The Green Cup

A letter to the editor in the New Jersey Star-Ledger came to my attention this past weekend. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had been “listening” in the area, and he managed to say a few things as well. A retired teacher, Jane Ebihara, didn’t like some of what he said. So she worte the letter…

I found her on Facebook. I contacted her and got permission to reprint her letter. Here it is:

Education isn’t a sporting game

Education Secretary Arne Duncan thinks teacher pay should be tied to student performance just as sports teams are judged by “looking at their box score” (”Ed chief: Tie pay to student performance,” June 9). Well, let’s think about that.

When was the last time professional sports teams had to put everyone on the roster who simply showed up? When was the last time professional sports teams had players whose physical limitations made it impossible for them to keep up with the rest of the team, or whose emotional or mental disabilities made it difficult for them to even understand the rules of the game?

When was the last time coaches of those professional teams had not one team, but five and were allowed only 200 minutes a week to prepare each team for the big game?

Oh, and I’m sure that those same coaches understand that many of the players won’t be showing up for practice on a regular basis; some will come to practice hungry, depressed, distracted with family issues, and sleep deprived. But surely that won’t have any effect on those “box scores.”

Good that Duncan is no longer a student in someone’s classroom because with faulty logic like that, his teacher should surely expect to be looking at a cut in pay.

I’ve thought a lot about this issue and it seems to me that merit pay faces two profound delimmas.

First, what do we base it on? We could base it on a general standard. We could say, “Every teacher whose students average at least a 75 on the test this year gets the bonus” (or something like that). Depending on the school they’re in and the kids they start out with, some teachers would have to do almost nothing to get the bonus while others would certainly miss the bonus despite extraordinary efforts in the classroom. That seems unfair. Or we could say, “Every teacher whose students’ average score improves 10 points this year gets the bonus” (or something like that). Depending on the school they’re in and the kids they start out with, some teachers would get the bonus even though the average score in their classroom was a 50 while other teachers would miss out even though the average score in their classroom was 85. That seems unfair. And the real delimma is that we are in a situation nationally where every solution I’ve heard offered a.) generates some progress and b.) seems unfair to most people.

Second, how will we decide who gets credit for a child’s progress (or lack of progress)? If a child’s reading scores improve, the general education classroom teacher can probably take some of the credit. But there are also specialists in the building who go room to room, pull children for intervention, provide data that helps shape instruction and so on. They can take some of the credit as well. Is a specialist who only works in an intervention setting with children who have some academic problem going to be penalized for the problems those kids have (or rewarded when they make progress)? It all seems to run contrary to the idea that every faculty member in a school should feel responsible for the success or failure or every student in the school.

And maybe that’s the solution (or part of it, at least): corporate merit pay. I suspect that real peer accountability would not be far behind. And that would just leave us with the first dilemma: how to measure merit…

My friend Hugo Kerr (link courtesy of the International Reading Association) posted a quote from social scientist Daniel Yankelovich to the reading teachers listserv recently describing the McNamara Fallacy.

Robert Strange McNamara (his middle name was his mother’s maiden name) was U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967 under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. And during the Vietnam War he is supposed to have become obsessed with data.

Here’s the Yankelovich quote on McNamara’s approach to (evidently) most things…

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

Hugo (a Brit) posted it to the Reading Teachers listserv and commented that this “is precisely what is happening in literacy (and other) ‘education’ in the UK.” Of course, many Americans would say that it’s happening here, too…

One of those Americans is Al Franken. Franken is a comedian and political commentator who is currently running for the Senate in Minnesota. Franken says this: I believe that the No Child Left Behind law must be dramatically reformed or scrapped altogether. I’m for accountability, but I’m not for the deeply-flawed NCLB system.

The danger is that Franken and other opponents of No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on testing will probably win. That, by itself, would be okay. But it seems inevitable that tide of rebellion swelling up against NCLB will result in a move to the opposite extreme.

The problem is that there is nothing wrong with testing. We should keep right on testing. But how we interpret the results and what we do about those interpretations – that should change. The first step really is to measure what can be measured. It’s the rest of the process that’s a problem.

We need an amalgam of different forms of assessment – some sort of a fusion of the hard numbers we’re using now with more subjective factors. But more importantly, we need to decide how to balance an effort to provide fundamental educational services to the various communities represented in NCLB’s focus on disaggregating test data with the search for individual educational excellence and the effort to implement the new curriculum focus that is needed to cope with the 21st Century’s demands. Without that balance what we have is a stagnant curriculum designed to ensure generalized mediocrity.

Albert Einstein reportedly had a sign hanging in his Princeton office that read: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts!” I think we could add to that and say that not everything that counts today will still count tomorrow. That truth makes the enactment of laws about student assessment problematic (which is a fancy word for silly)…