Teacher Quality and Testing Don’t Mix

Bill Gates, Arne Duncan and others have been spewing the ridiculous lie that teacher experience and education do not matter very much, as indicated by the fact that student test scores are often low, even when their teachers are experienced.

It’s the Class, Stoopid

This should come as no surprise since standardized tests measure students’ material security and social privilege, not the quality of their teachers. Any teacher at a low income school, whether young, old, experienced, or novice, will have lower test scores than those teaching at middle class schools. (The data below offers just one example of the correlation between standardized test scores and poverty). For some explanations of how poverty influences student achievement, please see 8 Delusions About Education, The Dropout Process in Life Course Perspective, Inequality at the Starting Gate, Meaningful Differences in the Every Day Experience of Young American Children and any number of articles by Richard Rothstein.

2005 College Bound Seniors Average SAT Test Scores

                                                                                       Verbal         Math       Total 

Source: Test Scores, Poverty and Ethnicity

Could the Ed Deformers be Right? (Of course not, they don’t even make sense)

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that experience and education do not matter much. Let’s further assume that student test scores can discern the good teachers from the bad ones. This leaves a fundamental question unanswered: How did these good teachers become good teachers?

Was it on the job training, an argument made by those who wish to throw more undertrained novices (like Teach for America) into the ring? If so, then experience really does matter. Throw them into the deep end and, if they don’t sink, they will improve over time.

Or is it some magical ability that certain “supermen” teachers have, that most of us lack? If this is the explanation, then it seems unlikely that the magic can be transferred to the rest of us mortals, and we’ll just have to be happy with the few “supermen” out there and make do with a majority of mediocre grunts.

Or perhaps it’s just that unionized, well-trained teachers are spoiled and lazy and need to have the discipline that only a non-union, down-sized, assembly line charter school can impose? If this was the case, then we should only find good teachers and never any bad ones in charter schools, which is clearly not the case. Or perhaps we just need to abolish the unions entirely, since they are clearly such an impediment to progress. Of course, if this were the case, then why do “right to work” states and districts without union contracts tend to have lower student test scores?

Worst Time Ever to Be A Teacher

The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning released a report Monday saying that California is “facing the gloomiest outlook for the teaching profession in a very long time.” The research for the report was conducted by SRI International, at Stanford University. “California’s fiscal crisis has so severely damaged the pipeline for recruiting and training new teachers that the quality of the teacher workforce has been put at risk for many years to come.”

Not only is the state failing to recruit and train new teachers, it is also losing its existing teachers at an alarming rate. About 26,000 teachers received layoff notices last spring and over half these (14,000) were not rehired in August. The state is also losing teachers to attrition at an alarming rate. One-third of the state’s 300,000 teachers are over 50 and close to retirement. Within a few years, there will be huge teacher shortages.

Working conditions have deteriorated so much that many teachers are trying get out of the profession as soon as they can. In 2009-2010, 16% of school districts in California shortened their school years, thus reducing instructional minutes for students and take-home pay for teachers. Class sizes have increased by as many as 10 students, thus increasing the workload and the number of daily student interactions. 48% of districts cut counselors, nurses and or psychologists. 29% of districts cut classroom aids. BTSA support has been cut by 30% since 2007. “Teachers are expected to do more, and do so with fewer resources,” the report said. “It is not hard to understand why many teachers feel under siege.”

California is also doing little to recruit and train new teachers. According data from the California Department of Education, in 2000-2001, there were 45,829 1^st and 2^nd year teachers in California. By 2009-2010, it had dropped to only 18,164. . The number of people enrolled in teacher training programs in California has dropped from 77,705 in 2000-2001, to less than 45,000 students in 2007-2008. The teacher training schools are also experiencing cuts, which diminish their ability to train new teachers. Credentialing programs have implemented hiring freezes, especially for tenure track professors and they are hiring fewer temporary professors.

 
While the report lays solid blame on economic conditions for the crisis, it lets policy-makers completely off the hook. “It is a hard and complex task for California policymakers to help guide the teaching profession with skill. In part, they have little control over a damaged economy that has played havoc with school budgets.”

In reality, they have considerable control. What they lack is balls. It’s really quite simple: tax the hell out of the rich and corporations. Empty the prisons of nonviolent offenders. Abolish the death penalty, which is seldom used, but costs the state far more than holding murders in prison for life. Make the petroleum companies pay royalties for the oil and gas the extract in California. Tax marijuana, junk food, alcohol.

First McDonalds, Then Starbucks, Now Education Deform Hits England

English School Girls, Photo by Ken

De-Professionalizing Teachers, English Style

The “Education White Paper,” published on November 24, outlines the British plan to place trainee teachers in classrooms throughout the country (kind of like the de-accreditation and TFA movements in the U.S.) The government intends to abolish the requirement that teachers obtain a 1-year post-graduate degree. They are also discussing the implementation of national core standards and increasing standardized testing, including the addition of a new test for six-year olds. Sound familiar?

Militarizing the Schools

Michael Gove, Secretary of Education, wants to fast track “high fliers” to get them into positions of educational leadership quickly. He especially wants to get recovering soldiers into the classroom, where they can impose their well-honed discipline on unruly urban youth. The new plan also gives head teachers much more power to search students, detain them, and use “reasonable force.”

Privatizing the Schools

Failing schools will be forced to become privately run (but publicly funded) “academies.” All this is coming amidst huge education cuts that threaten teaching jobs, course offerings and services. Teacher salaries have been frozen, while the government has abolished national negotiations over teacher pay, giving local head masters more power to control individual teacher salaries. The Department of Education has also threatened to publish teachers’ qualifications, sick leave record, and pay, giving even more leverage to head masters wishing to discipline their employees.

Blue Ribbon Panel Comes Up With Innovative New Ways to Destroy Public Education

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The Blue Ribbon Panel on teacher Accreditation is recommending that new teachers spend less time in university classes and more time in k-12 classrooms to get more “clinical” training, like in the medical profession. What the panel neglects to acknowledge is that doctors spend years in medical school before they start their clinical training so that they have some understanding of what to look for in their patients and how to treat it. It seems self-evident that more classroom practice (i.e., observing and critiquing other teachers and student teaching) should be beneficial to teachers in training. However, if this comes at the expense of sufficient training in curriculum and content, educational philosophies, pedagogy and history, new teachers will lack a theoretical basis for their clinical practice. They will lack a basis for evaluating curricula and education policies and will simply become uncritical automatons that go through the motions of “good” teaching.

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

According to the panel, “school districts will have a more significant role in designing and implementing teacher education programs, selecting candidates for placement in their schools, and assessing candidate performance and progress.” As a result, districts and individual schools will be forced to compete with each other to create the most “exciting” or “state of the art” “clinical” programs to attract new teachers, taking resources away from existing programs and classroom instruction. Academic freedom and creativity may also suffer, as new teachers will be much more easily molded to the desires of local school districts, thus stifling innovation and dissent. It will also result in bloated district bureaucracies.

For years there has been a growing cry to hold teachers accountable for their students’ test scores, completely disregarding the well-documented socioeconomic factors that have the greatest influence on student achievement. Now they want to extend this blame to both student teachers and their education schools and professors. The panel recommends that all programs use “data-driven accountability based on measures of candidate performance and student achievement, including gains in standardized test scores.” While this does not go quite as far as Reed Lyon had hoped when he argued that we should blow up the teacher colleges, it does imply that teacher training colleges will be punished if k-12 students fail their standardized tests. One likely result will be a dearth of teacher training schools, as more and more lose accreditation. The vacuum will likely be filled by private for-profit schools such as American College of Education (started by Bush cronies Reid Lyon, Rod Paige and Randy Best). There will also be a dearth of qualified teachers as candidates who fail to bring up test scores will fail to be certificated.

The panel makes many other dubious recommendations. For example, they “urge states, institutions, and school districts to explore alternative funding models, including those used in medicine to fuse funds for patient care and the training of residents in teaching hospitals.” Schools are already running on bare bones budgets. Without extraordinarily large increases in school funding, this recommendation will result in money being reallocated from teacher compensation and classroom instruction to teacher training programs.

Eight states—California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee—have already signed letters of intent to implement the new agenda. The two biggest teachers unions helped draft these proposals. They have accepted the sky is falling hysteria of the pundits and politicians and hope to quell the attacks on the teaching profession by collaborating with the bosses. Rather than supporting the teaching profession and their members with sane, workable improvements to teacher training and evaluation, the unions are selling out their members and their constituents, the students. In the end, the attacks on teachers will continue, as will the demands for more accountability, merit pay, charter schools and evaluations based on student test scores.