Some do. Some don't. Neither of those propositions is on my mind today. Today's question is this: will the students say what they know and will the result be better teaching?
There was a really interesting piece in the New York Times this morning. It begins with the interest the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has shown in locating good teachers. They have devised a "value-added" metric, by which they statistically calculate how much of a student's test scores can be attributed to particular teachers. A student of mine told me last week that in Los Angeles, these scores are printed in the newspaper next to the names of the teachers. I haven't verified that, but I find it plausible. Horrifying too, of course.
The new interest from the Gates Foundation is to see what other measures correlate with high value-added scores. They have discovered that you can ask the students. That seems obvious, I guess, but I began by observing that some do (know) and some don't. Here are three such observations.
Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.
The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and,
“My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”
This is information worth having and it can not be collected by having an administrator drop into the class, as if by parachute, jot a few notes and leave. The students know things like this and they will safely tell you provided the questionnaire is anonymous and is not used to evaluate the teachers.
Oops. We have just reached the brow of the hill and are peering down the slippery slope. I don't see any vegetation down there and it has been raining for a week. What are the chances we can keep our footing? (Here in Portland, it actually has rained for a week and there are months yet to go.)
When the answers these students provide are used to discipline or to reward teachers, to promote or demote them, to hire them or fire them, the students are presented with a new set of choices. I don't mean to cast aspersions on the students, but this new choice is a challenge routinely flunked by congressmen, judges, and White House staffers.
The choice is this. Do you want to say what you know or do you want to produce the kind of effect your assessment could produce? That's the question I had in mind when I started; that's what's on my mind today. Let me phrase that in a few other ways. Dear student: do you value the accuracy of your observations more than you value seeing justice done in your school? More than you value the chance to retaliate against the teacher whose homework you did all last week instead of going to the coast with your family? More than you value that chance to hurt the teacher who had one of your friends suspended from school last month?
Dear student: do you really think the administration is going to make good use of the information you provide them? Will they not, rather, put this information to their own purposes? Don't you think you can trust the clout you have right now (in answering the questionnaire) more than the clout some administrator might have in using the results for good purpose?
The question for these students, in short, is this: will you be willing to tell only the truth you know rather than trying to have an effect of some kind? The question for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is this: do you really think students will continue to tell you what they know after you have put into their hands a tool that will allow them, instead, to get what they want? Do you really?
I don't.
A decade or so, the legislature in California began a program of sending cash awards to high schools with high (or with rising) achievement scores. The students at some schools began meeting with the administration to talk about what the money would be used for, should it actually arrive. In a number of cases, the administration's vision of the best use of the funds did not match the vision of the students, who were thinking that a day at Disneyland would be really cool. And, since the students controlled absolutely whether the scores would be high or not and since they personally paid no penalty for low scores, they were in a perfect place to blackmail the school. Which they did. And after enough schools did it, the Assembly suspended the program--probably over protests from Disneyland.
Have we taught our students to tell "the truth they know," to admit that there are some important truths they do not know, and to walk past all the inducements of power and influence? It would be nice to think so, but I don't. And until we do, this lovely new source of information that the Gates Foundation has given us will remain a small candle in a very large dark room.
Yeah, this is a pretty awful idea, that's for sure. This kind of system is very much like working on commission--something I'm very, very much in favor of for salespeople.
ReplyDeleteBut as you accurately pointed out, this idea puts all the power into the wrong hands. You can't have a system in which the people in charge are beholden to the people in their charge. That is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.
I know lots of people are struggling to find a way to weed out the bad teachers and reward the good ones, but how to define that is the hard part. What do you think the solution is? Testing? Observation? A combination of the two?
-Doug
I've never seen the "people in charge" set against "the people in their charge" before. I like it a lot. When Bette read it, she put the piece down and looked at me and said, "We should send him on the road." I think she meant instead of Arne Duncan.
ReplyDeleteWe have so screwed up the educational system that it is hard any more to see where to intervene. Here are my first two questions, each leading to an intervention. 1. Are teachers professionals in the sense that doctors and lawyers are professionals? If they are, they should be policed by the profession. The good ones and the bad ones identified. What the legal government, the school board, wants to do after that is up to them. The right question for the good ones is not, "How much money do you want?" That's not what drives good teachers, as years of studies have shown. The question is, "What will we have to do to keep you doing what you're doing?"
The second point of intervention is student goals. Teachers ought to be evaluated on "value added," certainly, the the measure should be how close the teacher got a particular student to the goals the two have jointly set out. Someone will say that is impossible, but every college football team does it every week, so it isn't really impossible. Just expensive.
Two things, really.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Dale, you asked, “Have we taught our students to tell "the truth they know," to admit there are truths they do not know, and to walk past the inducements of power and influence?” Maybe “we” who hover around your blog have tried, and maybe some are successful. But “we,” as in our social and political institutions, certainly don’t. At least, I see very little evidence of it among my IB students, and even less among my standard students, except for the Muslim girls, actually, who appear able to do all three.
Second, thanks, Doug, for appreciating the difficulty teachers face in being evaluated. Florida instituted several Merit Pay plans (all have failed) based on content competency and administrative observations, for which there were rubrics: Asks higher level questions, Provides smooth transitions between activities,… (Google FPMS Observation Forms to see one from Duval County [Miami], particularly pp.6, 15, 19etc.).
Raise teachers’ standards? National certification is available through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards which requires sets of sample student work, video clips, documentation of continuing ed. and of family/community relationship, each accompanied by an explanatory paper, again, judged with a rubric; it takes a year to complete. I kind of liked doing mine—at least it felt authentic and I learned a little about my teaching, good qualities in an assessment, don’t you think? Still, I could name two “bad teachers” I work with who have NB Certification.
I wouldn’t mind being judged on my pass rate (if the rate were “reasonable”) because I teach highly advanced students, but we have roomfuls of students who don't attend, don't bring books, don't do homework, and refuse to do classwork.
The difference between retailers and teachers is not only that the products don’t evaluate the sellers, but also that the products don’t have a say in whether they want to be sold.
The problem ends where I opened, with Dale's questions, except I’d ask them about our administrators. And these are the answers I've derived from my years’ experience:
1) Those who evaluate us don’t or won’t tell the truth they know (for fear of lawsuits, or being called “unfair,” or just out of personal druthers);
2)they NEVER admit there are truths they don’t know,
3) nor are they the kind of people who WOULD “walk by the inducements of power and influence”—their very jobs are about power and influence.
I don’t know of any group in the last 50 years that has created a fair and usable method for evaluating teachers. Not for lack of trying. But does anyone think we can evaluate teachers with a form? Could it be time to look at the evaluatORs. Aren't they the ones responsible for maintaining an effective staff? Oh well, everyone’s got an opinion.
Good thoughts, Bonnie. I've faced many of the same issues as a trainer, but in Corporate America it's all about results achieved. The standard process is:
ReplyDelete1) Identify the problem
2) Quantify the problem and set goals that establish success
3) Create training plan
4) Follow through to ensure adherence to plan
5) Track results
That works really well for training adults, but I get why it would work--and has worked--less well with teaching kids. I also get the difference between training and teaching.
But I would like to make one correction. In retail sales, the products don't rate you, the customers do, and that's as it should be. Still, I'd like to think that the equipment I sold over the years would give me high marks.
-Doug
Oh, and thanks for saying you liked that line, Dad. I generally know which lines you're going to like when I write them. ;-)
ReplyDelete-Doug
Doug,
ReplyDeleteIf you handled them well, I'm sure you received very high marks!
In a strange turn of thought I just realized that you have products and you have customers, but teachers' products and customers are the same person--at different ages. In school, he's the product, the thing being led forward; after school, he is the customer wanting/needing/relying on the education he was supposed to have obtained as the product. As the customer, the person aware of "himself," he ought to have some sense of whether or not he was well-served, and ought to complain if he was not.
So our customers complain after the fact, but are participatory in the fact.
May I take the other side of my point for a just a moment, because students could actually tell us valuable things about their learning experiences. I hear things from them about other teachers that are complex, but spot on.
I agree I wouldn't trust them to evaluate teachers, but maybe we could see what they have to say? Nothing replaces data collection.