agree to go out with him on a date, and so calls up the administration and says, "I want that teacher gone! Fired!! Do iT!!!"

For that matter, God save us from evaluation systems that use shoddy tests and unproven formulas to generate a number that is no more reliable or consistent than rolling dice.

10) To compare teachers to other teachers

Because stack ranking is fun, and finding winners and losers is really helpful? No-- because public education is where bad corporate management ideas go to die. Private industry long ago noticed that stack ranking is just bad for business. To do so in education is exponentially worse, because any system that allows you to compare a tenth grade English teacher in Virginia with a third grade music teacher in Alaska is a deeply, profoundly stupid system.

11) It's paperwork.

Some combination of state and federal meddling has created a new form that must be filled out. There's numbers that have to go in here and checkmarks over there and mostly principals just want to get back to doing their actual jobs, which means that your evaluation form may have been filled out before Principal Swiffboat even set foot in your classroom to "observe" you. But as long as the paperwork looks good, nobody anywhere in the system cares about its relationship to reality.

12) Because, you know. Reasons, and stuff.

This is one of those things that administrators are supposed to do. The administrators doing it may have no actual purpose or point in mind, but they know it's a Thing They're Supposed To Do, so here we go.


The thing is, you can't pick more than one or two of these; they are almost all completely mutually exclusive. Yet, on the state and federal world, as filtered through the thinky tank policy wonk lens, the goal is to do some combination of most of these.

And some of these require major overhauls. If you want, as the Bellwether discussion suggests at one point, a system that meets teacher needs for professional development and growth, you need to pretty much scrap everything we're currently doing and start from scratch. People who think that we can look at BS Test results and thereby identify teacher professional development needs are clearly smoking something. That is like looking at an elephant's toenail clippings and deciding sort of fertlizer nutrients are needed for all the rice fields of Asia.

Honestly, I don't think we will ever have a good teacher evaluation system in this country. It would require everyone to be on the same page about the purpose of schools, the role of teachers, and the outcomes we want to see in all those areas, and I don't think that level of agreement is either possible or even desirable.

I think the best we can hope for is a system that isn't toxic and bad and damaging to public education, which is pretty much the kind of system that NCLB, RTTT, and Waiverpalooza gave us. I expect something simpler from Trump-DeVos, in which anyone who is identified as a trained, experienced teacher is automatically rated "Awful" or "Sad" in a late-night tweet. For what it's worth, I have a whole system for serious teacher evaluation ready to go as soon as someone is ready to help me launch my consulting business. But in the meantime, I think we're going to be stuck with one of the above.

DeVos's Inconvenient Truths

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post turned up a 2015 speech from billionaire heiress and Education Secretary Designee Betsy DeVos in which Devos lays out her six "inconvenient truths," the guiding principles by which her vision of American education is powered. Ed Patru, a self-identified spokesperson for Friends of Betsy DeVos (so I guess that's a thing-- damn), indicates that the speech is a fair measure of DeVos's animating philosophy, so we'd probably better take a look at these six pillars of super-duper governance that's headed our way like a over-loaded semi with a brick on the gas pedal.

Inconvenient Truth No. 1-- Our education system in America is antiquated and it is quite frankly embarrassing.

DeVos compares public education system to the Model T, and talks about how Detroit totally innovated to do a better job of producing automobiles, so I'm a little confused-- she wants to send American children to Mexico and Canada to be educated under less safe conditions by underpaid workers?

This truth is where we get to bring up the criticism of DeVos that she has never in her life spent any time in an actual public school. She didn't attend one; her children didn't attend one. This is not a mean, personal attack-- it's an explanation for why she doesn't appear to know what the hell she's talking about.

This is what I call Reformster Timewarp Syndrome, in which reformsters criticize public schools based on the assumption that these schools are exactly the way they were fifty years ago (when some reformsters attended them as students). This is like criticizing the military for still fighting on horseback.

Is there room for improvement, growth and new creativity in public schools? Absolutely. And there's no question that like many institutions, public education is at root conservative. But on this point of antiquation and embarrassment, DeVos is just spouting vague, baseless baloney.

Inconvenient Truth No. 2-- American education has been losing ground to other countries for at least half a century.

DeVos says the facts here are "unarguable," and follows up that piercing argument with "it's really a waste of our time to even slog through this, it's just plain true and everybody knows it."

This would be the part where I draw attention to the fact that DeVos has never been in a leadership position where she had to use any method of argument beyond "let me just sign this check." Her assertion is completely arguable, it's not just plain true, and everybody does not know it-- and if she wants to convince anyone, she;'ll have to do way better than that.

She tosses out PISA scores which are a fine example of what we don't know and aren't measuring. Like most test score cultists, she skips over the obvious check-- is there a correlation between PISA scores and economic health, political success, or general world domination. Have the high test scores of Estonia led them to global importance? No? Then why, exactly, should we care.

For those who think Trumplandia will be a clear break from the Duncan-Obama past, she also drops this winner. After pointing out that lots of poor children are failing, she goes on to note that "we have too many children in middle class suburban areas that we think are doing well... but that are actually seriously underperforming." Why-- that's exactly what Duncan said! Maybe he can get a job in the DeVos department!

Inconvenient Truth No. 3-- We are stuck in a partisan rut. The political parties are dead enders when it comes to education revolution.

DeVos notes that there are plenty of nominal conservatives and alleged liberals who are on the choice train, but mostly politicians just won't step up. Republicans don't want poor black kids in their schools, and Democrats are the lackeys of the anti-choice unions. Hey, look! She also resembles Arne Duncan in her willingness to sweepingly insult all sorts of people. Remember how he was pretty ineffective because he couldn't play well with Congress? "Plus ca change..."

Somehow this turns into arguing that in DC, charter-private schools are awesome and the public system sucks, so keep the DC voucher program. Guess that's better than following the rest of her argument's path, which leads to the notion that we should scrap the political parties because the political division that matters in this country is the division between the rich and the not-rich.

Inconvenient Truth No. 4-- Government really sucks.

You know, I'm going to give her a point for pithy phraseology. And as she notes, parties and politics are one thing that she does actually knows. And she reminds me of a question I've always had-- if your main experience of government is using money to bend politicians to your will, just how far does that lower your opinion of and respect for politicians?

But government does things top-down, stifles innovation,likes idea-killing committees, and loves control, says DeVos, when really, noble and awesome entrepreneurs should be free to roam about and do as they wish. It will be interesting to see how she feels about this once the wheel of power is in her hands and she has the power to force everyone to Do The Right Thing in a top-down manner.

See, I don't even disagree that much with many of her criticisms. But she ignores the part where government has a role to stand between citizens and People with Power who want to do harm. She also ignores, as do all free market acolytes, the Great Failing of the Free Market-- it will not serve all customers, and public education MUST serve all customers.

Inconvenient Truth No. 5-- We don't pay teachers enough, and we don't fire enough.

Again, the words of somebody who has never run anything except meetings of a group she created with her own bank account.

But I am willing to bet that every one of you had one or more teachers who made a big difference in your life, who opened your eyes to possibilities and to opportunities. You probably recall them in your mind’s eye right now.

And likewise, I am pretty sure that every one of you had one or more teachers who should not have been teaching. That doesn’t mean they were bad people, or maybe they were, but regardless, they weren’t any good at teaching.

Sure. We could do that for all the people who came out of the same school, and they could make their lists, and the lists would not match. So then what?

Pay teachers more? Sure, but as she acknowledges, lots of folks (she says "Republicans") don't want to do that. Meanwhile, DeVos is the gazillionth person to fail to understand what tenure is and how it works and why it's needed. But even if she had simply worked in the private sector, she would have learned, as most private sector employers have, that you cannot fire your way to excellence.

She also uses this point to repeat that both political parties suck. She is adamant about that. I can see her building that great working relationship with Congress and governors and state legislatures already.

Inconvenient Truth No. 6-- In America we do NOT provide equal educational opportunity to our kids.

Truth that! But as I've complained before, equal opportunity is a crappy goal. All of the passengers on the Titanic had an equal opportunity to get in a lifeboat. What we really need is a commitment to provide a quality education to every student, period, end stop. Not just an opportunity.

But the "opportunity" weasel word is the great escape hatch for the charter-choice movement. We're only going to invest the time and money and attention and resources for a few students-- but all students had the opportunity to get them. This is how you spend the money to educate 100 students and leave 1900 behind-- by saying they all had the opportunity.

Students don't need an opportunity. They need an education.

As currently practiced, charter and choice are not the solution to this problem. The free market will not serve students on whom it cannot turn a decent profit. And trying to run ten schools with the money that used to fund one school is sheer idiocy.

This point is Devos's big finish. She accuses "defenders of the status quo" of hypocrisy which she "can't stomach." She makes the old complaint that public school students, trapped in a zip code, should not be made to wait until the school gets more money and improves, and yet charter schools make students wait all the time-- for improvement, for more money, for a new school because that one just closed because it no longer made business sense to keep it open.

DeVos has, in short, revived some of the reformsters greatest hits. Trapped in zip codes. Urgent-- can't wait! Money doesn't help (well, it doesn't help public schools-- it helps charter-choice schools just fine). I don't know if DeVos is a hypocrite or not. This is one more respect in which she resembles her predecessors Arne Duncan and John "Duncan Lite" White-- it's not always clear whether she is using devious political spin or she just doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. If we don't have the good fortune to see her appointment thwarted, I guess I'll just wait and see which inconvenient truth we are dealing with.

Unavoidable Costs

I have libertarian friends (it's true). And one of them posted this particular meme

Now I don't think either of these statements is accurate on its own;  if something is a right, it's a right and there is no "should be," and libertarian "no one has a right to your labor" talk stops the moment money changes hands, thereby buying the right to that labor. But that's beside the point.

Health care and education are what I call unavoidable costs.

All living human beings require health care. There is a cost to providing it, and there is a cost to not providing it.

The costs of providing it are well known and constantly debated in this country, though we have made the issue complicated by insisting that not only should people providing the service be paid, but the insurance company paper-pushing bean counters make some sort of profit because reasons, but the bottom line remains the same-- there are large costs to providing health care. However, not providing health care also comes with costs. There are perhaps uncountable costs in terms of lost productivity due to un- or poorly-treated conditions. There are the unknowable costs of losing a potential leader, scientist, or pillar of the community because they died at age ten from an abcessed tooth. And there is the moral and spiritual cost to a nation that stands by and lets some people die because, for whatever reason, they don't have enough money. There is a moral and spiritual cost to being a nation where families lose members even though the ability to save those people exists.

In short, no matter how we answer question  "Who gets health care and how will it be paid for," there is a cost. There is no answer to the question that costs us nothing as a country or a culture. It is an unavoidable cost.

Likewise, there is no way to answer the question of education that doesn't cost us something. Providing a full, quality education to every single citizen would cost a bunch of money. But leaving any sector of the population uneducated is also expensive, in productivity costs, in human costs, in ability to carry their own weight costs. To leave some people un- (or under-) educated costs us all, particularly in our ability to maintain a functioning democatic(ish) form of government.

Providing education comes with a cost. Not providing education comes with a cost. This is the flip side of There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There are no decisions about health care and education that are free.

Education and health care are unavoidable costs. We can talk about rights and privileges, but they still have unavoidable costs. We can talk about delivery and payment systems, free market versus government management versus etc etc etc, but education and health care are still unavoidable costs, and what may seem like reducing the costs is most often just moving the costs around.

And this is a bigger problem than ever because both health care and education have expanded. A few centuries ago, health care was cheap and not very good and people mostly just died young (for which countries and cultures paid a price, but there was no alternative). A few centuries ago, a polymath like Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin could literally learn almost everything there was to know, and laborers who didn't know anything could still pull their own weight in the world. Nowadays, health care options are extensive and expensive and long-lived citizens can use many of them. Meanwhile, education is now an ocean instead of a bucket, and the educational requirements to be even working poor have increased dramatically.

End result-- the unavoidable costs have gotten greater and greater.

So there's a strong political push for some sort of plan that means I don't have to spend a bunch of My Money on Those People (who I believe do not deserve it).

This is not a new thing. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to argue against a world where the poor were left to struggle and die, condemned by a business-oriented government because they were excess population, poor because they were just too lazy and undeserving. In a telling detail usually omitted from modern renderings, the ghost of Jacob Marley invites Scrooge to look out the window, where he sees London teeming with the tortured, chained spirits of uncountable businessmen and politicians who failed to take care of their fellow humans. Ebeneezer Scrooge was never meant to be a single unique miser in need of redemption, but an embodiment of the troubled spirit of his age.

We can try to reduce the cost of health care and education for Those People, and when that leads to other costs (welfare, lost productivity, children in poverty) we can refuse to pay those costs, too, but the costs of health care and education are inescapable, even if we pay them by transforming into a country where the poor can never rise above the class they're born into.

There will be tension between "I think I should get a pony" and "I don't think I should ever help anyone with anything," and between those extremes there will always be plenty of room to debate how much is "enough." But to think all this can be judged against an imaginary setting at which we as a society pay nothing for health care or education...? There is no such situation. The costs are unavoidable, and the most useful conversation we can have is not about how to do away with them, but how to best meet them in a way that reflects costs we can bear to pay.

A Terrifying Look at the Future

Do you want to see just how bad data mining + gamification + creating a data-based profile for every citizen, just how terrifying this idea is?

Meet Sesame Credit-- and realize that Big Brother was an absolute pliant wimp by comparison. Just watch this. I don't even know where to begin, but you need to watch this.

Trump-Fueled Cyber Boom

Pundits and the commentariat may not be able to say what exactly will happen to education under Herr Trump, but at least one group thinks they have a pretty good idea-- investors.

Molly Hensley-Clancy covers business for Buzzfeed (yes, that's apparently a real job) and she reports that since election day, investors have been expressing some exuberance about K12, the infamous major player in the cyber-school arena. The stock has shown a steady climb since November 8, working its way from 11.19 up to 17.24, hitting a two-year high for the embattled manufacturer of education-flavored cyber-product.

You may recall that times have been tough for cyber-charters. This summer they were slammed by actual bricks-and-mortar charter operators on the heels of a report from CREDO that showed that students lost a full 180 days by being cyber-charter... well, students hardly seems like the word.

K12 itself has had a host of other problems, including the loss of major contracts in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Tennessee. The NCAA decided that it wouldn't accept any credits from any cyber charter using K12 materials. California just hit K12 with a $169 million settlement over false advertising allegations. This is not even close to the first time that the cyber-charter giant has been in trouble for shenanigans involving not-quite-truth-telling and general financial misbehavior.

What could possibly cause this creaking cyber-disaster-area to come bouncing back? Hensley-Clancy reports:

K12 executives have told investors the company was one of the “best positioned under Trump,” according to a note by BMO Capital Markets analyst Jeffrey Silber. The dialogue about online charters has changed, Silber wrote, as K12 executives tout the “personal” experiences that high-level Trump administration members have with the company.

Well, yes. Turns out that Dick DeVos was an early investor in K12.

So despite the fact that they've gotten virtually nothing right about virtual education, K12 is now sitting at the station waiting for its gravy train to come in. Because meritocracy and letting the invisible hand of the market reward quality and punish failure is all well and good, but first, you have to take care of your friends and stick to your ideological guns, even if they are firing blanks.

Teaching in the Machine Age (Or Not)

The Christensen Institute is devoted to "disruptive innovation," or as a five-year-old might put it, new and creative ways to kick over the big stack of blocks.

For the big stack of blocks that is public education, Christensen has the big boot of personalized computer-driven education-favored product. And a new part of their pitch is the recently released report/PR prospectus, "Teaching in the Machine Age: How Innovation Can Make Bad Teachers Good and Good Teachers Better" by Thomas Arnett.

Hi! I'm your new teacher, and here's my human assistant.

Arnett is a Senior Deep Education Thinker at Christensen, which is impressive since it was only five years ago that he was finishing out his two years with Teach For America in Kansas City. He then spent three months at Achievement First in 2012, and moved on to Senior Education Research Fellow at Christensen in 2013.If we dig deeper, we find that between 2002 and 2009 he was at Brigham Young earning a BS in Economics, and later did some graduate work at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, including (and you'll want to remember this) Data Mining, Applications of Operations Research,Management of Software Development for Technology Executives, Innovation Ecosystems, plus Commercialization and Innovation: Strategy. So, no education.

This is the guy who's going to tell us how The Machines will help us do our jobs. Yay. But I have read this so you don't have to, because this trend toward Personalized Competency-Based Software-Centered Education has been poised to become the Next Big (Money-making) Thing, so we need to know what they're thinking. Here we go.

Introduction: Welcoming Our New Computer Overlords

Computers just go smart enough to win chess games and Jeopardy, so clearly they are ready to help us run the world. They are doing All The Things, which raises the question-- will join "assembly line workers, personal accountants, taxi drivers, sports journalists, and family-practice doctors" in the list of workers whose jobs "fall prey to machines." Wait! What? Family-practice doctors have been replaced by machines? I have got to pay closer attention to Dr. Fee the next time I stop in.

But fear not, teachers.Complex social skills are required for teaching, so we can't be automated. However, the part of teaching characterized by non-teachers as "dispense information and assess student's knowledge of rote facts and skills"-- well, Arnett hints he's not so sure you need a human for that.

But computer-centered education is still a solution in search of a problem, so Arnett proposes the problem-- getting a high-quality teacher for every student. He even proposes reasons for this problem. There are teacher shortages, fed by low pay and low prestige. Schools are bad at hiring the best teachers. Teachers are burning out and leaving what with the grueling hours etc etc, which exacerbates the shortage issue.

Fortunately, technology can help with these problems. Not by improving teacher pay, work conditions or prestige, silly. No, we're going to "commoditize professional expertise."

Commodi-what??

Commoditize. Which means basically the same as commodify, which means to turn into a commodity. Innovations can do this, and we're going to talk about doing it many, many times in this report.

These innovations simplify and automate some of the tasks of experts, making expert-quality work less scarce and more widely available. 

In other words, some skill sets are rare and therefor expensive and hard to get, like, say, getting Lebron James to play for your basketball team. If you could commoditize basketball skills, though, you could maybe come up with a hundred basketball-playing robots of comparable skill, and everyone could have Lebron on their team. In sectors like the restaurant biz, we solved this issue years ago by turning high-skill jobs (guy with skills and training to be a chef) into low-skills jobs (guy with ability to stick basket in deep fryer). But if we could commoditize teaching...

How could we do such a thing? What sorts of innovations would help commoditize teaching so that we wouldn't have to pay a bunch of money to highly trained professionals with a rare skill set?

Innovations That Simplify Professional Expertise

It used to be hard to diagnose scurvy. Now any mook can identify it by consulting with Dr. Google. Once we learn a lot about some deep, complex area of expertise, we no longer have to depend on highly trained skill sets to deal with the issues. Non-experts can just follow the rules and the procedures laid down by actual experts and-- voila!-- anybody can do the job just like a pro!

Innovations That Automate Professional Expertise

As the understanding of a field moves from expert intuition to rules-based practices, parallel developments in the field of computer science make it possible to automate many tasks that historically required the attention of experts.

After you've reduced expertise to simple procedures, any idiot can do the work like an expert. And "any idiot" always includes "anything run by a computer." Computers can now fill out your tax returns and figuring out your credit score.

What Happens To Commoditized Professions

Good question. Perhaps we should all ask the next gas station attendant we meet.

First, Arnett says that after commoditizationizing takes hold, non-experts can step in to do all sorts of work that previously required professionals. There may be a slight hole in his argument here:

For example, using rules-based medical science and the latest diagnostic equipment, middle-skilled professionals, such as nurses, can diagnose and treat many conditions

Yikes. I am absolutely not telling my mother- or sister-in-laws that as nurses they are just middle-skilled folks. If Arnett is ever in need of health care, I recommend that he keep this observation to himself as well.

Second, he says, the handling of so many tasks by computers and other drones frees up the trained expert to do more experty things. For instance, doctors can stop scanning test results and leave that to the computer while they go consult with patients about treatments and complications and other inquiries like "Holy hell are you telling me that my tumor diagnosis came from some machine and not an actual human!!??"

Arnett lays all this out in a chart to show that computers can do any algorithmic stuff, non-experts can just follow orders, and experts can use their "human cognitive flexibility" to handle creative problem solving and "engage in complex interpersonal communication."

Also, all the cool data and information that the computers and meat widget drone assistants collect will give the experts many more chances to come up with cool ideas as they sift through all that data.

See? There's still a place for carbon-based life forms in this brave new world. Just fewer of them, and cheaper ones. Feel better yet?

Arnett Puts His Foot In It

As he works his way around to explaining what all this has to do with teaching, Arnett says a Dumb Thing:

In industries, such as teaching, where professionals are under great pressure to do and accomplish more than they have in the past, assistance from non-experts and computers can be a huge boon to professionals

First, teaching is not an "industry." Teaching is "manufacturing" and it does not result in a "product," any more than ministers manufacture married people or couples manufacture children.

Second, teachers are not under pressure to do and accomplish more. Not really. We're under enormous pressure to waste a lot of time on malpractice like Common Core-based curriculum and tons of time doing test prep in order to get test scores up. So we are under pressure to do more pointless timewasting and less actual teaching.

Disney Animation

Arnett illustrates his point by talking about Disney animation, trying to show how the advent of computer tools gave animators all sorts of new capabilities and stuff they could do, shifting from the slide-rule computed camera tracking shots of Peter Pan to the CGI-guided swoops of Beauty and the Beast. He might have thrown in color issues as well-- the animators of Fantasia had to turn to things like fruit jelly to come up with colors they wanted, while modern animators have a rich and wide palatte to chose from. Hey, they've even made some big hits with this technology. I hear the young people really like the Frozen and the Finding Nemo.

On the one hand, I see Arnett's point. Technology has broadened the available possibilities for creators of animated movies, allowing experts in the field to imagine and create things far beyond what was available in the past.

On the other hand, his point is stupid because schools do not create commercial properties from scratch, but instead help develop and support live human beings. Because people aren't products. Animators start from a literal blank slate to create their products, and animated films don't have an opinion about what they want to be when they're created. Arnett needs to read that cute inspirational story about the blueberries.

"Create an awesomely marketable product" is not the gig in education. His analogy is terrible. But now he's ready to go back to the main questoin.

Will Innovations Replace Teachers?

Wellll......

If you were wondering what part of reformsterland Arnett hails from, he will now cite authorities like the Brookings Institute and Bill Gates.

Simplifying teacher expertise is no big deal-- heck, textbooks are an old tech version of that, saving us all from the trouble of coming up with our own materials. I actually have spent some time thinking about this, resulting in my decision a few years ago to stop using the grammar textbooks my school bought for our classes. I dumped them because they kept my teaching tied to their pace, their ideas, their examples, and their limited practice materials; I decided I would rather take my cue from my students and what they needed and how they could best be helped to understand. Could i have done this when I first started out? Probably not enough hours in the day-- and the fact that I can type materials up on a computer and have them printed out on a machine on the other side of the building certainly helps, so I guess I both object to and agree with Arnett's point.

Or maybe my point is that if you aren't very careful, labor-saving (or labor-transferring) technology will tell you how to do your job instead of helping you do it.

Arnett really wants to talk about automating part of the teaching process, having computers assign the materials and assess the materials and collect all the data from the materials, and not for the first time, I am kind of non-plussed by the way that folks like Arnett talk about all these hunks of adaptive teaching software as if it descended from a cloud, given some sort of divine breath by some higher power. I, on the other hand, view them as if some stranger knocked on my classroom door and said, "Hey, I'd like to come teach your class using my own materials." Is there any reason to believe that this stranger knows my job better than I do, that this stranger has any level of expertise that I should respect? I ask this question as an experienced teacher who has never yet seen a textbook that did not have its share of bonehead materials and just-plain-wrong baloney, clearly written and published by someone who had no idea how it would actually play out in a real classroom. Why should I believe that software will be better?

Software is written by people. Why should I trust those people or hand my classroom responsibilities over to them? There may be perfectly good answers to both of these questions, but we won't get to them if we keep pretending that computer software is magical and not just one more human-written teaching tool.

Arnett even has the nerve to bring up Pearson's WriteToLearn, yet another footnote in the long sad history of trying to get computer software to teach writing.

But now Arnett wants to talk about three specific situations in which it would be awesome to commoditize teachers and hook students up to a friendly computer.

#1 When Schools Lack Expert Teachers

Arnett believes that if you don't have a top-notch teacher to teach a class, some computer software would be great. He tells a long story from India to illustrate this point. He's heavy on how the human touch is still needed-- but boy do those magical computer programs make a difference, and I decide to take him even less seriously because he starts talking about measuring learning gains in some sort of linear fashion (these students learned had 2.5 times the gains of those students-- what does that even mean?? Test scores? Because I'm pretty sure India needs more than just people who do well on bubble tests.)

#2 When Expert Teachers Must Tackle an Array of Student Needs

Gosh, differentiation is just, you know, soooo hard! What would make it way easier is to have all of the students hooked up to computers that could automatically differentiate and spit out scads of data which the teacher can then pore through in her copious free time.

It's true-- meeting the needs of every individual student in the classroom is challenging. Oddly enough, Arnett doesn't discuss one obvious solution, which is to hire more teachers in order to create smaller class sizes, a known winner of an idea, but also an idea that doesn't make any money for all the people heavily invested in computer teaching software. More teachers and smaller class sizes would also provide no help to guys who went to Carnegie Mellon to study Data Mining (I told you to remember) which is so much easier when you've got the students doing all their work on the computer.

Arnett wants to sing the praises of Teach To One, one more teaching program in a box. I remain unimpressed.

#3 When Expert Teachers Need To Teach More Than Academics

So, always.

Increasingly, advocates are calling for schools to place greater emphasis on fostering students’ deeper learning and noncognitive skills. Recent research shows that noncognitive factors—such as goal setting, teamwork, emotional awareness, self-discipline, and grit—are strong predictors of how likely students are to persist through college and succeed in the workforce.

Oh, honey. This is the kind of thing that people say when they're young and impressed with themselves and they don't actually know very much at all about the teaching profession. This is the part where the TFA reformster comes breathlessly out of the classroom to declare, "Boy, those kids have like emotions and feelings and stuff and sometimes they have problems that they want to talk about and, man, I thought I would just teach math and reading and stuff but they really need other things and, dude, it's just hard!"

His exemplar here is Summit charters, a group that can barely acknowledge the non-academic needs of its staff, let alone its students. And Brainology. And project based learning and competency based education and basically every version of hooking up students to computers rather than humans. Or as I heard one parent comment, "I don't know whether to send the Christmas card to my child's teacher or to his computer." If the software (or rather, the software writer) is handling all the curriculum, practice and assessment, while the present live human is handling mentoring and non-cognitives, who is actually assisting whom?

Arnett offers data and theories. What he fails to offer is any evidence that computer-centered schooling is superior to any other model. In the end, he tries to dial it back and argue for a sort of teacher-cyborg, a expert (or near-expert) who is so computer-enhanced that she accomplish great new things with the help of her new technopal. Or maybe it's a computer teaching, and the human is just its attendant, and that's what is supposed to work so great. But evidence? There's none, just as there's no solid evidence that Arnett really understands what a teacher does in a classroom.

If you've been in teaching for more than a decade, you've been here before. Some salesman, who may have spent a year or two in classroom before deciding it wasn't really his gig, stops by to sell something. He doesn't seem to really understand your job, but he assures you that if you just buy his product and change your whole practice to match what the product is supposed to do, you will accomplish awesome things. Thanks, dude, but I'm already overstocked on snake oil.

Gerrymandering Charter Success

Once again I'm reading a spate of charter fan fiction in which charters are lauded for out-performing the rest of the schools in their city.

That one right there near the center is where I've been smacking my head

"Out-perform the rest of the schools in East Egg" is a meaningless metric, and I keep trying to explain why to some folks. Let me try it again, because looking at the mess in North Carolina has given me a thought.

Let's start with one of the best graphics out there for explaining gerrymandering. It comes from an article by Christopher Ingraham at Washington Post's wonkblog, with the graphic itself adapted from Stephan Wass.

This shows how you can divide up a city to create different combinations of the voters to create particular outcomes. It explains, for instance, how Pennsylvania and North Carolina can have legislatures completely dominated by one political party even though that party doesn't have a vastly greater number of actual voters.

But now, look at the graphic again, and this time, think of the red blocks as high-achieving students.

Let's say East Egg, back when it had only public schools, looked like #2. Five schools, all containing some high-scoring students (aka "high-achieving," but as always I will remind you that "high-achieving" just means "got a high score on the Big Standardized Test") and some low-scoring students, with the proportion being such that all five schools come out "blue," which for our purposes will mean "sad and Not Good" schools (because when we talk about low-achieving schools, we just mean schools that have lots of low scores on the BS Tests).

"We must turn around East Egg," declare some Very Concerned Politicians, and soon three new charter schools open up. That takes us to #3, where the three "red" schools are the high-scoring charters, while the two remaining public schools are now very blue.

But here's the thing-- the overall total distribution of high- and low-scoring students in East Egg has not changed a bit. This whole game will still work even if all students get exactly the same score they got back in the all-public system.

Every one of the charters can brag about "out-performing" the public schools, but it means nothing. The overall total performance for East Egg has stayed exactly the same, static, flat, unmoved (exactly, in fact, as overall test results have proven to be on tests like PISA and NAEP).

"How can we gerrymander the students when we get students in random assortments?" some charter fans will say. From marketing to applying to push-outs to recruiting from outside the community, charters have shown themselves highly adept at managing their student population. No less a reformster all-star than Chris Barbic left the Tennessee ASD noting that, gee, it's really hard to lift up a school when you have to work with all of the same students that are there in the community.

So if a charter operator wants to impress me, I would need to see some data showing that the results improved for the total student population of the city where they operate. Being able to gerrymander your way to success is not the same thing as actually changing the makeup of the entire city system.