I have been critical of “Reformists” with their mantras of greater teacher accountability, putting greater pressure on teachers in order to make them shape up, and firing some as an example to the rest. And I still am critical of this approach. They always seem to come down to the conclusion that the single, intractable problem with American education today is the teachers. Solutions, proposed and implemented, are usually punitive in tone and brutal in degree. For example, the Los Angeles Times used school district test results to identify the “worst” teachers and publish their names and pictures in the paper. This has always seemed to me to have little to do with “reform” or “accountability,” and everything to do with Terror: “See what we can do to you, and there will be absolutely nothing you will be able to do to help yourself!” This kind of intimidation may have its political uses, cowing a faculty, for example, but it is not going to be much of a positive motivator. It is unfortunate but not surprising that teachers and their union, witnessing such gratuitous cruelty, see “evaluation,” like “reform,” as an enemy.
And I have been critical of Bill Gates as another Billionaire Bearing Gifts, a Reformist who uses his wealth and influence to mould the nation’s schools to serve his own social, political, ideological, and ultimately financial agendas.
So it is that I was a bit surprised that some of the things Gates said actually make sense. He feels that a recent New York Court of Appeals decision that teacher evaluations may be made public is a mistake. The idea is to help teachers be better, and making personnel records public is not conducive to frank and open discussion; it is not constructive criticism.
A supposed benefit is to inform parents which teachers are good, which are bad, and whose classes to get their kids into, and which to avoid. Which families will be accommodated and which will not? But having parents competing against each other for slots in the “best” teacher’s classes is a “zero-sum game,” Gates says. It works against the kind of honest feedback that will improve teachers’ capability.
Gates is also critical of the primary emphasis on test scores in evaluation. For one thing, test scores are poor diagnostic instruments: they do not tell a teacher what part of what he is doing is/is not working. Actual observation of teacher practice is much more useful. Student feedback has potential as well. He says that we need to get serious about all aspects of teacher evaluation. The idea is to help teachers improve their practice.
I think that Reformists’ fixation on test scores as the primary if not sole evaluator is a result of the Streetlight Fallacy. It is easy and seems obvious. But if we really want to find ways to improve instruction, we need to figure out how to look in the shadows back down in the middle of the block where the lost keys actually are.
Nobody benefits more from well-conceived, well-executed teacher evaluation than teachers themselves. Accomplished teachers get validation. Less-accomplished teachers get constructive guidance. Anyone who has been on either end of the evaluation transaction realizes neither the conception nor the execution is simple because teaching is a complex endeavor, more so than most Reformists seem willing to acknowledge. Gates says that he had an excellent education. What did it consist of that may/may not have been different from somewhere else? How was it delivered that may/may not have been differently than might have been done somewhere else? What made Bill Gates’ education better than Jimmy Stiles’ across town? Besides the big, obvious things, what are the myriad less-obvious variables that may or may not make a difference? Complex.
As with most complex undertakings, the devil is in the details. What do we evaluate? How do we evaluate it? Who does the evaluating? What are the criteria and who defines them? How often? What is done with the results? How much time can we devote to Evaluation before it starts to interfere with actual instruction becomes otherwise counter-productive? What is the relationship between evaluating students’ learning and evaluating teachers’ instruction? You know, details. Unlike most Reformists, Politicians or otherwise, Bill Gates seems at least to have a clue.