No Cliche Left Behind

The Obama administration recently announced proposed changes in the No Child Left Behind law. The “jury is out” on whether it would be an improvement. Much depends on the extent that there is enlightened collaboration between education professionals and political forces. In either case, it may be revelatory to reflect on where some of the contributing “reformers” have been intellectually “coming from” lately.

Mike Johnston, a member of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, who is also a Colorado state senator and former principal, bunted some softball pitches lobbed at him late last year by interviewer Michael F. Shaughnessy of Eastern New Mexico University. Many of the observations were minor league.

By virtue of Johnston’s having been at some point and for some time an actual principal, he is “uniquely qualified to lead this committee,” according to Shaughnessy.

Johnston seeks to “build on the commission’s previous work by developing updated federal policy to improve teacher and principal effectiveness.”  The focus on teachers and principals as joint problem-solvers is commendable in theory. It’s more than a good idea; it’s indispensable to success.

But the relationship between classroom educators (who are the preponderant experts on education) and the executive who operates the building, must be symbiotic and without the prejudicial power of a superior force. Equality during fair weather that defaults to the doctrine of “rank has its privileges” when there’s an impasse is a ruse.

Principals are not forces of nature, given to divine right, especially these days when so many of them have no background in education. Is it too much to ask in this elusive climate of “reform” that school leaders actually possess vision rather than impose and enforce their own?

Johnston supports the commission’s “major shift in the way the nation measures teacher quality — from evaluations based on qualifications to those based significantly on classroom results together with principal or peer evaluations.”

(Oops — Johnston did not couple “teacher quality” with “principal quality” this time. Could it have been a reverse “slip of the tongue”?)

If he really means “or,” when he says “principal or peer evaluations,” then he’s a reformer we can believe in,at least tentatively. The phrase “classroom results” is a minefield of volatile implications. Teachers should no more lose their jobs over their students’  performance on standardized tests than should doctors lose their licenses over their patients’ performance on blood tests.

Johnston’s unquenchable thirst for the designer brand of NCLB Kool-Aid is enough to make true educators lose their insatiable appetite for teaching. He applauds that “states have developed the sophisticated data systems needed to measure…effectiveness.” He does not want to “prop up the status quo.”

Because “status quo” is a wet putty concept that means whatever people with conflicting views scheme it to mean to suit their aims, that adaptable abstraction is ideally fit for artificially unifying opposing camps. Very convenient.

But sure enough Johnston gives himself away by fulminating against seniority (I wonder whether he opposes seniority among members of Congress) and union contracts. He feels they “don’t make sense” because they keep experienced teachers on the job at the expense of “energetic” ones and they cause “inefficiency” in budgeting.

He cites, without disclaimer, the New Teacher Project. This innocuous sounding outfit is a notorious client of “reformist” school systems and union busters. It is not a legitimate and impartial source of research and it is an authority on nothing other than its self-aggrandizement. The NTP is highly suspicious and condemns the high percentage of satisfactory performance ratings earned by teachers. They interpret it as evidence that “excellence goes unrecognized, professional development needs go unmet, and poor performance goes unaddressed.”

From an unimpeachable source of warped logic.

Johnston’s stand on NCLB and special education is calculatingly naive and dense with gall. He says that “NCLB has changed the game for students with disabilities…They’re no longer invisible in state accountability systems,-which means they are finally getting more of the attention they deserve.”

Almost every special education teacher in the nation can testify to the falsity of this claim. Such irony. Such paradox. Such contradiction. Such cynicism.

The truth is that special education students are getting less attention than ever. Their needs are being neglected, services denied to them and deprivations concealed from them, their parents and teachers, on an unprecedented scale. Principals in  public school systems like New York City are given incentives and, indirectly, bonuses, for treating special education kids as second-class students.

To make sure that teachers don’t rest on their laurels, Johnston has pulled them out like rugs from under them. He appears to have renewed his long-term subscription to the Journal for Pseudo-Research, claiming that the “major reasons that students chose to drop out was that classes were not interesting,” not “because they couldn’t do the work,” or, presumably, unmentionable socio-economic factors.

NCLB is massively flawed but salvageable, although Johnson’s formula is doomed to fail even if it passes legislatively.Great transformations are possible in human and natural history. After all, ancient dinosaurs have been “salvaged” into modern pigeons.

So there’s hope for NCLB. Shall we throw a few crumbs to the reformers?

Tagged: evaluations, NCLB, Obama

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