One of the benefits of travel lies in reading newspapers from other parts of the country and learning what is going on there. So it was that when I opened the Denver Post of August 11, 2010, I saw the headline, “No gains on CSAPs.” The sub-head sums it up: “Despite high-profile efforts at reform, Colorado schools’ proficiency rates have stayed flat in recent years.” http://www.denverpost.com/education/ci_15736900
Things could (and should) have been better – scores up. On the other hand, things could have been worse – scores down. As it is, some great inertia held things on a more-or-less steady course, for better and for worse. It seems to me that in the first case, education leaders (rank-and-file, too) would have done well to leave off patting themselves on the back and have asked themselves “What, specifically, are we doing that is effective, how might we build on that strength, and how might we extend the same principles, where appropriate, to other areas.” In the second case, education leaders (rank-and-file, too) would have done well to leave off gnashing their teeth, rending their garments, and pointing their fingers at each other and have asked themselves “What, specifically, aren’t we doing that we might productively do, and/or what are we doing that is counter-productive, which therefore we should cease.” The third and present case is more complicated because both sets of questions apply equally and simultaneously. Reason would seem to dictate such approaches, complicated, tedious, and difficult though they may be.
But on the Opinion page, reason goes out the window, as it usually does when Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and Professors Who, of All People Ought to Know Better, begin to Pronounce. “Flat CSAP scores another sign that reform is crucial.” http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_15737495 Again, the sub-head sums it up: “Those who have been fighting education-reform efforts in Colorado are perpetuating a system that is not improving.” There you have it. Test scores are not improving because, although there are heroes who are valiantly fighting for education reform, there are villains who, for their own base motives, are cravenly fighting those noble efforts. This is good rhetoric. It is good argumentum ad populum. It reduces all sorts of complex issues to one: heroes vs. villains. People love heroes. People love to hate villains. People love the solidarity of “You’re with us or you’re against us.” This may be good rhetoric, but it is dubious basis for intelligent public policy. “For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is wrong.”
And so it is that we have “Those who found every way possible to criticize recent reform efforts would, essentially, perpetuate the same system that produced these scores, with the exception of putting more money into it.” The “villains’” motives would seem to be obstruction for the sheer hatred of anything better, as well as monetary interest. How despicable! Who are these villains? Teachers’ unions, no doubt.
“The state is counting on a range of reforms.” Some of these reform efforts are potentially worthwhile, “strategies to train Colorado’s 40,000 teachers in the state’s recently passed education standards,” for example. I would like to think that would include training teachers in working with students to achieve the standards. As a teacher of 44 years, I can see how this could accomplish good things. But we come back to other, more predictable standards of Reformist 4Ps such as “linking teacher evaluations to student academic progress.” There are lots of ways that student performance can and should be factored in to teacher evaluations, and ways evaluations can be factored into teacher compensation plans. The 4Ps usually preach “Pay for Performance” (the term “Merit Pay” having become shop-worn), by which they mean that a teacher’s pay should be directly tied to his students’ scores on the most recent standardized tests. Such an approach is simplistic, and where implemented generally creates more problems than it solves. (There are other approaches. For a starting point, see the Consortium for Policy Research in Education’s Teacher Compensation Research. http://cpre.wceruw.org/tcomp/research/index.php They tend, however, to lack the ideological directness craved by the Reformist 4Ps)
A news story that should be a springboard to rational discussion and considered action becomes, instead, an occasion for yet one more “Reformist” polemic.