Improved teacher evaluation may be necessary, but it’s far from sufficient

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H. L. Mencken

The problems of teaching, learning, and school leadership are complex. Perhaps that is why policymakers often respond with solutions that are “clear, simple, and wrong.” Or at least wrong in part.

Recent efforts to strengthen teacher evaluation provide an example.

There’s no question that improved teacher (and principal) evaluation is desirable. Evaluation methods used in most places in recent years have done little to improve teaching, support struggling teachers, and identify and remove educators who are incompetent.

But the effects of improved processes of teacher evaluation will be minimal unless they are well integrated with:

• Well-trained classroom observers, evaluators, and peer assistance teams.

• Peer evaluation and mentoring of teachers in their first few years of employment to ensure that only competent teachers are admitted into the profession and that they begin their teaching careers on a solid footing.

• Sustained, high-quality professional learning with coaching targeted at high-priority school and school system student learning goals.

• Participation by all teachers on instructional teams that have as their primary purpose the continuous improvement of teaching and learning for all students.

• School cultures that promote innovation and experimentation and that surround all members of the school community with encouraging and helpful relationships.

• Skillful principals and teachers leaders supported by skillful system administrators.

Effective leadership at both the school and district levels will determine to what extent these elements are integrated into a coherent, high-quality program of career-long development that serves students, the school community, and the teaching profession.

What the best and wisest parent wants…

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must be what the community wants for all its children. – John Dewey

The quality of a child’s education ought not be determined by his or her ZIP Code. Nor by the luck of the draw regarding which teacher he or she has been given in a given year.

That’s why it is essential that:

• schools be designed so that all students and all staff members are successful,

• all teachers experience various types of informal and formal professional learning each day as part of their work,

• all teachers are part of high-functioning teams that continuously improve teaching and learning for the benefit of all students,

• every member of the school community feels engaged and supported in his or her unique role,

• the success of reform efforts be judged based on whether they have a positive effect on all students, not just those who are easiest to educate or have the most engaged parents (school privatization programs that leave public schools with fewer resources to educate this nation’s most-challenged students do not meet that criterion).

Taken together, these assertions are the rationale for a strong, comprehensive, and accountable system of public education sustained by dedicated and skillful career educators.

What did I miss?

 

The two worlds of school leadership

William Glasser’s  book Reality Therapy was an invaluable resource to me in the early 1970s as I sought to help “disaffected” youth be more successful and responsible in life and school. (I had helped found and co-directed a public alternative high school.)

Glasser taught me what went on within and between people mattered and that people of all ages could learn how to be more effective (in this case, both me and my students).

Another book from the 1970s, Kenneth Wooden’s Weeping in the Playtime of Others described the pernicious effects of the juvenile justice system on young people who were incarcerated for status offenses – that is offenses for which adults would not be deprived of their freedom, like running away from home.

Wooden revealed to me the powerful and often invisible influence of the broader system on individuals.

Because of Glasser my work over many years has been focused on creating learning environments for young people and adults that enable success and on developing face-to-face relationships in classrooms and schools that empower both young people and adults.

Because of Wooden I am interested in how the systems that surround schools affect learning and the quality of life within them.

Because my goal is to help school leaders become more skillful in creating school communities that continuously improve teaching, learning, and relationships for the benefit of all students, I want:

To support principals and teachers in doing their very best for the students who are now in our schools.

To interrupt in any way I can the destructive downward spiral of public education by those who will benefit from its demise.

As a result, some of these essays provide practical ideas and processes through which teaching, learning, and relationships can be strengthened. (My most popular post of this type was one on teamwork.)

Others essays are intended to reveal the powerful forces external to schools that seek to undermine public education and to inspire school leaders to act individually and collectively to counter these forces. (The most popular post here was one on the narrative used to destroy public education.)

Taken together Glasser and Wooden taught me that creating great schools for students and teachers requires leadership that addresses both the schoolhouse and the statehouse, a lesson that’s as relevant four decades later as it was in the 1970s.

First, do no harm

All but the most extreme ideologues would have to agree that Muskegon Heights, Michigan’s first fully-privatized school system, is doing harm to students in the name of helping them.

When I read this Michigan Radio report on the current state of affairs in Muskegon Heights I was reminded of the Vietnam-era strategy of destroying a village to save it.

The report begins:

“At least one in four teachers at the new Muskegon Heights school district have already quit the charter school this year. That’s after an emergency manager laid off all the former public school teachers in Muskegon Heights because he didn’t have enough money to open school in the fall. That means there have been a lot of new, adult faces in the district.

“Students say the high teacher turnover has affected them and top school administrators say it has held back academic achievement this school year.”

A minimal standard for reform efforts is that they do no harm to students. Non-maleficence, as they call it in the medical profession.

Sadly, that is clearly not the case in Muskegon Heights.

The reasonable part of me wants to say, “But on the other hand…” I want to believe that these are well-intentioned people, to acknowledge that this is a complex undertaking and that success will take time, perhaps even years, if it is to occur at all.

But there can be no “other hand” when it comes to the well-being of children who pass through our classrooms only once. They deserve far better than what the public school privatizers are giving them through Mosaica Education Incorporated.

Mosaica, first do no harm.

 

A strong rationale for public education

As a firm believer in the value of a strong system of public education staffed by well-prepared and supported career teachers, I think it is essential that school leaders be able to clearly articulate a rationale for public education, particularly during a time when it is under serious threat from powerful and well-financed interests.

Diane Ravitch has done a superb job of describing why public education is important and the threat posed to it by privatization. She writes:

“There are many reasons to object to privatization.

“One is that there is no evidence that privately managed firms that operate public services provide more efficient or less costly service. Another is that privately managed firms, when operating for profit, extract public dollars for investors that taxpayers intended for children, for educational programs that directly benefit children, for reduced class sizes, —and not to enrich shareholders. Privately managed nonprofits often pay salaries that would be unacceptable in the public sector. Privately managed firms tend to exclude the costliest clients to minimize their own costs, thus leaving the hardest cases for the less well funded public sector agency. And last, to destroy public education, which is so inextricably linked to our notions of democracy and citizenship would be an assault on the commonweal. Let us not forget that public education has been the instrument of the great social movements for more than the past half century–desegregation, gender equality, disability rights, and the assimilation of immigrants. Once it is gone, it is gone, and that would be a crime against ourselves.”

Advertising campaigns touting for-profit schools?

A New York Times article reports that energy drink producers are making unwarranted claims about their expensive drinks.

“The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels,” the article notes. “But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.

“’If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,’ said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.

“Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more.”

Articles like this one make me wonder about the kinds of marketing claims that are or will be made by for-profit charter and online schools.

Given the propensity of marketers to use fear and sex to motivate consumers, not to mention the exaggerated claims described in this article, it’s not hard to imagine the advertising campaigns that are or will be used to persuade parents that such schools are in the best interest of their children.

Perhaps such distorted and inaccurate appeals already exist. If readers know of such campaigns, please share them here for others to see.

 

Readers comment on my recent post regarding the destruction of public education

In a recent blog post I described the basic elements of what I believe is an insidious, carefully-constructed narrative that threatens to destroy public education in this country.

Yesterday Diane Ravitch mentioned my essay in her influential blog, and I thought you might enjoy perusing the varied and lively conversation among readers that ensued.

I encourage you to add your comments regarding my original essay on this critically important subject and to join the comment threads that follow it.

 

 

Teachers and principals are this nation’s first responders

Teachers and principals are first responders, but not only to school violence.

They are first responders to financial crises in families, to poverty, and to hunger.

They are first responders to child neglect and abuse.

They are first responders to physical and mental health problems in children and their families.

In short, teachers and principals are first responders to problems that our society has not addressed.

Unfortunately, teachers and principals are also the first to be blamed for society’s problems.

We can wait no longer for public officials and those who influence them to stand up to their responsibilities to young people, to public education, and to the our collective future.

 

The storyline used by those who seek to destroy public education

Just as stories can instruct, provide guidance, energize, and help create a desired future, they can also provide a rationale for destruction that becomes so broadly accepted that it is viewed as an unquestioned truth. Here’s an example that is having a profound effect on public education in the United States.

The prequel:

A few enormously wealthy individuals and organizations such as ALEC that are ideologically opposed to government services and/or who see the privatization of government functions as an essentially untapped profit center focus their resources and efforts on remaking public education for their benefit.

Through an unrelenting litany of criticism they have convinced many Americans that their public schools are failing and that they must be radically changed. If these “reforms” are not implemented with urgency, these ideologues say, the United States’ world dominance will fade as “government schools” deprive American’s of their freedom.

The storyline and the plan:

1. What business does is good. It is efficient and effective. What government does is bad. It is inefficient and ineffective. With a small number of exceptions, everything government does can be better done by private enterprise.

2. Public schools are government schools, which means they are inefficient and ineffective.

3. Exploit this country’s financial crisis by blaming public education for economic problems, including the outsourcing of jobs.

4. Blame the  alleged failures of public education on teachers and teacher unions.

5. Use the imprimatur of “reform” to shift public resources to for-profit companies who run charter schools and are online providers.

6. Begin “reform” with historically low-performing schools because of the long-standing challenges they face, which are closely linked to poverty and discrimination. Then expand “reform” to suburban schools using the results of new standardized tests and systems of teacher evaluation as evidence of their ineffectiveness.

7. Transfer public money with minimal oversight and accountability to companies that manage for-profit schools and provide other services.

8. Consign to “traditional public schools” students whose high-cost special needs make them less profitable. Then blame resource-starved schools for not succeeding with those students and begin anew to find new ways to drain those schools of their remaining resources.

The consequence:

• Money that would benefit students is siphoned off as corporate profit.

• Public money is spent to serve non-public purposes (for instance, schools that promote an ideologically-driven form of science education) without transparency and public accountability.

• The “traditional” schools that remain continue to serve the neediest students, and they do so with even fewer resources.

The narrative I’ve outlined is the rationale for a wholesale, ideologically-driven assault on public education that will affect a generation or more of students in virtually every school system.

It remains to be seen whether the forces that are beginning to coalesce in response to this threat can gain traction before irreparable harm is done. The stakes are high, and I remain hopeful.

An ideologically-driven attempt to destroy Michigan’s public education system

While Michigan teachers and administrators work diligently in often difficult circumstances to improve the quality of teaching and learning for their students, the state’s Republican legislature and governor seek in one brief flurry of legislation during a lame-duck session to dismantle public education in the state.

In a commentary titled “A dagger aimed at the heart of public education,” Michigan superintendent Rob Glass describes this legislation as “the latest in a year-long barrage of ideologically driven bills designed to weaken and defund locally controlled public education, handing scarce taxpayer dollars over to for-profit entities operating under a different set of rules.”