Jonathan Alter and Teacher Evaluation

In a recent Newsweek article, Jonathan Alter makes it all sound so simple. Teachers should be well paid. Then, if they don’t do their job, fire them.

Well, no one would disagree with that, and certainly not what he calls the “Paleolithic teachers’ union.” Like everyone else, teachers want to work with colleagues who are competent, professional, committed, excellent – which, is what they mostly do. But teachers are also professionals who spent a lot of years in school becoming teachers, and termination isn’t just the end of a job; it often means the end of a career. So, while it’s all very well to believe that incompetent teachers should be terminated, the trick is to create an evaluation system that’s fair.

Should teachers be evaluated only by their supervisors? By their colleagues (other professions police their own)? Or by something else?

Alter tells us we ought to hold teachers accountable for “performance” – which sounds fantastic until you realize that performance is just code for firing teachers based on student test results (value-added formulae, VA). The thing is, however, that though plenty of economists have made whole careers out of VA, it’s still a crude instrument for evaluating teachers, destined to go the way of alchemy, phrenology, and all that other pseudo scientific junk. Even at the aggregate levels – nations, states, and schools — no one can agree on what, if anything, the scores might mean. If we don’t quite trust or understand the aggregates, then how can we use just a handful of scores to decide the future of an individual teacher?

That may not trouble Alter, but it’s troublesome to most people who have looked into VA. In fact, Mayor Bloomberg himself, who hired test-score tyrant Joel Klein, has said that it’s not so simple to tie test scores to individual teachers. Said Bloomberg, “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.” With the UFT, New York City created a low-stakes use of scores in schools: school wide bonus plans that can pay a little extra to all school members if the schools meet certain goals. That’s reasonable, a good compromise with test score ideologues, not least because it is low stakes.

Terminating teachers by test scores, on the other hand, is high stakes. Even if the tests were reliable enough for that (they aren’t), we really ought to ask ourselves whether we are prepared for the consequences. And it’s not just union members asking that. It’s testing experts too, experts who are big proponents of the tests. Howard Everson, for example, is chair of the New York State’s testing Technical Advisory Committee, and advisor to the Feds. Yet, Everson has raised concerns that the high stakes nature of the tests is masking educational levels rather than raising them. Everson suspects that high stakes pressure has encouraged practices that are likely to undermine education. As he says in The New York Sun, there’s a “whole range of folks whose jobs are in some ways on the line.” Everson is calling for appropriate research.

Everson is a member of the cognoscenti. Is Jonathan Alter really sure that pushing teachers under the high stakes train is going to make education any better?

There are, of course, good ways to evaluate teachers. Last week I had a long conversation with a woman from another state (I don’t remember which). She said that in her district, teachers rotate into and out of peer review positions, and work in teams to support and evaluate new teachers. To ensure that the teachers who became evaluators work free from conflicts of interest, the evaluators sign an agreement not to move into administrative positions for at least two years following their return to full time teaching. I liked the sound of it. Teachers need to take charge of the schools, and professional evaluation is a crucial part of that.

In any case, an enthusiastic faith in VA is naïve on Alter’s part, and he makes another naïve observation as well. He seems to believe that teaching by itself can eradicate the unconscionable achievement gaps between poor kids and rich kids, black kids and white. If only, he seems to say, there were enough great teachers!

Well, actually there are a lot of really great teachers, but the responsibility for changing the achievement of students doesn’t fall solely on teachers. We cannot redress an entire society’s failure on our own.

Now, it’s right at this point that someone steps in and says, Oh, that’s just an attempt to shift the blame from teachers. After all, look at … and then they name a school that seems to show what miracles are possible if teachers could just be saints, and we could fire them at will.

The problem is, those miracles usually aren’t miracles, and when they are, they rarely last. In the present case, Alter (or the folks who wanted to influence Alter) pointed to the KIPPs schools, but because of the particular demands these schools make on students and parents, KIPPs is self-selecting. No real studies have been done regarding enrollment and attrition for kids who can’t cut it in the boot camp, high-expectations culture we hear KIPPs creates. Even the graduation rates that Alter quotes are about as suspect as the Texas miracle (see here for an explanation of how Alter misrepresents the data).

And, even if we are to believe the KIPPS success story, such models are not replicable, or even sustainable. KIPPS may find it handy to burn through teachers, but you can’t create a school system on that.

Consider, for example, the words of Elana Korapkin, the principal of Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn. According to the New York Times, Law and Justice is a high poverty school, yey 93 percent of the senior class — nearly all college bound — will graduate this year. Korapkin is leaving her successful school to become a superintendent. She told the Times that she was “exhausted,” both physically and emotionally. She added, speaking of the staff, “You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task,” she said. “People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity.”

You can’t run a school system on burnout – which is what it takes (if anything) to produce miraculous results in a desert. Ultimately, kids need 360 degree support because the factors influencing the poor performance of some children from struggling families are too multivariate for teachers to tackle on their own. Randi Weingarten has proposed the creation of community schools that would broaden the services that schools offer, and it’s a practical idea. More than that, though, it is an idea that has a certain metaphorical resonance, because it makes concrete some of the many things that probably need to be in place to foster success: early exposure to broad experiences and vocabularies (pre-K and child care); good health (health services), safe and healthy ways to play, explore, and socialize (after school programs) ESL and other services for parents (engaged parents and communities).

Is Randi Weingarten shifting blame? Well, certainly it’s true that teachers don’t want to be blamed.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t right.