Please, won't someone think of the children?

The New York Times has an interesting article on the weaker aspects of current teacher evaluation methods, playing into why maybe it's too early for mass releases of this kind of data like they did in Los Angeles, or arbitrary policies demanding that low scoring teachers be replaced.  Turns out, somewhere around a quarter of the teachers who get ranked as low performing one year will get ranked as high performing the next year...which year do you base the decision to fire them on?!? (The article doesn't get very specific on this, but the implication is that this is due to testing error, not actual improvement...I assume because the variation is strong in both directions).

On the one hand, the growing field of educational effectiveness research is a very interesting one; I think it's fairly promising in the long term, and I think it's an important thing to be looking into. On the other hand though, I will admit that I see big flashing warning signs at every turn, almost to a paranoid degree. Here's why: I think it's a mistake to assume that high quality free public education is a universal goal in this country. I think there is a significant section of this country that is looking to reform public education right out of existence...people like this guy, for example. The Republicans were making political hay by promising to abolish the Department of Education well through the 90s, defunding the public schools and sending all the white children to private ones was a favorite tactic of Southern bigots looking to sidestep integration. There is a constituency for this, people who feel that the curriculum of the public schools undermines their goals for their children (evolution, tolerance, the fact that the Aztecs were not actually Satan worshipers, Keynesian economics, non-revisionist U.S. History, who knows what else...) and that it is their right to reserve their tax money to pay for private schools that will let them decide what their children will be taught...or to localize public schools until they teach only the views held in their own homogeneous communities.* When I hear (questionable) metric after (questionable) metric proving that the public schools are failing, I do wonder if part of it is just setting the groundwork for moving people away from the expectation that public schools will educate their children. I guess what it comes down to is I'm not against standardized testing, per se, and I'm not against seeking out new ways to measure teacher performance, but I am against the rhetoric that America's public schools are failing. Or at least, not in front of those people. That's like telling your ex boyfriend that your new guy doesn't understand you.

*This isn't really a wacky point of view. I want to have a say in what my children are taught too! You know, when I have them. I just have the advantage of mostly agreeing with mainstream opinion on things that are taught in school. Also, of being right....and I'm willing to let go a little on my stranglehold of all information that would ever reach my hypothetical children ever in order to give some other kid whose parents are wrong about everything half a chance.

School Reform - Suspensions

School reform is another one of those issues that I find fairly interesting...although a lot of the discussion of it lately is more frustrating than anything else. This article in the New York Times isn't too bad though.

It's about the superintendent of Baltimore, and I think the most interest part of it is his decision that it was important to decrease suspensions. He created a requirement that someone in his office had to sign off on a suspension of more than 5 days. (5 days?! Admittedly, I didn't exactly get in a whole lot of trouble in school, or keep close track of the people that did, but 5 days is a pretty long suspension, right?). He's managed to cut down suspensions from 26,000 a year to less than 10,000 a year in six years. Obviously, that doesn't necessarily mean that the kids are better behaved...but in the same time the dropout rate has fallen by half, which is definitely significant.

I took P.E. my senior year of high school, which is a bad, bad idea if you are already fed up with the immaturity and stupidity of people younger than you. There was this kid in the class...a sophomore, obviously a stoner, who barely ever bothered to show up. And then, the one day he did, the teacher got on his case about the shoes he was wearing (some kind of Timberlands or something...not good P.E. shoes but he also wasn't going to die putting in the same lackluster effort towards P.E. that the rest of us were planning on) and sent him out of class. That still sticks out in my memory of one of the worst instances of teaching I ever witnessed. Who knows if that guy ended up graduating or not, but if he did...no thanks to her.

I can see how a culture where suspension is the solution to every problem could completely undermine the message that school is important and dropping out means missed opportunities. Hell, it's practically like handing out free samples, and students who are already frustrated at school aren't likely to like it any better when they come back two weeks behind in all their classes. The trade off, of course, is that suspension is easier on teachers than a lot of other options...and if you are going to ask them to use a more labor intensive form of discipline, you have to accept that they are going to have less time for other things. But it might be a worthwhile trade off, and I think that whatever gains there are to be found in school reform are going to come from figuring out which of these kinds of things are most effective. (Rather than say, setting some arbitrary goal and offering to keep firing teachers and replacing them with shiny but not necessarily better new ones until it happens).

Also, the article mentions that the superintendent compares himself to a character in War and Peace....an excellent excuse to bring up the fact that I read that book. (I read War and Peace, did you know? Mostly just so I could say I read it, but as it turns out, it's pretty decent). Which character though? It makes a big difference, since one of the main characters of the book is actually a guy who gets swept up in silly political ideologies but is completely inept at actually implementing them. Was it that guy? The failure of the writer to pursue this further makes me suspect that unlike me, he has not read War and Peace. In which case, woohoo! I am smarter than people who write for the New York Times by a completely arbitrary metric!