Can We Fix Civics and History Education

So, let's take a moment to freak out over the NAEP history and civics scores.

They dipped in a manner reminiscent of the math and reading scores, and some folks are going to provide reruns of previous cries of alarm. "Students' understanding of history and civics is worsening," hollers the Washington Post (and they'll go on to do the standard failure to explain what "proficient" means for NAEP). 

There are several possible reasons. The pandemic resulted in far less time being spent on training students to take multiple choice tests, and that's crucial. Just because you Know Stuff, that doesn't mean you can automatically apply that knowledge to the very specific activity of taking a multiple choice standardized test. 

And because states all put emphasis on the standardized reading and math Big Standardized Tests, that's where much of the "catch up" energy went. 

Responses to the scores have not been particularly useful. Education Secretary Cardona released a short statement that dovetailed with his team's talking points, saying essentially, "Look at that! This is no time to banning books and cutting education budgets." Cardona's words were cherry picked and used as a talking point for folks like the head of reformster group 50CAN who accused him of saying that red state book bans were responsible for the drop in scores. Others correctly pointed out that once again, the lowest scoring students were the ones who had the biggest score drop. Others used the occasion to bemoan the sad state of K-12 civics and history education. Can't we do better?

We can. We should. I don't know if we can in the current atmosphere. And suggesting that history and civics education can cure what's ailing our country right now is absurd, 

To begin with, history and civics education is hard, for many reasons.

One is simply the matter of reaching students. For most of my career, I asked students to reflect on their own education and classes and talk about what was and wasn't working for them. The hands down winner of the "Why do we even have to take this class" award was history. When Lauren Boebert says she never learned the three branches of government, I believe her--but I don't assume that's because nobody tried to teach her.

Students hate history class because the typical high school history class is stripped of every appealing part of history. History is stories. History is a conversation, not a declaration. Likewise civics is a constantly ongoing debate about what our government is supposed to do and how it's supposed to do it. But if you are committed to keeping all of those discussion out of the classroom, then you're left with nothing but dates and locations and verifiable events and that is A) barely the point and B) supremely boring. But we insist on cutting away all the complicated, controversial parts, like butchers who throw away the meat and keep the gristle.

There are ways to do it right, and most all of them involve bringing all of the various points of view into the classroom. The basic model is not complicated. "Some people view this like X, but other folks view this like W. Research, explain, and discuss." And that model has to be regularly updated and amended, because there is virtually no piece of history on which we have had absolutely the last word. The beauty of this model is that it fosters not only content knowledge but also critical thinking, building arguments from evidence, and just a generally nuanced view of the world (I deeply believe that reality has a bias toward nuance). 

But that's not where we are right now. Where we are right now is promoting the idea that proper history and civics education is designed to turn every child into a patriot. We have folks scrambling around to erase even the mention of certain types of citizens; yes, Oklahoma's governor wants to defund PBS in part because Clifford the Big Red Dog and Work It Out Wombats (a less-known by superior show) showed lesbian characters (not doing anything sexual- just showed them).

Real, serious study of history and civics requires a variety of viewpoints. That doesn't mean the viewpoints must be required for adoption but they have to be available for discussion. The discussion has to have guardrails--it's not okay to declare "All wombats are evil and don't deserve to live" when there are wombats sitting in the classroom. And my experience says that it can be tough to work through the barriers of a student whose position is "This is right because I say so and that's all the evidence I need." 

History and civics is hard to teach if you come at it with a belief in One Correct Answer, which is currently the stance of way too much of our public discourse. We're in a place where, for some people, it's not even acceptable to encourage empathy for all fellow human beings. But if you want to teach that there's only One Right View of history and only One Correct Answer for all civic questions, you're teaching something that is neither history nor civics.

This is why the Everyone To Their Own Silo approach is not an answer. A model of choice in which everyone sorts themselves out according to their One Right Answer does not make this pluralistic scrambled salad of a nation work better. 

How do we navigate all this? I don't know. I don't know how you get people to stop feeling so fragile that even exposure to an idea they don't like is more than they can bear and especially more than they think their children can bear. I don't know how you get people to develop a better plan for dealing with those with whom they disagree than to somehow just make all those Wrong People shut up and go away. 

Americans are not very good at history. Never have been. If you get to be a certain age, you can marvel at how many people spring up with arguments and viewpoints and policies that are not, in fact, bold and new, but just the same old time-worn trappings of an earlier age, while at the same time holding fast to the notion that certain historical ephemera (like, say, fashion signifiers of gender) have somehow existed since the dawn of time. 

I don't know how you help people set down their fear and anger long enough to catch hold of the desire understand. The public spaces are filled with so many very loud people who have no real interest in understanding--just label it as "my team" or "their team," mark all opponents as evil or stupid, and treat every new event and piece of information as something to be fashioned into a cudgel for Our Team. As they say, I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people. I don't know how to get someone to be curious.

It may seem like my wailing and moaning has now expanded far past the point, but I don't think so. To imagine as some do that by strengthening history and civics curriculum we can cool the fever in our society are simply imagining that we can change the color of the ocean with a thimble full of food coloring. Schools exist downhill from the rest of the culture, and right now our culture is too full of contempt and derision for those who disagree with us. The most effective teacher of citizenship is what adults model.

We can do better. We should do better. We won't agree on exactly what the process should be, and how we manage that disagreement will be the first lesson we teach students about history and civics. If the lesson we try to teach is "Everyone who is Wrong must be silenced and stamped out," well, that's going to leave a mark. If we move on to lessons like "You're a child and you can't handle the truth," that will stick, too. 

We can do better. We should do better. Step one is to give up the dream of a world in which everyone is Right (aka thinks the same way we do). And yes, I do recognize that my belief in the need for pluralism could be framed as my own One Right Way--except that my way leaves room for all the other ways. It's complicated. People are complicated. History is complicated. But we can still do better.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day

There have been better days for the profession. 

In Oklahoma, State School Superintendent Dudebro called the teachers union a "terrorist organization" while suggesting they want to "sabotage our kids," because, as we all know, the teachers union kept schools from opening as a way to extort more government funds (maybe he meant funds for things like making schools safer to operate during a deadly pandemic). If that seems like a bad way to recruit teachers, well, he is offering a signing bonus for newbies. You know what doesn't help you apply for a car loan or a mortgage? A one-time bonus.

That was awful, albeit predictable. Maybe not as awful as the school district lawyer in Virginia, where the  teacher who was shot by a six year old is suing the school district that failed in so many ways to keep her and other students safe. The lawyer's argument? Getting shot is just part of what teachers should expect when they sign up for the job. So a simple worker's compensation claim is all that's needed. 

The brief glowing period of March-April 2020, during which people appreciated the Heroic Teachers doing their best to McGyver some sort of education in the midst of general pandemic panic--it now looks the really high initial hill on a roller coaster, the one you climb so that when gravity finally catches hold, it can wreak maximum havoc.

And at this point it doesn't even count as news when the indoctrination or groomer charges are leveled. Just another day in educationland.

Teaching has always had an appreciation problem. Everybody thinks they know how to do a teacher's job; mostly they're wrong. And the appreciation week you do get was created by the PTA; it's not like some folks completely outside the education ecosystem thought, "Yeah, teachers should have a week for appreciation." 

And to be fair, it's not just teaching--for whatever reason, we are in a cultural period marked by a serious lack of generosity of spirit, a meagerness of grace. Appreciation is a scarce commodity, and when it appears it is too often simply a slightly dressed up version of "I appreciate you for being on my team."

Nevertheless. Teachers deserve some appreciation. 

I did the job for 39 years, and with the exception of a brief dark period, I didn't regret it for a minute. But it was hard. It was time and labor intensive; on the list of things people don't understand about teaching, we can include just how many hours of the day it eats up. And I don't mean just the obvious stuff, like the stacks of papers and forms and lesson plans that get carried home, or the hours and hours of time spent in the classroom outside the contracted hours. There's also the sheer head space--one of the big adjustments of retirement is that (even with Board of Directors navigating toddlerhood), I didn't have nearly so much stuff taking up space in my head. You think through the day's interactions with students, you think through individual student issues, you mentally rejigger your schedule for maximum efficiency ("If I grade those papers while I eat supper, I could carve out twenty minutes to go walk outside").

Nor do people get the weight of compromise, the hard part of teaching where you have to make decisions about what needs to be done that you are not going to do, because you are human and you have limits. And then making peace with those decisions. And then not talking about it because talking about the hard parts of teaching just sounds like whining to people who haven't been there. 

Teaching is not for just anyone. It's not for folks who are slow on their feet. It's not for people who have limited grasp of the subject matter. It's not for people who can't be self-motivated and self-directed, because for much of the time, it's an isolating job, and when you do encounter adults in your work, they're after something. The cavalry is not coming (and if something cavalry-like shows up, they may very well be shooting at you). 

Teaching is a profession (the second oldest one), with all the training and professional skills and knowledge that implies. But it's also a very blue collar type of job, where you have to roll up your sleeves, dig in, and flex whatever muscles you have. And unlike other professional jobs, it's one where you have very little control over your environment or the flow of your day. I've known lots of medical folks, and their experience of time is completely different from teacher time. Doctors and nurses do work in the time it takes to get it done and done right. Teachers work with dozens of deadlines every day. 

And in a society that is ever-increasingly organized around profit and gain and ROI and increasing shareholder value, teaching remains largely work of service--service to students, service to families, service to communities. Despite widespread and concerted efforts to make schools run like businesses, teachers remain largely focused on service to the point that the tension between teachers; mission of service and demands that schools function like (or converted to) businesses that crank out useful meat widgets--that tension is one of the major sources of personal stress for the modern teacher.

Teachers do the work, day after day, student after student. Well, actually not student after student, because they are handling umpty-ump students simultaneously. I'm not partial to billowy shining writing about teaching as a calling and a gift because, for me, that glosses over the sheer hard work that goes into teaching, the degree to which teachers gut it out. They are climbing that mountain, hand over hand, skinned knees knocking another rocky outcrop; they are not floating up to the top like some kind of feathered angels. And while they climb that mountain, they are helping dozens of other fledgling humans and fellow sherpas make the climb as well. If it all seems that effortless and natural, that is only one more mark of how much skill and technique and experience and sweat that teacher is putting into the work.

Teachers are real people, with the whole range of real people weaknesses and flaws, and they do the work anyway, which, for me, is far more meaningful and impressive than if they were all some sort of superhuman beings walking on clouds and magically imbued with some sort of teacher power. Real people, and--as we've been learning for the past few years--real people who don't have to stay in the classroom if they don't want to.

So God bless everyone who is still in there, still doing the work, still climbing the mountain, still helping hold up your little piece of the human race and society, helping as many as you can climb that mountain, too. Thank you for everything you've done and everything you're about to do.

ICYMI: So Long, April Edition (4/30)

Well, that was a month. God bless all the teachers out there in the midst of testing season,

I'll remind everyone that part of the purpose of this weekly collection of pieces is amplification. It is harder than ever to break through the media fog, whether we're talking about legacy media, online media, or social media. You can help by sharing anything that you think others should read. Tweet. Post. Do whatever it is that people do on Instagram. You can help make writers some noise in the world.

These States Have the Most 'Underqualified' Teachers Stepping in to Fill Open Positions

Now that states have been pushing laws to let any warm body into a classroom, we can start to see the effects. From Edsurge, here's an article complete with an interactive map that lets you see which states have the most not-exactly-qualified teachers in the classroom. 

A Far-Right Moms Group Is Terrorizing Schools in the Name of Protecting Kids

David Gilbert wrote this piece about Moms for Liberty for Vice, and it is blistering, with some specific tales of people who have crossed M4L and an exceptional retelling of their origin story. A good antidote to M4L's attempt to push out PR about how nice and non-threatening they are. An important read.

Gaslighting Americans about public schools: The truth about ‘A Nation at Risk’

Another important read from this week. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post hosts the true story of A Nation At Risk (celebrating another one of its birthdays) from James Harvey, who was part of that report's creation. What better person to debunk that influential festival of cherry picking and logic chopping. And this link is to MSN's copy of the piece--so no paywall.

The Lies America Tells Itself About Black Education

Bettina Love at EdWeek with another take on A Nation At Risk, well worth your time. She pulls up the sub-text of the report--that the US was falling behind in education because it was spending too much time and money on Those Children. Another important read.

New “Ed Reform” Coalition Shows How Media Allows Billionaires to Control Narrative

Maurice Cunningham, expert on dark money in education, takes a look at the hottest new coalition in Massachusetts.

Are Schools Responsible for the Racist Behaviors of Students?

Nancy Flanagan wonders who bears the responsibility when students start acting out racism.

NARF Demands Change in Charter Hair Policy

Classical Charter School of Leland requires boys to get their hair cut short, because, I guess, the 21st century still hasn't made it everywhere yet. The Native American Rights Fund is not a fan of that policy.

Chromebooks’ ‘Short’ Lifespan Costs Schools Billions of Dollars, Report Finds

Maybe your district heard it, too-- the claim that by going digital, we could save all sorts of money on textbooks. But it turns out that Chromebooks are actually super-expensive. Lauraine Langreo has the story at EdWeek.

‘We need help’: Portland middle school principals plead for help to manage student behavioral problems

Reporting from Portland about behavioral issues through the roof. 

Should Monroe Tax Dollars Be Used to Open Charter Schools in Escambia? More Fiscal Shenanigans in Florida.

Florida leads the way once again. If nothing else, this serves notice that "the money should follow the child" will be jettisoned once it does its work. Sue Kingery Woltanski has her eye on Tallahassee.

Review: Christianity and Critical Race Theory

I ordered this book on the strength of the review. Turns out Jesus didn't necessarily demand that His followers had to reject CRT. This looks like a thoughtful piece about, among other things, the church's need to deal with its own racism.

Stop Giving Away Our Tax Dollars to Private & Parochial Schools.

Steven Singer would like to have a few words with elected representatives about the tax credit scholarship program in Pennsylvania.

Spring Branch ISD cancels trip to see play due to performance that was not 'age-appropriate'

This week in Dumb Culture War Moves, a parent complains that a performance of James and the Giant Peach includes actors who play multiple parts in flamboyant costumes that don't always match their birth gender. So the district canceled the trip. 

Take Your Kid To Work Day Reports from Greek Mythology

From McSweeney's. Made me chuckle.

At Forbes.com, I covered a new working paper from Mark Weber and Bruce Baker, school finance wizards, that finds another influential factor for how long districts stayed remote. 

Sign up for my substack and get all the stuff for free in your email inbox. All the cool kids are doing it.

PA: Hillsdale Comes To Pennridge

“Our end goal is that every single kid who leaves Pennridge loves this country and understands our constitution,” said board member Ricki Chaikin. “Right now, that’s not happening.”

That's a board member of Pennridge schools, a district that just okayed a contract with Vermilion Education, LLC. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because the company was the center of a controversy just a few weeks ago when the Sarasota, FL, board considered (and ultimately rejected) a contract with the education consulting firm. Who are these guys (or, perhaps, this guy)?

The Sarasota board considered board a contract with Vermilion Education, LLC . If Vermilion's website seems a little sparse, that's because they have only been operating for a few months. Their promises and principles are suitably vague-- I mean, here's the whole pitch --




The address Vermilion lists on the Sarasota contract proposals is a single family home (1640 square feet) in a residential neighborhood of Hillsdale. And their personnel--well, so far, it looks like one guy.

That guy is Jordan Adams, fresh from Hillsdale. There's a lot of story with Hillsdale (here's a short-ish version or get into it more heavily with a whole series of articles), but the current version is a private right-wing christianist college whose head, Larry Arnn ("Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon"), is the same MAGA-fied guy who headed up Trump's 1776 Education thingy (and said teachers are the dumbest). They've provided a platform for a lot of school privatization and taxpayer subsidies for private christian school rhetoric from heavy hitters like Betsy DeVos and Christopher Rufo, all arguing that government shouldn't be running schools--churches should.

Hillsdale has long had a charter school initiative called the Barney Charter Schools, and more recently they've been behind the launch of many "classical" academies around the country.

Jordan Adams is a Hillsdale grad ('13), which means he was a Hillsdale student when they were launching the Barney schools, and eventually became their Associate Director of Instructional Resources. I'll let you draw your own conclusion about his fitness for the role:

“I mostly focus on the history and Latin curricula, figuring out how things are taught in a fourth-grade or eleventh-grade classroom,” said Adams. He looks forward to experimenting with more accessible resources for teachers: “When you’re a first-year teacher, you’re just trying to stay one day ahead of what you’re supposed to be teaching. You don’t have time to sit down and read a long text about teaching. But maybe if there’s a short video that is clearly titled and easy to access, you might conceivably watch it while you’re making dinner.”

If only there were a place to go where you could study teaching so that you knew what you were doing on more than a day by day basis. Adams's original undergrad plan was to work at a think tank, then he went to grad school for a Masters of Humanities. One more educational amateur rediscovering the wheel. But apparently reinvented it well enough to move up to interim director of curriculum for the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, a job he was holding back in October of 2022.

Adams was part of the crew that screened the Florida math textbooks that DeSantis accused of being too indoctrinatey.

Adams is no longer listed in any current capacity as employed by Hillsdale, though there is no peep about his departure. Not sure what we can make of that.

As was the case in Sarasota, Pennridge added the Vermilion contract to the agenda 24 hours before the meeting,

Pennridge School District is located in the Southeast, just north of Philly, in Bucks County. Their board has been pretty relentless in pursuing repressive and reactionary policies. They have trouble telling creationism from science. They banned Banned Books Week. They tried to clamp down on student expression. And they blew up DEI policies (even as they demonstrated why they needed such policies in place). And they are considering Hillsdale's ideological, biased and not very great 1776 Curriculum (Hillsdale is presided over by Larry Arrn, the guy that Donald Trump appointed to create an anti-1619 curriculum). 

As was the case in Sarasota, it's not really clear what Adams and Vermilion are supposed to do, and since they appear to have no previous track record (the site is still nearly bare and there's no sign anywhere that they have any previous contracts). It's still not clear how close Adams ties to Hillsdale remain. But now the taxpayers of Pennridge get to pay for Adams to do something, for some amount of money, to be completed sometime. Good luck to them. 

What We've Forgotten About Pandemic Schooling

Some folks in Congress are going to use the pandemic as a cudgel to beat on teachers today. So any time this topic gets brought up, here are a few basic points to keep in mind.

Schools were not closed.

School buildings were closed, and teachers were working their butts off to deliver education in a variety of ways. Most commonly that meant cobbled-together tech-based systems, but in some communities (like mine) it meant teachers driving packages of hand-outs to unwired homes out in the sticks. But the notion that schools were completely shut down and teachers were sitting at home eating bon-bons and enjoying a paid vacation is utter bullshit. 

Teachers wanted to return--safely.

It would be a Herculean challenge to find any significant number of teachers who said, "Boy, this remote teaching is awesome. I want to do it forever." Teachers wanted to be back in the building--if they could do it without risk to the safety and health of themselves and their loved ones. But across the nationm we got variations on this conversation.

District: We would like to get the school buildings open again. Would you come back?

Teachers: We'll gladly come back as soon as you've put some safety measures in place.

District: We're not going to do that.

Teachers: Then we would rather not come back.

Certain Folks: Teachers are forcing us to close schools for no reason.

You can add a variant form, particularly after vaccinations became available, in which the district says, "Tough shit. Come back anyway."

National unions do not control locals

The weirdest variant of these arguments has been the one where Randi Weingarten personally kept schools closed, as if the presidents of the national unions can exert control over union locals. There are two probable reasons that MAGA pushes this argument. 1) They are projecting their own ideas about how they think government should work i.e. one strong boss who controls everyone beneath him and 2) Randi makes a visible target and personification of the Evil Unions. 

As Jennifer Binis observed this morning on Tweeter, attacking unions is always a handy way of badmouthing teachers without looking like you're attacking teachers. 

Local school districts were on their own.

One of the pandemic details that seems to have fallen completely down the memory hole is just how much local districts were on their own in making all decisions about pandemic response. The CDC and Dr. Fauci offered "guidance," but that was often evolving, and it was up to local authorities to sort it out. Nationally, the Trump administration was MIA. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos shrugged and said, "Not my job" until she eventually caught the political winds that demanded re-opening everything no matter what.

States provided strict guidelines--until they didn't. Then local districts had to sort it out themselves, which usually meant a handful of duly elected ordinary citizens who hadn't actually run for office in hopes of becoming crisis managers. who, in most cases, talked to their teachers and their parents and other folks to try to come up with a functional plan. Or, in most cases, a plan they could use until it turned out they needed a new plan.

Local teachers unions and parents and school boards were divided on the same lines as the rest of the country. Different districts had different sorts of resources (East Egg gets a new HVAC system, West Egg gets a box fan in some classrooms). Different political leaders weighed different factors (To get businesses open, we need to warehouse children somewhere). Different communities had different levels of trust. Different communities had different levels of disease impact.

Worth noting that polling has repeatedly found that parents were mostly happy with how their district sorted things out. 

Armchair hindsight quarterbacks can just knock it off.

I'm not sure we'll ever completely sort things out, both because there's still so much we don't know, but especially because so much smoke has been churned out by political opportunists. The conversation will always require a variety of voices and some conflicting viewpoints. 

But one sort of voice I'm positive we don't need is the voice of anyone arguing that it was obvious way back when that X was the right answer, and everyone who did something else was a big evil stupid fool.

Nothing was obvious. Not in 2020, not in 2021. Maybe 2022 brought some clarity, but I'm not sure we're ever going to have clear understanding--just a bunch of political talking points. And we'll never, ever know what would have happened if we had done X instead of Y. 

Conspiracy theories are dumb.

The notion that the pandemic and the pandemic response was all manipulated and controlled by dark forces is dumb. The best explanation I can come up with for the pandemic response is this:

Lacking clear information and clear direction from leaders, stuck in an evolving situation caused by an unprecedented and lethal health crisis, most people tried to make the best decisions they could. The available choices ranged from bad to really bad. 

If there was ever a time we needed more grace and less politics, this is it. But instead, today, Congress brings us politics.

It's Testing Damn Season Again

So the phone rings yesterday (now that the Board of Directors are full-fledged kindergartners, we're on the district robo-phone list), and it's the announcement that third-through-sixth grade education is about to be suspended for more important things--testing.

It will take the next three weeks. Please have your child to school on time. Please feed them. Please don't schedule doctor or dentist appointments during the school day during these three weeks. 

Three weeks. Three. Weeks. 

Kindergarten will be spared. In some area schools, first and second graders will take other tests, not because those tests yield any useful data, but because they will help prepare the students for when the tests Really Count. 

The testing won't take up the entire day, but the chance of educating students during the other hours becomes exponentially smaller with the disruption of routine for students who are worn out from sitting and testing for hours. At my old high school, testing is limited to only some grades, but because there are so many shared teachers, school stopped for everyone.

Administrators face an unmanageable choice-- compress the testing to "save" the most days, and the test results will suffer, because students can only do so much of that standardized testing baloney in a day before they just shut down. But the more the testing is spread out, the more days are disrupted.

And when they come out the other side, it will be well into May and students will smell summer. Testing season doesn't just mark an interruption of the school year, a weeks-long pause, but in many schools, the end of the year. Not a pause, but a truncation, an amputation of the last stretch of school year.

For what? 

In Pennsylvania, the results of the Big Standardized Tests will be used to rate schools and teachers. The state will also pretend that the tests generate actionable data. 

They do not. 

A fancy shmancy website will provide graphs and charts that tell teachers which and how many students scored in certain brackets--basically, the state gives each student the equivalent of an A, B, C, or F on each test. But (as in most states) the teachers cannot see how the students answered particular questions, not even what the questions were. This is not useful data (and it's not even delivered in a timely manner). And the tiny bit of information revealed is not anything that teachers did not already know. A five minute conversation with a student's previous teacher told me more than BS Test results ever could.

Do you want extra education time to make up for Learning Loss, or to simply expand educational offerings and opportunities for students? Get rid of the state test.

Do you want to claw back some financial savings and reclaim taxpayer dollars for more educational supports? Get rid of the state test.

Do you want to refocus schools on meeting students needs for education and support instead of focusing on getting the students to provide the test scores the school needs? Do you want to focus on the whole child instead of the test-taking child? Get rid of the state test.

This is such a waste. A waste of time, resources, attention, money and teachers' professional expertise. A bad idea poorly executed. End it. 

Teacher Evaluation: The Revolution Didn't Work

The National Bureau of Economic Research has just dropped a working paper entitled "Taking Teacher Evaluation to Scale: The Effect of State Reforms on Achievement and Attainment," and you can read the whole 72 pages of the thing if you wish, but instead, I would recommend a very thoughtful review of the paper by Matthew Di Carlo, a senior research fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute. 

"The Rise and Fall of the Teacher Evaluation Empire" spins from the working paper into the decades long history of attempts to "fix" teacher evaluation somehow and (spoiler alert) why it has consistently failed.

This isn't the first time that the revolution in teacher evaluation has been tagged unsuccessful. Di Carlo tries to break down the whys and wherefores, and I think he gets it mostly right.

Di Carlo notes that evidence on teacher evaluations is "mixed, with no clear pattern-- low stakes, high stakes, various versions, some work well, some don't. The key issue for Di Carlo is that we don't know why the ones that work, work. 

So, there is some good evidence out there, but it is far from perfectly consistent, and it is still outweighed by what we don’t know about teacher evaluations (including, most crucially, why systems do or do not work).

I have some thoughts, but those can wait for a bit.

One major failing he points to is the combination of "implicit overpromising" and the "short-sighted policy analysis environment" resulted in a demand that systems be implemented RIGHT NOW and that results be visible IMMEDIATELY. Well, yes. The whole modern ed reform movement has been marked by a manufactured urgency, an insistence that major changes need to be made quickly, an education implementation of the techno-ethic of move fast and break things.

Change doesn't happen quickly in education, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that students themselves cannot be turned on a dime. Di Carlo is right on the money here:

So long as every policy needs to harvest quick testing gains to be considered successful, there won’t be many acknowledged successes, many potentially successful policies won’t be tried, and those that are tried will be in danger of being shut down prematurely.

So we've been hammering at this stuff for a while, particularly when No Child Left Behind laid the foundation for a Fire Our Way To Excellence policy approach. If you're old enough, you remember reformsters arguing with a straight face that if 50% of students scored poorly on the reading Big Standardized Test, that meant that 50% of the teachers stunk and should be fired. The notion that teacher rewards and employment decisions could and should be tied to test scores was irresistible to some folks, including outfits like TNTP that ground out fake research materials like the irredeemably dumb "Widget Effect." Besides being a bad policy idea destined to fail, the "throw out the bad apples" policies were brutal on teacher morale, mostly because policies makers adopted a stance of "Assume all teachers stink until they can prove otherwise." 

Which was bad enough, but since "prove otherwise" meant "be somehow associated with better student scores on a bad untested invalid standardized test' or even "somehow get those bad test data run through a magic VAM formula," teachers too often found themselves caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare in which they were guilty of bad teaching unless "evidence" emerged from the back end of a mysterious and unreliable process over which they had little influence. More nightmare fuel from the notion that if an evaluation system didn't find lots of bad teachers, it must not be working correctly.

So yeah. I have a few thoughts on why the evaluation revolution didn't pan out.

And yes, this is a good time to reiterate that as long as "success" is measured by scores on a mediocre test, it will be hard to achieve and, more importantly, counter-productive to pursue.

Di Carlo argues that there's no evidence for any particular approach to be a winner at scale. He also offers four reasons that he thinks the "rate harder, and rank more rigorously argument is baloney. 

First, there's plenty of evidence that evaluations can work without any ratings attached to them at all. Second, teachers will respond to a second-highest rating. Third, when you rush these systems into schools, with such speed that nobody has any reason to trust them, administrators will shy away from handing out the low ratings. Fourth, nothing matters if the evaluation is not provided with actionable feedback. In other words, "You suck. Go do something about that." does not get you an improved teaching staff.

So "can teacher evaluation reform be salvaged?"

Di Carlo points out that evaluation systems work by changing behavior, which they do either by 1) changing the person in the job into another person by hiring and firing or 2) helping the person in the job do better work. For that to work, the system has be credible and trusted. Di Carlo notes that all means of improvement are voluntary. Hence the need for some kind of useful feedback.

I'd say that useful feedback is one of the two critical elements in teacher evaluation. What's the other?

Di Carlo just about has it figured out:

... there is consistent evidence that principals—their training, the time and resources they have to conduct observations, the culture they create—are vital to the success of evaluations and accountability systems.

That's it. That's everything. It's not "vital"--it's the only thing that really matters. If you have a building principal who professional judgment you trust, the format and elements of the evaluation can be configured any number of ways, and it won't really matter. Conversely, the best evaluation system in the world will be worthless junk in the hands of a principal that teachers can't trust.

States can certainly screw this up, mostly by creating an evaluation system that is so regimented that it ties the principal's hands. Such a system won't make an untrustworthy administrator into a trusted one, but it will keep a trusted principal from being able to use their judgment to steer the process into a useful approach. Likewise, swamping a principal in an evaluation system so detailed and time-consuming that for three months of the year they can't get any of the rest of their job done--that system does not help anyone. Neither does mindless "this is fine" happy talk.

I am absolutely a fan of meaningful, useful teacher evaluation. I have yet to meet a teacher who particularly enjoys working with a teacher who is not pulling her weight. And I am an Edward Deming fan--you get better work out of your people in an environment heavy on trust, and you do the opposite by relying on fear and punishment (and to be clear, when you create a system where getting a living wage depends on being "rewarded" for doing well, you are creating an environment based on punishment). 

A system that depends on threats and punishment and fear will not create excellence in the school, will not help teachers improve, will not create a healthy environment in which students can learn (see also: the old management maxim that your employees will treat your customers the way you treat your employees). 

But for at least twenty years, we have let the fans of fear and punishment direct the course of teacher evaluation. They have, predictably, failed to achieve any of their promised goals. It's time for them to step back and let other approached prevail.