February 16, 2007

Your Lying Eyes: When Educational Policy Advocacy Is Held Captive To Ideology

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 6:24 pm

Over at The Quick and the Ed, Ed Sector designated hitter Kevin Carey objects to our take on the Aspen NCLB report, complaining of “a lot of distortions and flatly incorrect statements.” Carey’s contribution is worth dissecting, because it illustrates what happens when policy advocacy is held captive to ideology.

Take Carey’s first objection. Our statement that “Educational research affirms the absolute centrality of experienced, accomplished teachers to the education of young people, especally students living in poverty and at academic risk” is, he contends, a “gross distortion of what research says.” “Absolutely none of [the research] says that teacher experience is central to the education of young people,” he continues. “The research says that experience matters in the beginning of a teacher’s career, up to at most 10 years, and then not afterwards. And even when experience does matter, it accounts for only a small fraction of all the variance among teachers.”

On this question, let’s start with the real world of schools. In the work I do for the UFT, I have visited scores of high schools over the years, and have been involved, in one way or another, in numerous efforts to improve, transform or replace low performing schools. One of the first things I learned in this work was that there were two key statistical profiles which would always predict how academically successful a high school was: the grade level distribution of the student body, and the experience level of the faculty. A low performing high school had a rather disproportionate share of students in the ninth and tenth grades, and a disproportionate concentration of novice teachers with a correspondingly high rate of faculty turnover.

Here’s why that second profile — the experience level of the teachers — is absolutely central. Teaching is a difficult, demanding craft. Under optimum conditions of meaningful teacher education, good mentoring, strong supervisory supports, appropriate professional development and a safe, orderly school, it takes a minimum of three years to master the fundamental skills of teaching. In less than optimum conditions, it takes longer, and is all too often never accomplished. When a school is staffed with novice teachers, and experiences a high rate of turnover, there is a surfeit of teachers who have mastered the skills of teaching to mentor and guide the novices, and at the point when the novices may have learned even some of the teaching essentials, they are leaving. How can a school gain educational traction under those circumstances?

Now, as is often the case, good educational research confirms this common sense description of school reality. For one example, take a look at Kacey Guin’s “Chronic Teacher Turnover in Urban Elementary Schools,” which is easily available on-line, since it is published in the Educational Policy Analysis Archives. Guin’s point that the ‘retention crisis’ in education is highly concentrated in inner city, high poverty schools is worth highlighting here, for it means that the students who have the greatest need for the most skilled teachers are instead facing the largest numbers of novice teachers. The argument we made in the original Edwize post that drew Carey’s obections was exactly on this point, our belief that the recommendations of the Aspen report would take us in the wrong direction in fulfilling NCLB’s promise to bridge the achievement gap.

So when Carey disputes the notion that experienced, accomplished teachers are central to the education of young people, especially those living in poverty and at academic risk, it brings to mind the line in the old Richard Pryor movie, after Pryor’s wife finds him in bed with another woman. “Who are you going to believe,” Pryor says, “me or your lying eyes?”

Let’s deconstruct the twists and turns that Carey takes to support that position. He offers the confusing statement that “The research says that experience matters in the beginning of a teacher’s career, up to at most 10 years, and then not afterwards.” This is a garbled version of the fact that the learning curve in teaching is very steep at the start of a teaching career, when the novice is mastering the fundamental skills, and levels off after that initial 3 to 5 year period. From the viewpoint of mastery of the teaching craft, therefore, it makes sense to say that there is little difference between a 10 year and a 20 year teacher. But whether a teacher has 10, 15, 20 or 25 years of experience, what never disappears is the crucial differential between a novice teacher and an experienced teacher. An accurate description of the research would be that the gap between the skills of the novice teachers and the skills of more experienced teachers grows significantly through five years of experience, and thereafter levels off. This understanding is crucial: while an experienced teacher is not necessarily an accomplished teacher, only an experienced teacher can be an accomplished teacher. That’s why we used two qualifiers together in our original statement: experienced, accomplished teachers are absolutely central to a student’s education.

What’s happening here is that Carey is working backwards from an ill-conceived Ed Sector policy proposal to eliminate teacher salary differentials based on years of experience, made in its Frozen Assets report. In a massive leap of logic, the Frozen Assets reasoned that since teachers have sufficient experience to master the fundamentals of teaching by year five, there is no need to have salary differentials providing a retention incentive beyond that point. The problem, as we pointed out at Edwize, is that from the viewpoint of teaching quality, one needs the numbers of experienced teachers to substantially outweigh the numbers of novice teachers. In order to accomplish that end, one must retain experienced teachers after they master the fundamentals of the teaching craft. If one eliminates the incentives for the retention of experienced teachers at the very point they have finished climbing the steepest part of the teaching learning curve, the result will be highly counterproductive: one will be left is a teaching force disproportionately staffed by novices, and the tough lesson experience teaches us is that those novices will most likely be disproportionately concentrated in schools serving high poverty communities. Carey’s argument that teaching experience after year five is inconsequential might be best understood as a rearguard defense of the Frozen Assets proposal, which can only be defended by the notion that teaching experience is inconsequential.

But examined from the viewpoint of real schools, real teachers and real kids, the importance and centrality of teaching experience are undeniable. The problem here is that the starting point of Ed Sector policy advocacy is not schools, but the neo-liberal market ideology which takes as its guideposts the prevalent corporate way of doing business. When corporations tear up the existing American social contract, eviscerating pensions and decimating health care insurance, the Ed Sector response in reports like Frozen Assets is that public school teachers should join in the race to the bottom. The Ed Sector proposal to eliminate teaching experience from teacher salary schedules [where it is generally one, but not the only, basis for salary differentials], is based on a reading of how salaries are done in the corporate world. [However, as Sherman Dorn has pointed out, it is not even a very deep understanding of corporate practices.] The idea that one might craft teacher salary schedules to promote the end of retaining accomplished, experienced teachers for an entire professional career, in order to provide the highest quality education, is simply not on the Ed Sector ideological radar screen.

The other major point of Carey related to our discussion of “accomplished teaching.” We argued that ‘value added’ measures were not able to identify quality teaching at an individual teacher level. Carey’s response assumes in its premises the very point which most desperately needs a supporting argument. He begins by saying that accomplished teaching “consistently helps students increase learning” — not the most felicitous of definitions, but workable enough. But then he adds this qualifying phrase “as measured by standardized tests.” This ancillary point– that standardized tests provide meaningful measures of accomplished teaching, let alone of actual student learning — is precisely what it is contested, and not only by us. At the very least, one needs to make a compelling case for this point of view; smuggling it into your argument’s definitions just doesn’t do.

The issues here are legion, so much that even Ed Sector has published a report by Thomas Toch quite critical of the current state of affairs in the world of standardized testing. Let’s consider just a few of the important problems. Standardized tests currently in use are notoriously uneven in quality, and are used inappropriately for purposes other than those for which they were designed [i.e., tests designed for diagnostic purposes used to make high stakes promotion and graduation decisions, and vice versa]. There are enormous problems of the alignment between the standardized tests, on the one hand, and the curriculum and standards that states and school districts tell teachers to teach, on the other hand. There are few standardized tests in use that provide the sort of longitudunal data that the Aspen reports envisions using [the AFT calcuates that less than 25% of all American teachers teach classes where such data is now available], so a whole deluge of additional standardized tests would be required to implement it, at a time when American schools and students are already drowning in such tests, and test prep is more and more crowding out teaching and learning in our classrooms.

There are also serious questions about whether any standardized tests can measure what is truly important in learning. Many of the most important skills a student should be learning in K-12 education — how to write a persuasive essay which convincingly presents a logical argument with supporting illustrations; how to research a major issue, organize the evidence from the research and write a research paper which synthesizes the evidence; how to deliver a coherent, convincing oral presentation — simply can not be assessed through standardized, multiple choice tests. Yet success in post-secondary education and in knowledge economy jobs require those skills, and critical thinking and problem solving ability that can not be captured by multiple choices. Real teachers in real schools understand this only too well, but it escapes those who approach the problem with a pre-given ideology.

Even if ‘value added’ tools were able to provide meaningful measurements at an individual teacher level, and the Rand study clearly demonstrates that they can not, there is still the fundamental issue that as a measure of actual learning, these tools can only provide information which as good as the standardized tests that are being used. If you stick garbage data in, you are going to get garbage data out, no matter how sophisticated your statistical calculations are.

3 Comments

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  • Hey Leo,

    Are there teachers in the UFT that support the opportunity to be paid significantly more based on some sort of judgment of performance? What percentage of the UFT membership would you guess has this viewpoint?

    Ken

    Comment by curious3 — February 17, 2007 @ 10:23 am

  • People often say experience, meaning years, when they mean the knowledge created by those years. I honestly do not know if a I am a better teacher at 30 years than someone with ten years.

    Madeline Hunter, in her voluminous compilation of educational research, did state that the single greatest factor in classroom success was the knowledge of the teacher of the subject matter to be taught.
    If that is the yardstick then many of us have been transformed into poorer teachers because the DoE has changed what we have been asked to teach.

    My education, my prior experiences have not prepared me for the classroom methodology called America’s Choice. It is like being asked to learn to bat and throw with your left hand after years of being a righty. If mandated methodologies like AC which the Union supported, are the future, then the current crop of experienced teachers are not better teachers because of their experience. And if the powers that be frequently adjust those methodologies or contract with different providers, no one’s experience will count for much

    Comment by xkaydet65 — February 17, 2007 @ 10:34 am

  • Notes from a Chapter Leader’s Journal

    By Phyllis C. Murray

    “Teaching is a difficult, demanding craft. Under optimum conditions of meaningful teacher education, good mentoring, strong supervisory supports, appropriate professional development and a safe, orderly school, it takes a minimum of three years to master the fundamental skills of teaching.”Leo Casey UFT

    Leo Casey is right. However, after three years, many of our gifted teachers leave with their master degrees and the incalculable skills and abilities which they have honed while working in our Hunts Point school. They leave and… off they go into the wide horizon. Several of the teachers have become assistant principals, law students, or teach in charter schools or the suburban schools of Westchester County. And we wish them well. And we cheer them on because others will benefit from their skills and abilities and talents. All is not lost.

    However, there are still gifted teachers who remain in our inner city school. These teachers know that they are working under less than optimum conditions than their former colleagues. Yet, they have chosen to remain. And even under the harshest conditions, while fighting to enforce the UFT contract, they take pride in the fact that they can make a difference in the lives of their students as they move many of the students from Point A to Point B. Thus, many of our former students, like our former colleagues, are on a new and different path to success.

    Moving students forward, takes an inordinate amount of energy. And at times, it becomes a constant struggle or hassle in a school complete with over-sized classes, loss prep periods, meager resources, and day-to-day imposed drama and trauma. These teachers know the challenge of being a teacher means:

    1. They must use their personal resources to invest in the lives of the students they serve.
    2. They must also work to enforce the UFT Contract by any means necessary.
    3. They must become New Yorkers: Resilient. Resourceful.
    4. They must press on! Adalante!

    Phyllis C. Murray

    Comment by phyllis c. murray — February 17, 2007 @ 10:39 am

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