Is There an Education Uber?

This week at his blog Culture of Yes, Chris Kennedy asked "Is there an Uber coming to education?"

Kennedy rattles off a list of techno-changes that have broken into business in recent years. We buy books at amazon, not brick-and-mortar stores. We talk about netflix instead of cable. Kennedy reflects on flying into Denver and defaulting to Uber rather than a cab, and how, having recently discovered airbnb, he cannot imagine booking rooms the old-fashioned way ever again.

So he wonders-- will we keep tinkering around the edges of education, or is there a major disruptor coming there as well? Is there an education Uber out there?

There are many issues to consider with such a question. For starters, sooner or later we're going to have to deal with one common factor in all of these techno-disruptions-- they are all ways for wealthy folks to get services from non-wealthy folks for less money. These disruptors have created more jobs for the Just Scraping By economy. Amazon has made the world a better place for folks who have money and a desire to get what they want to get when they want to get it, but Amazon has made the world a lousier place for folks who have taken a job in an Amazon "fulfillment center" in hopes of supporting their family. These kinds of disruptions are here, and they're unstoppable, but it will help us as a culture if we can stop pretending that they have made a brighter, shinier future for everyone.

Techno-driven disruption raises other issues as well. We're buzzing in my neck of the woods because Pittsburgh is going to get autonomous Ubers, because why pay human beings a cent more than you absolutely have to. Autonomous cars have been coming for a while, and I will be excited about that just as soon as I own a computer complete with software that does what it's supposed to do every single time. So, roughly "never." An autonomous car, like any other piece of pseudo-AI tech, is simply a way for a programmer to impose his preferences, values, and biases. Somewhere in that autonomous automobile software is some code that says, "When you have to decide whether to hit an on-coming car or the child that ran out in front of you, here's what you pick." A car-directing software package is going to make moral choices based on its programming, and I'm not saying that the prospect is horrifying or Frankensteinian-- but I am saying we have to stop pretending that computers make cool, perfectly objective choices. They do not. They make the choices their programmers tell them to make.

Both of these points have huge implications for education. Will edu-Uber be paying more attention to those who are being served, or those who are doing the serving? And since the education of small live humans is absolutely saturated with moral choices, which set of programmers will be pre-making those moral choices and value judgments for the students?

These are both big issues, but they are not the biggest one.

Kennedy's examples all have on thing in common. They are businesses. Uber's purpose is to make money (by hooking people up with a ride). Amazon's purpose is to make money (by sending people stuff quickly and easily, and by convincing investors that it will be profitable some day). Netflix's purpose is to make money (by getting content to customers).

Education is not a business. The purpose of of a school is not to make money.

Current reformster attempts to disrupt education all start-- must start-- by challenging that foundational assumption. Kennedy doesn't mention charter schools, but I would bet that many charteristas think they are the edu-Uber, and charter school's most fundamental change in the approach school is to turn it into a business, riding the wave of the Free Market and reaping piles of money to be directly (or more sneakily) diverted to the pockets of the charter operators. The purpose of a charter school is to make money (by providing an educational product to parents and students).

As always, I'm not trying to suggest that anything done to make money is inherently evil and awful and anyone who makes money at some business activity is a terrible person who should hang his head in shame.

But bringing a business perspective to public education represents a fundamental shift in the values and purposes of the institution.

In other words, an education Uber would not just change how we pursue the mission of public education. It would change our very conception of what that mission is. Uber didn't change the business of getting people from place to place-- it just changed who did it and how they were paid. But an edu-Uber would change the purpose of school.

It's Great Not To Be Needed

It is one of the best things in teaching-- that moment when your students just don't need you.

I'm the adviser for many creative, artsy, performance activities. One of my fave side jobs is stage crew adviser, which also ends up being basically the stage manager and house manager for our auditorium and related facilities. It's my job to train the students in lighting design and execution, sound work, backstage grip stuff-- everything that has to happen in order for a performance to happen on our stage.

Every May the district rents our performance space out to a local dance studio (run by one of my former students, because I teach in a small town) and my crew gets to experience being a stage crew for hire. They get two rehearsals, and then two performances. The dancers come equipped with music and choreography; it's up to us to design and execute the lighting, keep the music on point, handle everything that comes up backstage. In an average, or below-average year, I'm moving from station to station, offering advice, tweaking choices, making sure that the crew has thought everything through and that they don't have any questions. In an average or below-average year, I get plenty of exercise and log plenty of steps.

This year I sat in the lobby and kept an eye on traffic in and out of the hall.

The crew didn't need me for anything. They made their choices, executed their plans, corrected their mis-steps, coordinated their duties. If space aliens had kidnapped me from the lobby five minutes before curtain, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference to the show itself.

This is the dream. Students who have learned and internalized their learning so well that they don't just remember the specific how-to's of specific situations, but they can see the whole organizing structure of ideas and values so that they are perfectly capable of analyzing and responding to new situations. Better still, they can evaluate their own work as they do it and decide to pat themselves on the back or make better choices.

They're students, and they still like the affirmation and confirmation, so I tell them they've done a great job. But, really, they already knew that. They've acquired the most important, most valuable of educational "outcomes"-- they're own personal inner guidance system.

This is one of the things I find fundamentally troubling about test-centered accountability-- the continued insistence that without the Big Standardized Test, or the Ongoing Computerized Feedback, or whatever we're selling this month-- without all of that, the poor students will never know how well they're doing. But a constant feedback loop of, "We'll just check the computer data to see how you did" teaches them that they must always look to someone else, someone outside themselves, to know how they did. The proof is always in someone else's pudding.

Add that to the kind of no excuses systems we see in urban charters, and we are creating a system in which children are taught NOT to be independent, self-directed, self-actuating humans with their own inner guidance system.

That's just wrong. The end product of an education should be an independently functioning human being.

That's always my goal. My crew ran the show for four straight nights, did it well, and did it without needing me to get them there. Last week we passed out yearbooks (yes, that's me, too) and my yearbook students were able to contemplate the book with pride because it was their book. There are choices I might have made differently, but it's not my book. It's their book, and they took responsibility for it, using all the training I've given them over the years filtered through their own judgment and inner guidance. That includes training the rest of the staff. I always tell my seniors, "The real measure of how good a job you did is not your own book-- it's next year's book."

It's easy to give in to the urge to fiddle, to tweak, to tell yourself that you'd better stay right next to that student and keep issuing directions so they don't mess up or make a mistake. But you can't practice functioning independently if nobody trusts you. How, I keep wondering, can a child ever get to pride in their ability to read and write if they spend their whole school career hearing, "Just hold on there, buddy. I'll let you know whether you can read and write or not."

It is a great thing to look around in May and see students who absolutely do not need me. It would be discouraging and sad to see students who can't make a move, a choice or a judgment without checking with me for the data printouts. I am proud of my students, and far more importantly, they are proud of themselves. The end of the year has come, and they don't need me. It's perfect.

aPARCColypse Now

The last ten days have been a test of how diligent PARCC might be about protecting their sad test (and, yes, a test of the internet's ability to coin a PARCC-based pun to refer to this dustup). For those of you playing along at home, here's a rundown of what has happened and what issues are involved and some of the questions on the table at this point.

Events kicked off when Celia Oyler, an education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, posted an anonymous critique of the PARCC fourth grade reading exam. That post was picked up by some other bloggers, including me, but within a few days PARCC was on the case.

Initially they went after tweets that linked to Oyler's article. That in itself was an.... interesting move because none of the tweets actually included allegedly copyrighted material, but they did link to posts that did include the test prompts. This suggests its own little DMCA research project-- just how many degrees of separation from copyrighted materials can companies legitimately pursue? Apparently a link to a post containing allegedly copyrighted materials is not okay. What about a link to a source that contains a link? A link to a link to a link to a link?

The clean-up of twitter seemed to be job one, taken on so quickly that the DMCA request filed included a misspelled job title for the guy at PARCC filling the request (Kevin Michael Days, Assoicate Director, Operations). Meanwhile, Oyler got a letter, not from the PARCC legal department, but from PARCC chieftain Laura Slover herself, requiring Oyler to take down the allegedly copyright materials AND requesting that she hand over the name of the anonymous teacher.

Next up-- going after the posts themselves. Diane Ravitch's post just kind of went away overnight; Ravitch's blog is on the wordpress platform, which turns out to be an important detail. Many other bloggers who work on the blogger platform received notice that their DMCA-violating post was being turned back into a draft (basically, unpublished but not actually erased). The targeting there seemed a bit random-- some posts were hit almost as soon as they were up, while my post stayed up for almost a week before anyone got to it, though I did not get a nifty letter from blogger explaining why it was happening. It just did. I'm a little curious about exactly whether a bot or a harried secretary or an intern or Slover on her lunch break did the detective work here, because it all seems a little slapdash. (I have reposted a redacted version of my post for the time being, just to keep the record straight).

There has been speculation that twitter and blogger have been hit by PARCC and quicker on the draw because they are more "corporate" entities than wordpress. With the exception of Ravitch, I haven't run across any wordpress bloggers who have been pushed to take the post down, and in fact, this post on a wordpress blog has been up since May 11 has all the material in Oyler's original post and then some.

The blogger platform belongs to google, which adds a level of irony to all of this since google is infamous among writers for the google books project, in which google just went on ahead and made digital copies of every book they could get their hands on. I've published a couple of books and you can find them fully available in free digital format on google-- and not because google asked me, but because they just went ahead and did it and if I don't like it, I can ask them to take it down.

There are multiple issues involved here. Mercedes Schneider has raised the question of who exactly holds the copyright for these items. I suggest you read all of this-- there are several complex issues here above and beyond the fact that we taxpayers footed the bill to create the damned tests in the first place.

Many folks have raised the question of whether or not publishing and discussing the prompt items comes under the doctrine of fair use. Which takes us to the larger question of how we discuss, as a country, anything at all about the tests if nobody is allowed to talk about them, ever.

PARCC has offered their own press release on the matter, chock full of hooey about how the security of the test must be protected and keeping things fair for all the hardworking educators and students out there. I particular like the part about being fair to the many hundreds of educators who have invested thousands of hours providing input and helping to develop and review test questions, ensuring that they are of high quality, align to standards, and are grade-appropriate." In other words, we're worried about swell teachers and not proprietary corporate products. Because these teachers slaved over these super questions and then said, "Please, don't let anyone see or discuss our work, ever. We prefer to live in the shadows."

Meanwhile, the story has been picked up by Slate, USA Today, and the Progressive. And yesterday afternoon Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post provided a good summary of The Story So Far.

And now, since corporate types are home for the weekend, the story can simmer for a bit.

Issues? As a sometimes writer and hack musician, I have a great deal of respect for intellectual property rights. But to use copyright law as a way to keep a secure lock on a piece of work that virtually unprotectable is just... silly. The prompt that I originally included verbatim can be summed up easily as "Read the story Sadako's Secret and make up another story that could be a sequel to it that talks about when Sadako tries out for the junior high track team." That summing up could be done by any English-speaking human who ever laid eyes on the test, including every single child who took it. To imagine that it can be kept more secure than the launch codes or the latest episode of Walking Dead is just dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

More importantly, and I have made this point before, any test that requires that level of security is a crappy test. It is a test built on a foundation of "gotcha" and hidden tricks.

This flapdoodlery is, in many ways, a waste of all our time, even as it is necessary to push back when PARCC tries to silence any serious critique of their product. We should be talking about the test, its many flaws, and the many reasons it should be thrown in the dustbin of education history; instead, we are busy talking about corporate shenanigans and the idiocy of trying to lock down the internet. But there are important reminders here. It's a reminder to outfits like PARCC that maintaining perfect secrecy and security is a fool's game. It's a reminder to those of us in the blogosphere that the platforms and social media that we use are companies, owned and operated by corporate entities, and it is ultimately their circus and they can do what they want with the monkeys.

But most of all, it's a reminder of just how lousy the PARCC is. A test so sad and fragile that to let any part of it see the light of day will cause it to shrivel to dust like a data-sucking vampire (not the cute sparkly kind), a test so feeble that it can't withstand the most rudimentary examination or discussion. All of this is simply more proof that the PARCC is a bad test that needs to just go away.

What Do I Fix Next

Every top teacher that I know can tell you what their Worst Thing is.

The good-bad teacher model that's constantly being used as a basis for policy proposals-- it's nuts. In that universe, teachers are good or bad. Put a bad teacher in a classroom, and education withers and dies as students fail to thrive. Put a great teacher (or an "effective teacher") in a classroom, and test scores fly upward and a thousand learning moments bloom. If you're a teacher, you're good or bad, and when you step into a classroom, your fruits reveal your nature.

But "good teacher" is not what you are; it's what you do. And every good teacher knows a list of things she needs to do better.

This is one of those killer Things They Don't Tell You In Ed School. You will not be able to do everything you know you need to. You will see all the things that need to be done-- and you will only be able to do some of them.

The prevailing reformster model of teaching is solid state, a set stasis. Get the teacher put together just so, then come spray on the Kragle and lock it into place.

However, on this planet, teaching is much more like juggling. You're tossing up a couple of balls and an apple and several eggs and a pair of hamsters and maybe a chainsaw, and not always with grace, but always with the knowledge that there are some bowling balls and waffles that you need to pick up and add. Oh, and you are riding a unicycle on a tightrope, carrying laser sharks.

I've really just been looking for an excuse to run a picture of a laser shark on this blog. Today is my birthday, so happy birthday to me. You're welcome.














Like all jobs that fit the juggling metaphor (I wouldn't pretend for a second that teaching is the only line of work that is like this), a key ingredient is reflection.

Think. Look. Listen. Weigh. Check your assumptions. Check your results.

When you don't reflect, it's easy to let things slip or slide. How long has that apple been lying on the floor instead of flying through the air? Am I using my bowling ball grip on a marshmallow? Am, I really not ready to add the ten tennis balls, or am I just slacking? And particularly at the end of the year, have I let my heart harden when it needs to stay open, ready, and willing?

Conditions in the classroom always change, because the school and the rules and the climate and the world and most of all the students always change. Have I made the right adjustments?

And that's the conscious Big Stuff. Any complicated high wire juggling extravaganza requires a million micro-adjustments in every second. That's why data-crunching analysis may have its place, but I also need the mental discipline to be reflective, mindful, present.

This is why I reject the data-driven test-centered model favored by some-- not because I have no interest in data and feedback, but because I'm operating on a baby seal for which I need precise and subtle instruments, and these folks are offering me a blunt ax.

If you ask me, "Are you a good teacher?" I don't really know how to answer. I can tell you if I think I did good work today, or this week, or this year. Oh, this year. The end of the year is brutal, a giant polished wall that reflects back all my miscues and mis-steps and missed opportunities and failures of the previous year. I can start sorting out the stuff that I must do better next year, the broad strokes and the fine touches. I have to figure out what to fix next.

I have been in the classroom for thirty-seven years, and there has never been a year when I didn't have a list if things to do better. I get many more objects in the air with far less wasted effort than I used to, but still-- still there is more to do better. Some of the challenges are brought to me-- shorter class periods, more days lost to testing, class size fluctuations-- and some I bring myself. But dammit-- I am doing the work better, and I will keep doing it better. I just have to figure out what to fix next.

I don't talk about this often because we mostly live in a meat and potatoes world, but in addition to being art and science, teaching is a spiritual pursuit as well-- you have to be in tune with yourself, your students, your surroundings, your content, your community, the ebb and flow of the day, the week, the year. You reflect and you grow, and if you don't keep growing, then you shrink and ossify and fail to do your best work. You reflect and you grow, and because you reflect and grow, you keep asking--

What do I fix next?

edTPA Still Baloney

The National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) decided to take a look at edTPA, the teacher evaluation program of dubious value. CALDER's headline may be welcome to the folks at edTPA, but a quick look under the hood reveals a big bunch of baloney. The paper is informative and useful and pretty thorough, but it's not going to make you feel any better about edTPA.

CALDER is a tentacle of the American Institutes for Research, the folks who brought us the SBA test. The report itself is sponsored by Gates Foundation and "an anonymous foundation," which-- really? Hey there, friend? Have you had any research done on your money-making product? Certainly-- here's some fine research sponsored by anonymous backers. You can totally trust it. CALDER does acknowledge that this is just a working paper, and "working papers have
not undergone final formal review."

What are we talking about?

edTPA is a system meant to up the game of teacher entrance obstacles like the much-unloved PRAXIS exams. Coming up with a teacher gatekeeper task than the PRAXIS is about as hard as coming up with a more pleasant organization that the Spanish Inquisition. In this case, there's no reason to assume that "better" is the same as "good."

The idea of coming up with something kind of like the process of becoming a board certified teacher is appealing, but edTPA has been roundly criticized (more than once) for reducing the process of learning the art and science of teaching to a series of hoop-jumping paper-shuffling, an expensive exercise that involves being judged via video clips. The whole business is eminently game-able, and there are already companies out there to help you jump hoops. It's also a system that insults college ed departments by assuming a premise that your college ed program, your professors, your co-operating teacher, and basically none of the people who work with you and give you a grade-- none of those people can be trusted to determine whether or not you should be a teacher. Only some bunch of unknown evaluators hired by Pearson (yeah, they're in on this, too) can decide if you should have a career or not

Yeah, whine whine whine-- but is it any good?

As always with education research, we deploy the program first, and then we try to find out if it's any good. So although edTPA has been around for a bit, here comes the CALDER working paper to decide if we just wasted the time and money of as bunch of aspiring teachers. Or as the paper puts it,

Given the rapid policy diffusion of the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, it is surprising that there is currently no existing large-scale research linking it to outcomes for inservice teachers and their students.

Well, I've read this paper so you don't have to. Let's take it a chapter at a time

1: Background: The Teacher Education Accountability Movement

Hey, remember back in 2009 when Ed Secretary Arne Duncan said that "many if not most" of the nation's teacher education programs were mediocre? This paper does. Man, it's hard to believe that we didn't believe him when he talked about how much he respected teachers.

Want a bigger red flag about this report? Three footnotes in and we're citing the National Council on Teacher Quality, the least serious faux research group in the education field (insert here my reminder that these guys evaluate non-existent programs and evaluate other programs by reading commencement programs). Straight-faced head nod as well to policy initiatives to measure teacher education programs by measuring value added or subsequent employment history.

Fun fact. 600 ed programs in 40 states now use edTPA. Seven states require edTPA for licensure. Okay, not a "fun" fact so much as a discouraging one.

But let's talk about "theories of action" form how edTPA would actually improve the profession.

First, it could be used to weed out the chaff and keep them unable "to participate in the labor market." That, CALDER wryly notes, would require "predictive validity around the cut point adopted." At least I think they were being wry.

Second, it might affect "candidate teaching practices." edTPA's own people suggest as much. This training to the test could be done independently by individual proto-teachers, or enforced by ed programs.

Third, schools could use edTPA scores as deciding factors in hiring.

CALDER notes that these three methods would only improve the teacher pool if edTPA scores have anything on God's green earth to do with how well the candidate can actually teach.

CALDER proposes to go looking for that very same white whale of data revelation. They poked through a bunch of longitudinal data from Washington State, looking for a correlation with employment (did the candidate get a job) and effectiveness (sigh... student test scores.

Insert Rant Here

Student test scores are not a measure of teacher effectiveness. Student test scores are not a measure of teacher effectiveness. Student. Test. Scores. Are. Not. A. Measure. Of. Teacher. Effectiveness.

Ask parents what they want from their child's teacher. Ask those parents what they mean when they call someone a "good" teacher. They will not say, "Has students get good scores on the Big Standardized Tests." Ask any parent what they mean when they say, "I want my child to get a good education" and they will not reply, "Well, I want my kid to be good at taking standardized tests." Ask taxpayers what they expect to get for their school tax dollars and they will not say, "I pay taxes so that kids will be good at taking standardized tests."

I will push on through the rest of this paper, but this point alone invalidates any findings presented, because their measure of effective teaching is junk. It's like measuring the health of the rain forest by collecting chimpanzee toe nail clippings. It's like evaluating a restaurant by measuring the color spectrum ranges on its menus.

2. Assessment of Prospective Teachers and the Role of edTPA

CALDER is correct to say that edTPA is different from "traditional question-and-answer licensure tests," though as someone who earned his teacher stripes in 1979, I'm inclined to question just how "traditional" the Q&A tests are.  The paper follows this up with a history of edTPA, and offers a good brief explanation of how it works:

The edTPA relies on the scoring of teacher candidates who are videotaped while teaching three to five lessons from an instructional unit to one class of students, along with assessments of teacher lesson plans, student work samples and evidence of student learning, and reflective commentaries by the candidate.

CALDER also explains what basis we have for imagining this system might work-- some other system:

Claims about the predictive validity of the edTPA are primarily based on small-scale pilot studies of the edTPA’s precursor, the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). Specifically, Newton (2010) finds positive correlations between PACT scores and future value-added for a group of 14 teacher candidates, while Darling-Hammond et al. (2013) use a sample of 52 mathematics teachers and 53 reading teachers and find that a one-standard deviation increase in PACT scores is associated with a .03 standard deviation increase in student achievement in either subject.

So, a tiny sample size on a similar-ish system.

CALDER also considers the question of whether edTPA can be used both to evaluate teacher practice and decide whether or not someone should get a teaching license (and if you find it weird that this conversation about making it harder to become a teacher is going on in the same world where we'll let you become a teacher with just five weeks of Teach for America training, join the club).

3. Data and Analytic Approach

CALDER's data come from the 2,362 Washington state teacher candidates who took edTPA in 2013-2014, the first year after the pilot year for edTPA in Washington. That whittles down to 1,424 teachers who actually landed jobs, which in turn whittled down to 277 grade 4-8 reading or math teachers.

Then they threw in student test scores on math and reading tests from the Measures of Student Progress Tests of 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, plus SBA testing from 2014-2015. They "standardized"  these scores and "connected" them to demographic data. And then, cruncheroonies.

There follows a bunch of math that is far beyond my capabilities, with several equations supposedly providing a mathy mirror of the various theories of action. Plus mathy corrections for students who didn't test in the previous year, and by the way, what about sample selection bias. In particular, might not teachers be hired based on qualities not measured by edTPA but still related to student test scores. Oh, and they hear that VAM might have some issues, too, though they consulted Chetty's work, so once again, I'm unimpressed.

I am not a statistical analysis guy, and I don't play one on tv, but this model is beginning to look like it could be enhanced by twelve-sided dice and a pair of toads sacrificed under a full moon.

4. Results 

On the one hand, for all the reasons listed above, I'm not very excited about the results, whatever they seem to be. But we've come this far, so why not take it home. Here are some of the things they discovered.

Shockingly, it turns out that non-white, non-wealthy students don't do as well on standardizes tests. So there's that.

Passing edTPA correlates to having a teaching job the following year. So.... people who are good at navigating the hoop-jumping and form-filling and resume-building of edTPA are also good at getting a job?

As for screening, edTPA results correlate maybe with better reading test scores for students, but they don't seem to have diddly to do with math scores. Well, actually, we're graphing them against reading value added and math value added scores, and while the math chart looks like a random spray, the reading chart looks like a group of scores that are kind of bell-curved shaped, and which do not rise as edTPA scores rise. There's a dip on the left side, suggesting that teachers with low edTPA scores correlate to students with low value-added reading.

So I'm not really sure what this is meant to show, and that's probably just me, but it sure doesn't scream, "Good edTPA scores produce good student reading VAM.

And there's more about sample bias and selection and size and it's all kind of messy and vague and ends with a sentence that just shouldn't be here:

Despite the fact that licensure tests appear correlated with productivity, the direct evidence of their efficacy as a workforce improvement tool is more mixed.

"Workforce improvement" and "productivity" belong in discussions of the toaster manufacture industry, not in a serious discussion of the teaching profession.

5. Policy Implications 

So teachers who fail the edTPA are less likely to raise student reading test scores. Despite the low sample, the researchers think they're onto something here. They think that edTPA should be used to screen out low performing reading teachers, though it would come at the cost of screening out some candidates who would have been effective teachers. But again-- I find the math suspicious.

With random distribution, 20% of the lowest quartile of edTPA failers would fall in the lowest quartile of student resuilts. But "we find that 46% of reading teachers who fail the edTPA are in the low-performing category." So half of the edTPA failers get low student results-- and half don't. But-- and check my eyeball work here-- it looks like roughly half of all the edTPAers failed to "add any value" to students. Mind you, I think the whole busines of trying to use student VAM to measure teacher effectiveness is absolute bunk-- but even by their own rules, I'm not seeing anything here to write home about.

6. Conclusion

I applaud CALDER's restraint:

Given that this is the first predictive validity study of the edTPA, and given the nuanced findings we describe above, we are hesitant to draw broad conclusions about the extent to which edTPA implementation will improve the quality of the teacher workforce. 

My emphasis because-- really? Forty states and this is the first validity study?

Anyway, they point out (as they did at the top) that all of the theories of action would be more compelling and convincing if anyone knew whether or not edTPA is actually assessing anything real. And the writers suggest a few steps to take moving forward.

Those steps include reweighting and revising the rubrics, comparing edTPA to other evauation methods (eg observations), checking the edTPA impact on minority teacher candidates, and looking at whether or not edTPA varies across different student teaching situations. And underlying all that-- the question of whether all of this is really worth the time and money that it costs.

These are all very worthwhile questions to consider, and I give CALDER credit for bringing them up.

And let me circle back around to my own conclusion. You will not find me pledging undying loyalty to many teacher education programs out there, because there certainly are some terrible ones. And you will not find me sticking up for PRAXIS (I type it in caps because I imagine the sound of a chain-smoking cat coughing up a hairball), which is a terrible way to decide whether someone is fit to be a teacher or not.

But edTPA's long and torturous parentage and history, as well as its insistence on generating revenue and putting candidates' fates in far-off impersonal hands-- well, it's just not a great candidate to assume the Teacher Evaluation Crown. It takes human beings to teach human beings how to teach human beings, not a complicated hoop-jumping paperwork festival. We know how to do this well, but it's not cheap and it's not easy and it won't make anybody rich. We can do the kind of "better" that is actually "good."

Advice for Superintendents

This is for the superintendents out there who are concerned about the bad teachers on their staff, the superintendents who are afraid that they are either awash in a sea of incompetence or watching the rising tide or terror that comes from a few bad apples spreading their blasting blight through the district barrel. For those of you who are worried that you have some teachers who just aren't doing the job, here's some simple advice.

Fire them.

Seriously, I feel some days that superintendents have simply forgotten that they have some powers with their job, that they feel helpless in the face of terrible, terrible teaching. So to those of you in these dire straits, I want to remind you what you can do.

You can fire them.

You do remember that, right? You have the power to fire incompetent teachers.

Yes, yes, I know. It would be hard. You would have to fill out papers, and probably have meetings and somebody might even object and make you explain yourself. You might have to actually prove that the teacher really is incompetent and not merely annoying or irritating or refusing to play a board member's kid on first string.

But you can do that, right? Provide proof that the teacher is actually incompetent? You went to superintendent school and took Filling Out Superintendent Paperwork 101?

Hell, in some states, it's not even that hard any more. Just stack the offending teacher's classes so that the test scores will come back just the way you want them. Boom! You have your "proof" that the teacher sucks.

Document. Collect information. Observe. Hell, even attempt remediation if you like. And then.

Fire them.

I repeat this because to hear some superintendents talk, you would think they were expressly forbidden to fire anybody ever. They need their state to pass new laws, to scrap tenure or seniority or both because, somehow, they believe they have no power to fire bad teachers. So I want to remind you-- you totally have that power. Hell, I've watched some of you use it. So if there are bad teachers in your district,

Fire them.

Now, maybe what you really mean is that you want to be able to fire them easily. Just a wave of your hand and some teacher that has been a pain in your butt will just vanish. Maybe you imagined that being a superintendent would look more like being the CEO of some major corporation and you could just snap your fingers and people who irritate you would vanish without so much as a peep and you wouldn't have to explain anything to anyone. Well, that's not your job. You answer to elected officials and you spend tax dollars and the public is entitled to know why you do things and whether or not you are pursuing the best interests of the public or whether you just axed Mrs. DeWhipsnot because you'll be damned if you'll have One of Those on your staff.

I know it sucks. Hell, I was hoping that being a teacher would be more like being a rich, famous rock star. Looks like we both missed out.

But if you want to get rid of a bad teacher, senior or not, just do your homework. Collect the paperwork. Build your case. Do your homework. Do your job. And then, once you've done your job, well, then-

Fire them.

Yes, I know in some districts (particularly the big urban ones) the hoops you have to jump through are considerable. I blame your board which negotiated a bad contract in the first place. But this is your job. This is why you get the big bucks. And really-- are you saying that you should be able to fire a bad teacher without being able to substantiate the charge that she's a bad teacher? You should be able to fire her just because you want to and you say so? Think back to some of the people you worked for early in your career. Heck, think about some of the building principals who work for you right now. Does the "because I say so" approach really sound like a good idea?

And yes, you could just rank your teachers and always furlough the bottom of the stack every time the state cuts your budget. I suppose it's easier than actually pressuring the state to fully fund your school. But how will you ever recruit and build a staff? Yes, young teachers will initially think, "This is great. I won't have to worry about losing my job in the first few years that I'm least senior." But eventually it will dawn on them that they will have to worry about their jobs in that same youngest teacher way for the rest of their entire careers-- particularly when we're using a teacher ranking system no more reliable than the roll of the dice.

So sure, we could come up with some new set of laws that would upend the profession and incite thunderdome amongst the staff and make life really easy for the poor, beleaguered superintendent.

Or, when you determine in your considered professional superintendenty opinion that a teacher is incompetent, you could collect the data, do your job and then--

You could fire them.And if you didn't want to do the work to fire them, you could stop whining about it.

What's the Alexander vs. King Fight About?

There's a big battle continuing between Lamar Alexander and John King, and like many spats, it's about more than what it's about.

So what is it about?

The fancy terms here are "comparability" and "supplement-not-supplant."

Title I moneys are given to districts that have a big bunch o'poor students. But the rules say that a district (or state) can't use Title I funds to weasel of their own obligations. In other words, they can't say, "Look! We just got a million dollars of federal money for East Bogsweat High School. We'll just go ahead and cut our own spending on EBHS by a million bucks!"

Here's how the conversation is supposed to work:

State/local school bosses: We spent just as much on Gotrox High as we did on Trackside High. But Trackside High has more students with extra challenges. That makes Trackside extra expensive. Can we get a hand here?

Feds: Sure. Here's some Title I money to cover that extra cost''

Here's another example of how the conversation is supposed to work:

State/local school bosses: We are going to spend way less of our own money on Trackside than on Gotrox, because the students at Trackside are brown and poor and icky. Why don't you go ahead and cover the rest of the cost of their education, because we don't want to spend our money on it.

Feds: No! Also, shame on you.

The current argument is about how to measure spending. If we figure in buildings and resources and programs and materials, it's not too, too hard to decide if spending at Gotrox and Trackside is comparable or not. But when we start figuring in the money spent on teachers, computing somparable spending becomes complicated.

There are many examples of how this could go wrong, but let's take a simple and striking one. Let's say that Gotrox and Trackside have their payroll spending pretty well evened out. Then at the end of the year, five Very Senior Teachers at Gotrox retire and are replaced with five brand-new hires. Trackside is now $150K behind Gotrox in spending. The district's only real response is to move around some teachers to balance out spending, so Trackside loses some of its teachers to an involuntary transfer to Gotrox, which evens things out until the next big batch of retirements.

But King and friends would argue that if districts don't have to count payroll expenses, we can continue the practice of assigning Trackside the least experienced, least accomplished teachers, and under-supporting schools to turn them into failure factories.

That seems complicated 

I agree. And this is shaping up to be one of those policy debates in which everyone spouts disingenuous nonsense in which they pretend not to see one or the other of the problems laid out in the examples above. Oh, you don't want to shuffle teachers around like chess pieces-- you must be a Foe of Equity! What, you think that some schools are chronically and deliberately underfunded-- you must be a Foe of Equity! Yes, the baloney quotient is further exacerbated in that many sides are trying to claim the same high ground.

So is the fight really about who deserves the high ground? Nope.

So what are we really fighting about?

The issue is a difficult one, and one of the many contentious areas over which the Congressional shepherds of ESSA struggled and eventually found compromise. But this particular detail is beside the main point.

ESSA negotiations were tricky and complicated, but members of both parties were united by one big policy priority. As Alexander has said,

The reason we were able to achieve such unusual unanimity and consensus is that people had gotten tired of the Department of Education telling them so much of what they ought to be doing.

ESSA was built to spank the Department of Education. It was meant to rein in what Congress in particular saw as the biggest sin of the Duncan-Obama USED-- the writing of law by a agency of the executive branch. Regardless of how you feel about the content of Race to the Top and Waiverpallooza, the groundshattering feature of those policies was that they were essentially laws written by USED-- not Congress-- and the means by which USED started micro-managing every school district in the country.

"We will give you a pile of money and let you break the law as written in NCLB," said the USED to the states. "All you have you have to do is turn over control of your department of education to us."

Mind you, that probably didn't happen because Arne Duncan was power-hungry. NCLB was an oncoming train wreck, and Congress resolutely refused to do anything about it. And the Obama-Duncan USED had some ideas, but they couldn't sell them to anybody in the legislative branch. So they just did a work-around, and while I think their work-around sucked with the sucking suckness of a billion black holes, I will give them credit for being at least partly motivated by a desire to avoid the whole train wreck thing.

But that meant that when the education law rewrite finally happened, Congress was highly motivated to strip the USED of the power to write its own rules. And ESSA does that in fairly explicit language, taking the time and space to list lots of things that the department is specifically NOT allowed to do.

The desire to do that was great enough to motivate Congresspersons to accept compromises they didn't like just so that they could stop USED from being America's School Board.

Here's what Alexander believes that Congress did about comparability:

The law specifically says that school districts shall not include teacher pay when they measure spending for purposes of comparability.

This committee has debated several times whether or not teacher pay should be excluded. Senator Bennet felt very strongly about his proposal to address this, and I felt strongly about mine.
Ultimately the United States Congress made two decisions about this issue, as reflected in the law we passed:

First, we chose not to change the comparability language in law, so the law still says teacher pay shall not be included:

Second, we added a requirement that school districts report publicly the amount they are spending on each student, including teacher salaries, so that parents and teachers know how much money is being spent and can make their own decisions about what to do with it, rather than the federal government mandating it be used in comparability calculations.

The law that the president signed in December didn’t do one thing to change the law that teacher salaries not be included.

That's the compromise that Congress worked out. And John King looked at that and said, "Nah, doesn't work for me." And he has proceeded to try to overwrite the law that Congress passed.

This is why Alexander is pissed. If anything, this is worse than Waiverpallooza, because back then, the USED was making up laws to fill a void that Congress left through inaction. But this time, Congress has a law. Congress made the call. And USED is saying, "NO, we're just going to pretend that the law says what we think it should say."

That's what this fight is about. Whatever you think of the issues of comparability and supplement-not-supplant, Congress has made a ruling, written a law, and now that law is, well, the law. If you think government departments and agencies should just go ahead and rewrite, ignore, or wildly re-interpret the laws Congress passes, we have another issue.

King's argument is, basically, that his way to count the money is the right thing to do. That's a noble thought, but if he wants to write the laws, he should probably go try to get himself elected to Congress. In the meantime, expect this battle to drag on and to be not so much about equity and civil rights as it will be about who gets to b the boss of whom.