April 10, 2008
The Big Lie And The Simple Truth
Filed under: Education Education Funding by Leo Casey @ 4:21 pm
One of the more infamous propaganda techniques is the “big lie” — the repeated, calculated use of a falsehood, with accompanying statements of outrage so extreme as to leave the impression that the lie must be true if it elicited such an extraordinary response.
The passage of the state budget and the turning back of an effort by the New York City Department of Education to change the criteria for awarding for tenure — criteria supported by decades of practice and written into law in the compromise agreement that was part of 2007 budget — has been the latest inspiration for the use of the “big lie.” It is there in the public proclamations of Chancellor Klein and the NYC Department of Education, and in the sections of educational blogosphere which have been Klein’s most faithful camp-followers [here and here].
Quite simply, it is a lie that teachers do not believe in being accountable for their teaching and for their students’ learning. To the contrary, the language of the compromise agreement which teacher unions supported makes it unambiguously clear that tenure will depend upon the direct observation of the classroom instruction of the teacher by his/her supervisors and peers, as well as the ability of a teacher to use data to inform instruction. In the case of New York City, the DoE’s own regulations require that probationary teachers have a minimum of six full period formal observations by their supervisors every year. Those observations examine what we actually do in the classroom and are undertaken by experienced educators, who know what to look for and understand the particular context of teachers’ work. That is why they are the appropriate means for making a decision about our performance. And that is why they have been the means for evaluating teachers for decades.
By contrast, there a host of problems with the new method Klein and the DoE would like to introduce, the use of student scores on standardized tests to evaluate teachers. For starters, the tests are not designed for that purpose — they are designed to measure whether an individual student has achieved a certain performance level. The profession of test designers and makers — psychometricians — warn that it is wrong to misuse a test for some other purpose than it was designed: a student may score high or score low on the test despite her teacher’s performance, rather than because of it.
Moreover, the tests in place do not cover the period of a single teacher’s instruction of the student. The time period in question, from January to January for the E.L.A. exams, cover at a minimum the contribution of two primary teachers, and in a number of cases, a third summer school teacher and a fourth Academic Intervention Services teacher. There is no way to distinguish the contributions of these teachers, one from the other, and the solution of the DoE — to simply divide the progress among the teachers proportionately — is clearly not an accurate or fair way to evaluate individual teachers.
Further, only a fraction of teachers — those responsible for teaching literacy and numeracy in grades 4 through 8 — could be evaluated by this method, since those are the only years with annual exams which can be compared to each other. No high school teacher, no middle school teacher of a subject other than E.L.A. and Math, and no elementary cluster teacher or K-3 teacher could be evaluated with this method.
Finally, these tests are very superficial, very poor measures of actual student learning. The fact that they are basis for high stakes decisions about the students is already very problematic; now, to compound the problem, these unreliable measures would be used to make decisions about matters they were never intended to measure. The scholars who have carefully studied “value added” measures, and taken stock of what Klein and Co. want to do, agree: whatever the future of “value added” measures may bring, what the DoE wants to do is not a fair, reliable measure of individual teacher contributions to student learning.
It is the dogmatic adherence to technocratic ideology, the desire to make decisions about teachers — fair or not — from your computer screen at Tweed, that drives this terribly flawed policy.
The truth of the matter is that when independent, thinking people examine the actual facts, they grasp why teachers are opposed to allowing Klein and the DoE proceed with such a terribly flawed change in how we are evaluated. The anger directed at the state legislature and the governor from those quarters is the anger that comes from knowing you were beaten on the merits of the argument. It did not help the cause of Klein and the DoE in the eyes of Albany that it was the UFT and NYSUT who were leading the battle to restore funding to New York City public schools, while the Klein and the DoE put all their effort into changing the tenure law and even sought to undermine the battle for restoring the cuts. When the Mayor calls the restoration of promised funds to New York City public schools “a favor to the UFT,” it becomes all too clear who the special interest is and who is working on behalf of the larger common good.
So when you read about how turning back the changes Klein and the DoE wanted in tenure made it impossible “to weigh teacher performance in tenure decisions” and “illegal to evaluate teachers based on whether or not students are learning,” when you read that our defense of the existing evaluation criteria was an “unambiguous declaration of the union’s total disregard for student learning when its members’ jobs are at stake,” and when the leaders of NYSUT and the UFT are called the “murderers” of public education, remember that the rhetoric is so extreme and so completely over the top for a calculated purpose — to make the reader lose sight of the big lie. The mendacity machine is producing at full tilt.
But simple truths have a way of getting through.
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Well put. They award and deny tenure based on performance. That’s always been the case, though they may not always perform their jobs with diligence.
The tests have everything wrong with them that you mention. And more.
But I don’t much care for part of the compromise you mentioned
What a shame you agreed to let them sneak in test scores through the back door.
Maybe what bothers me more, use of test scores doesn’t matter.
You’ve sat on more hiring committees than most people I know. Did anyone ever care about how a candidate read data?
You have run into teachers whose tenure was denied. Did a principal ever express frustration about use of data?
Ever hear of letters to file for poor use of data? Other disciplinary action?
In the rest of the world? Problems with teachers using data badly in Canada? Parochial school teachers get rated on use of data? Charter school teachers?
What about at the UFT Charter School? (we need to return to this topic at another time) Do hiring decisions include the ability of the candidate to use data?
Maybe I’m wrong and the use of data is a big part of the culture in some of these places. But I don’t think so.
Schools should have someone, maybe a few people, who can handle data well. But it doesn’t need to be the teacher who wonderfully draws students into discussion of Beowulf, the teacher who makes participatory government come alive, and certainly not the teacher who wipes noses, doles out hugs while teaching the alphabet, counting by tens, and indoor voices.
Those jobs need to be filled by people who can teach.
Jonathan
Comment by jd2718 — April 10, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
Jonathan, thanks for your comments. I’m at a new school this year and was handed a pile of data before the quality review this year and told I was supposed to be using it to plan my lessons, because that’s what the quality review people want. Did I miss something? When did this fad become widespread? I received my masters in 2004 and this is all new to me. Can this be used as the basis for an unsatisfactory observation?
Comment by MichaelB — April 12, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
Can someone tell me what the DOE’s motivation is in trying to use test data in tenure decisions? If we’re dealing with probationary teachers, doesn’t the DOE already have all the power they need to deny tenure? Can’t they just give teachers U ratings and deny them tenure if they don’t like them?
Comment by MichaelB — April 12, 2008 @ 9:09 pm
1. Power (the more arbitrary, the better). Bloomberg managed his managers by keeping them in fear. He likes this.
2. Foot in the door. It is true that the DoE already has lots of control over probationary teachers. But they would come back and try to rate all teachers with the scores.
There’s probably more. I hope someone else chimes in.
Jonathan
Comment by jd2718 — April 13, 2008 @ 9:53 am
Here’s another aspect of the Big Lie. Bloomberg knows darned well that evaluating teachers by test score doesn’t work. Hehas said it himself on the steps of city hall:
… “I am a capitalist and I am in favor of incentives for individual people, yes. But it depends on the situation and the organization and what the function is. In some cases it’s very easy to measure whether you do a better job than the person sitting to your left or right. In the schools it is a much more collaborative effort.”
That’s October 17, 2007, just three months before Bloomberg gave the state of the city address and we were all off to the races. Bloomberg knows value-added (test score evaluation) doesn’t work, and I can’t imagine that any whispering in his ear on the part of Joel Klein could have changed that. It’s politics, not education, Bloomberg’s thinking about — his future, not the future of the schools.
Comment by Jackie Bennett — April 13, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
While I realize that test scores are a narrow measure, we are harming our profession by steadfastly refusing to be accountable for quantifiable outcomes.
Comment by nycityteacher — April 13, 2008 @ 7:26 pm
[...] The recent controversy surrounding the recent legislation on tenure criteria was made possible, in significant measure, by a lack of awareness outside of education on what tenure actually is. [...]
Pingback by Tenure: What It Is And What It Is Not | Edwize — April 22, 2008 @ 10:49 am
[...] one of the discussions on Edwize, the UFT’s blog, I asked my questions and made my points. (reproduced at the bottom of this [...]
Pingback by Rating teachers on use of data. Huh? « JD2718 — May 4, 2008 @ 11:15 am