It’s looking like a mutually beneficial deal is coming soon in the Chicago teacher strike, and I’m glad if so. Matt Yglesias has a post up that I think is really worth reading. One of the things that I’ve been trying to tease out in this discussion is a contradiction within the conventional, shall we say, market friendly progressive take. Many in the ed reform world both a) claim that American teaching is suffering from a serious dearth of talent and b) oppose the Chicago teacher union in their strike. I find this problematic, particularly when it comes from those who typically express value in purely monetary terms: if you think that a given occupation has failed to attract talented enough workers, simultaneously arguing to make the job worse is counterproductive. Yglesias avoids this, to his considerable credit, by arguing that the teachers are well paid and deserving.
As he says
What I think this drives home is that not only is Chicago compensating its teachers unusually generously, but Chicago is right to do so. The national average teacher is paid a low amount for a college graduate, which is not a smart way to try to attract and retain the best possible teachers. Chicago, by being unusually generous, is offering a level of compensation that seems modestly above average for a college graduate. That’s exactly what I would want to see from my city—a real effort to invest the money necessary to hire and retain quality people.
One thing Yglesias might have mentioned is that, by almost any measure, Chicago is a particularly difficult environment in which to teach. 90% of Chicago public school students are eligible for federal school lunch subsidies, and I don’t need to tell anyone the considerable educational disadvantage associated with low socioeconomic status. Chicago has also been subject to a recent spate of truly terrible violence, and has crime and violent crime rates that have not decline at the rates of many other major American cities. It’s a tough, tough job.
The question is where we go from here. Yglesias rightly identifies the issue of standardized testing as a major source of contention.
The city wants to make test-based, “value-added” models of teacher performance a very important part of retention and compensation policies. The union, reflecting the views of most classroom teachers, hates that idea. And here’s the crux of the matter. Chicago’s teachers aren’t living lives of luxury, but the city really is investing in paying them an above-average amount. Now it wants to ensure that it’s not just investing a lot of money but investing that money in quality. Chicago teachers don’t want to be subjected to that kind of regime and reject the premise that the test-based model the city’s elected officials favor is a good proxy for quality.
Again, credit where due: this is a fair and evenhanded gloss. And it really is the rub: what portion of a student’s educational output is student-derived and what portion is teacher-derived? My frustration with a lot of education reformers is that they, at an extreme, find that question somehow disqualifying in and of itself, or otherwise treat it as a dodge, a ruse, or a kind of wagon circling. (Yglesias is occasionally guilty of the latter.) The trouble is that divining the exact mixture is, well, really goddamn hard. Probably impossible on a per-student basis; the confounding variables are just too numerous. For myself– and I will risk saying that my opinion is not uneducated– I am confident both that the teacher side of the mix for the average student is far from nothing, but also that the general assumption places far too much power in the hands of teachers to determine student outcomes. I also believe that the mixture is probably not static or universal. Literacy skills, in particular, are likely dependent on students meeting certain thresholds of relevant exposure at a particular age. It’s possible, in other words, that an energetic and bright teacher might have a huge impact on a student who has already developed the prerequisite reading skills but have essentially no chance with a student who lacks them.
Yglesias’s economic intuitions, which frequently contribute to really valuable analysis of current events, fail him here because of these dynamics. A teacher’s control over his students just isn’t the same as a factory worker’s control over a widget. That’s why, for example, merit pay has such a poor track record. (Here’s an informative blog post, written by someone who is frequently critical of teacher unions.) I truly believe that a large part of a better educational discourse is just getting past analogy to conventional economics.
gelfling545
Why does your doctor get paid whether you get better or not? Because there are too many factors outside his/her control to assure outcome and the patient’s compliance with the doctor’s advice cannot be guaranteed. (Think about all that diet & exercise advice they give to no avail.) If a doctor loses many patients s/he may be less competent or s/he may just be treating the more seriously ill segment of the population. People tend to get this about medical practice, they rarely grasp that it applies to any field in which the “patient”‘s compliance and the seriousness of his/her condition impacts on outcome.
schrodinger's cat
Can’t get the Yglesias love of our new front pagers, the other one is BF (Bernard F). Especially on economic matters. MY is not that much better than McMegan and her infamous calculator.
Jefe Le Gran
My wife is a teacher and I’ve had this exact conversation with her several times. I work in the tech industry and we have a similar problem of being evaluated by folks who don’t necessarily understand what it is that makes us good at our job. In the end, it basically boils down to if your metrics don’t measure the results you’re trying to achieve, you’re not going to get those results. In the tech industry, we solve this problem largely by peer reviews but as my wife points out, her peers aren’t in her classroom. It’s a tough problem and I suspect that most teachers aren’t opposed to the idea of accountability, but just don’t trust the metrics that they’re being held accountable to.
The Moar You Know
As a teacher’s spouse, I can tell you in one word what the biggest problem in education is today:
Parents.
The kids are willing to learn, the teachers are willing to teach, the parents want total control in how teachers do their jobs, and want their kids to receive nothing but “A” grades no matter how bad they fuck up.
Here’s one interaction with names withheld:
“Ma’am, your child tried to burn down my classroom. (he really did, it was not a prank or playing with a lighter, the little fucker had a backpack full of accelerants and wood chips, lit it, a wall of the room wass on fire when the firefighters and cops showed up, and he was hauled off by the police and charged with arson) He won’t be allowed to make up the homework he missed while being on suspension.”
“FUCK YOU BITCH I PAY YOUR SALARY”
It’s gone to litigation.
MattR
You should have put this closer to the top of the article so I knew not to waste my time reading the whole thing
Litlebritdifrnt
@gelfling545:
That is an excellent point and very well put. As the wife of a teacher I can tell you that there are huge discrepancies in outcome depending on how engaged the parent(s) is or are. My DH is a band director, so generally he has very engaged parents (and in some cases grand parents too), but that is not always the case and if parents simply look at the school system as a glorified baby sitter and don’t take an active role in the education of their child then there is pretty much nothing a teacher can do about it.
penpen
Yesterday Halperin criticizes Romney. Today, Freddie praises Yglesias. What is going on? Surely mass hysteria is right around the corner.
Beauzeaux
There are times when I think I might not support a strike (any strike) but the people attacking the strike are always worse than the strikers.
Litlebritdifrnt
@The Moar You Know:
Of course that is the flip side of the coin to the disengaged parents. The helicopter parents are an absolute nightmare.
Villago Delenda Est
I’m afraid education, like health care, is one of those areas where “market based solutions” just don’t work right, because education and health care are not like apples, oranges, loaves of bread, pins, stereos, Buicks…
Need I go on?
schrodinger's cat
In addition to Yglesias’s calculator, his spell checker also usually has gastritis.
Darkrose
Just out of curiosity, I did a little math (which is hard for me, okay?). In 1985, my mother, a Chicago Public School teacher with a master’s degree and around 20 years service, was making $35,000 a year*. In today’s money, that would be roughly $77,000.
Now, we lived in a relatively nice, but old condo on the far South Side. I went to a Catholic high school which charged tuition. We weren’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, nor would we have been even without my father’s pension. But we certainly weren’t rich. $35/$77k in Chicago is a decent amount of money, but we’re not talking the 1% here.
All of which is completely irrelevant to the actual facts of the strike, which isn’t about salaries. It’s about, as you mentioned, using standardized tests to measure teacher performance without accounting for the conditions in which the teachers are working. And it’s about the kids. Great, you want them to spend more time in school? So where’s the money for air-conditioning in the Chicago summer heat? Are you going to fix the literally crumbling buildings and plumbing that hasn’t been kept up to code? What about tossing in a little money so teachers don’t have to buy school supplies for their students out of their own pockets?
Strangely, the liberaltarians are quiet on those questions.
* She was on the year-round plan, which meant that her total salary was pro-rated over 12 months, instead of only getting paid for 9. This was so we could, you know, eat.
flukebucket
I heard a Chicago teacher yesterday explaining that he has 41 students in a class with no air conditioning in over 90 degree heat and that a portion of those students are special needs students and that he has been teaching for over 10 years and does not make $75,000 per year that supposedly all of them make.
And then the seven figure per year bastards get out there and swear that they are the ones that are for the children and that the overpaid teachers should be ashamed of themselves.
It just gets harder and harder to believe in the future of this planet and the people on it.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Litlebritdifrnt: You have a designated hitter?
scott
Yglesias fails not despite his “economic intuitions” but because of them. Mainstream economics and modern progressive “wonkery” think they describe the world and the interactions of people through numbers and mathematical formalism without asking too many pointed questions about whether those measures realistically match up to what actually happens. This naive faith extends to what you rightly point out is a real can of worms about how, whether, and how accurately you can tease out what a teacher’s performance contribution is versus what stems from the students’ own economic and social backgrounds, the school facilities, the curriculum the administrators decided upon, etc. In conventional economics, when people want to push a point of view but lack the empirical data, they fall back on assumptions/prejudcies/models (equlibrium, perfect information, rational expectations) that help them do that. Yglesias falls back on his suspicions that the road to school reform leads through confrontations with hidebound and irrationally resistant teachers’ unions. The problem I have with Yglesias is that he talks a good game, about being an objective guy looking for the truth, but he demonstrably isn’t and likes to make really sweeping proposals and claims based on limited information. That doesn’t make him a wonk; it makes him a pundit, entitled to the respect that a pundit deserves.
Ethan Gach
@The Moar You Know:
“The kids are willing to learn.” What? Did you go to school? Have you been near a school? Does the average student wake up in the morning beaming, thinking I can’t wait to go to school and get me some of that education? You’ll have to unpack the phrase “willing” for me.
@Freddie:
What’s dissappointed me the most about the coverage this week is that the wonkish class has decided to spend so much time on the pay issue when both sides on the ground had already agreed that that wasn’t the issue.
The real issue is how should the power to fire/hire teachers, and decide their level of compensation, be divided among the stakeholders, and what part evaluations through test scores/performance assesments should play in that.
And yet for all of their wonkery, neither Matthews nor Yglesias, or even commentators like Drum and Kristof, have attempted to crunch the research numbers and make a case for what that split should be, or even offer their preliminary findings so that others can have that debate (as they were all happy to do with Chicago teacher salaries).
When your schtick is numbers, charts, and graphs, everything looks like a plot point or calculation. Everything else that’s not as easily broken down in that way get’s left aside.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@schrodinger’s cat:
Agreed. This is the guy who thinks Khan Academy can replace centuries of educational tradition.
Also never understood why someone who’s never had a job outside of media gets paid to be the ‘economics correspondent’ for Slate. Even McMegan has an MBA and a little bit of private sector experience.
Getting back on-topic, Boston has finally come to an agreement with the teachers’ union after two years of negotiation. All parties sound satisfied, at least in public.
jl
There is no argument or evidence relevant to the question in Yglesias’ post. All of that is devoted to showing that the Chicago teachers are not paid slave wages.
Yglesias’ merely asserts, with no argument, no evidence, no link, nothing, that the Chicago bigwigs know how to evaluate teachers, and they know best.
I have to deal with value added models, and such like since evaluation comes up where I work. Value added statistical models do try to account for teaching environment, history of student success, etc. But these statistical models involve tricky complicated and very debatable statistical whizzbang stuff, and they can certainly be rigged to get the result somebody wants.
I don’t see what econ 101 models have to do with it. I see Yglesias throwing out red herrings and then adding a few sentences of argument by (what exactly?) authority.
Find some readable articles by people like James Heckman, or start looking through Andrew Gelman’s blog for posts and links. Yglesias has zip to say that is worth reading, at least if this post is evidence.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Darling (or Damn) Husband depending on the circumstances. :)
srv
@The Moar You Know: Couple years back, preK kid came into class, greeted my sister, and added “Gram wants you to know she has a gun” and walked to his desk.
And that’s one of the funnier ones.
But I am really dissapoint with BJ. The best progressive Obama had, Rahm, can’t look to support from his fanbase here. Guess they’ve gone all Firebagger.
SBJules
I read(somewhere??) that the teachers were going in each morning so that the students could eat breakfast. Why doesn’t Mitt do something useful & pay for school meals for kids all over this nation.
Arclite
Speaking of schoolchildren, this really got my goat this morning:
Woman drives on sidewalk to avoid schoolbus stop sign.
It’s one of those things when you watch it you can’t believe it’s happening, and cannot relate at all to the person committing the act. It’s simply unbelievable.
The Moar You Know
@Ethan Gach: I wrote my assertion in English, did I not? Perhaps yours needs some remedial work. Your attitude sure does, it drips contempt for the entire idea of public education. I’m willing to bet you’re some kind of self-proclaimed libertarian idiot.
The kids, at least my wife’s district (and mine as we both grew up here) are very willing to learn anything a teacher’s willing to teach. They like school. I know it’s not like that everywhere, but that’s one of the benefits of living in a school district that can afford little things like building maintenance – the kids, by and large, actually want to go to school. I sure did.
weaselone
From what I have seen regarding value added assessment models for teaching, the test can identify outliers, but is not particularly useful for differentiating the performance of the vast bulk of teachers. Even for the outliers identified, it would still be essential to identify the reasons through further assessment. Is some several stand deviations above the mean an awesome teacher, or are their other factors at play possibly including cheating.
The year to year variability is also extremely high in most cases. Unless you believe that an individual teacher’s ability fluctuates significantly from year to year and often even from class to class, it should cause some concern regarding it’s appropriatness as a factor in yearly assessments.
Corey
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Where has he ever suggested that “Khan Academy can replace centuries of educational tradition.”?
Yglesias has this incredible ability to inspire people to put all kinds of words in his mouth. It’s seriously impressive.
Gex
We have cultural issues here that are problematic too. Being smart still isn’t cool, no matter how much ground nerd culture is has emerged.
And we have parents who are way more likely to always side with their kid over other adults, including teachers.
I would hazard to guess that the culture in a student’s home is more influential than the teachers. Students have a wide range of teachers throughout their careers. They have the same parents the entire time.
Corey
Finally Freddie, an invective-free post without the use of the word “neoliberal”. This is you at your best.
I too am skeptical of the rigor of quantitative teacher evaluation. But there’s some evidence that value-added models can account for improved educational and life outcomes (Chetty, et al).
If this finding is replicated, and it turns out that we can significantly improve the teacher pool by using those models, will you change your mind? Lots of leftists say no, that any possibility for error in the models would lead to some teachers being unjustly fired, and that that’s too high a price to pay. What do you think?
srv
@Arclite: Yield is a function of the roadway. She did not fail to yield in a technical sense.
It’s people like you who can’t recognize real innovations in our society and want to hold people back. Maybe you should put some Pink Floyd on and try to learn something other than blind obedience to the state.
Redshift
Or, to extend the analogy, if you have a supplier sending you raw materials of highly variable quality, give your factory workers little flexibility in how they do their job, and retain or fire them based on solely the quality of their output, you shouldn’t be surprised if your business doesn’t do well.
Andrey
@Ethan Gach: Of course kids are willing to learn. Kids love learning. It’s an integral and natural childhood instinct. Kids absorb knowledge and skills like a sponge.
The problem is that kids don’t love to study. They don’t love memorizing, they don’t love rote repetition. They also don’t love routines and strict schedules.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SBJules:
__
Because you start doing that and pretty soon one of the little fuckers is all up in yur grill saying “Please, sir, I want some more?” and creating a scene. And we can’t be having that now, can we?
The Moar You Know
@srv: Same thing happened to a friend of mine teaching up in SF, the difference being the young scamp HAD a gun with him. A freaking first grader! That was her first and last year as a teacher.
Sly
.
Half of all teachers quit the profession in five years. The annual national turnover rate is 16%, with 20% among teachers in urban areas. And privatization doesn’t make it any better; a UC Berkeley study found that the annual turnover rate among charter school teachers in Los Angeles hit 50% every year over a six year period.
So, by all means, let’s make those figures worse.
Josie
@The Moar You Know: Three guesses as to why that child felt like setting fire to something. But, seriously, folks, many parents spend so little time or energy actually taking care of their kids, they go off on teachers just to make themselves feel better. It’s sort of like the types who buy kids everything to make up for being shitty parents.
Spaghetti Lee
One of my mom’s favorite stories (she teaches in a neighborhood that’s got some crime, but she’s not in real danger), is the kid who stole her cell phone and proceeded to…show all the other kids on the bus. Criminal masterminds, our town haz them.
Joshua
Regardless of how well or poorly standardized testing accounts for a teacher’s individual performance, I really don’t believe the “pay-for-performance” models so dear to ed reformers are likely to make much difference. Money incentives run counter to everything management researchers have learned about how to retain good employees and motivate them to do better. They’re just a crude tool that generally doesn’t do anything to improve performance.
Gex
@Joshua: Problem is, that is THE only motivator for the MBA types who run things these days.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Gex:
That is what pisses off the teachers, they waltz into the classroom holding their clipboards and pencils and evaluate the teachers performance while never having taught a day in their lives.
Arclite
@srv:
I can’t decide if you’re being snarky or serious.
Spaghetti Lee
@Litlebritdifrnt:
People who have never been, say, cops or soldiers or engineers generally don’t presume how to tell those people to do their jobs. But some private equity asshole who hasn’t been in a classroom since he left grad school in ’83 always seems to think he knows how to teach better than every teacher.
The Moar You Know
@Gex: This is some weird generational thing I don’t get (I’m in my mid-40s). If I’d backtalked a teacher as a child, I’d have been backhanded across the room. My parents never even spanked me, but there was a line which I knew I could not cross and that was one of them.
If I’d tried to burn down the building I’d have lost some teeth or worse. And my parents would have offered to pay for the damages in full even if it bankrupted us.
Now they sue because the arsonist/murderer wannabe doesn’t get an “A”? Fuck, I just do not understand at all.
FlipYrWhig
@Sly: That’s the whole thing right there, IMHO. Let’s say you come up with a perfect evaluation system that accurately identifies the bottom tier of all teachers. If you fire them, or penalize them, or slowly but surely shame them out of the profession, who exactly is going to replace them? It’s not like people are banging down the doors trying to get that sweet, sweet teacher gig. I don’t get what comes next after determining who the worst performers are.
japa21
2 comments for the price of one:
For work reasons I was talking with someone in Alabama yesterday who, when she found out I am in one of Chicago’s suburbs immediately brought up the strike and how horrible it was, and how the teachers should think about the kids. By the time I was done explaining about the real reasons for the strike, that it wasn’t salary based, and explained that although the teachers have agreed in principle to having evaluations done but that they didn’t want it to be by some standardized test which didn’t take into account all the various factors, she was saying how she can understand why the teachers went on strike but hopes it is settled soon. Some people do listen and can change their minds when they have more information, even in Alabama.
Second comment, my son is a teacher in Chicago, but at a Catholic college prep high school. Because of its reputation, it has students travel up to 40 miles via train to go there. Although he has a PhD in history and has designed and taught some classes at Northwestern, he could not teach in the public schools in Illinois as he does not have an education degree. But, even though he is paid less than public school teachers and doesn’t have the same benefits, I think he would rather teach where he is, mainly because the percentage of motivated students is higher and parental involvement is higher. Not that he doesn’t have jerk students or jerk parents to deal with, but that there are not as many.
Corey
@FlipYrWhig: Most liberals pair their calls for better teacher assessment and accountability with a call for higher salaries, which they presume would help attract a more qualified teacher pool.
FlipYrWhig
@Corey: Well, OK, but when municipal and state budgets are strapped, that part just isn’t going to happen any time soon.
Jefe Le Gran
@FlipYrWhig: I’m a pointy-headed geek, so I firmly believe that if you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. The problem is that we’re measuring the wrong thing. My wife’s favorite statistic about standardized tests is that the #1 correlation with higher test scores is your parent’s income. The #2 correlation is your parent’s education. There’s nothing there about a teacher’s ability.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Andrey:
As a former student of a city public school system, allow me to add a condition: Kids are willing to learn if there is a reason for what’s being learned. Learning or attempting to learn because an authority says you should is no longer enough.
Kids aren’t naive, they see even the college-educated classes ahead of them struggling to find good-paying jobs. They sense that the antiquated equipment in their schools and the dearth of professional mentors in their community isn’t preparing them for a high-tech future. School is just something that a lot of city school kids have to muddle through on their way to adulthood.
The Moar You Know
@Josie: No clue and don’t care. He easily could have killed my wife. If you feel like guessing knock yourself out. I want his ass in jail.
Corey
@Jefe Le Gran: The argument that a teacher has no (or very little) influence in student achievement is an argument for lower teacher salaries.
dogwood
Parental involvement in schools helps with discipline and fostering student responsibility for the mechanics of being a student – i.e. doing homework assignments, making up work due to absenteeism, handing things in on time. However, important these things are, they are not enough. In 35 years of teaching, I can only recall a handful of times when a parent asked me about his or her child’s actual learning. They all asked about their child’s grade, however. Let’s face it, education isn’t valued in this country. One only has to look at who we admire to determine what we value. Teachers are one of the country’s scapegoats. I loved my job and didn’t much care how the public perceived me. But there isn’t much incentive for a top notch student to go into the teaching profession today.
As a side-note – The only time I ever found Lynn Cheney interesting was several years ago in an interview on CSPAN where she was promoting her memoir about growing up in Wyoming. At one point she talked about her schooling and all the fabulous teachers she had. She made the point that most of these great teachers were very erudite and accomplished women who didn’t have the career opportunities in the 40’s and 50’s that women have today. There is probably some truth to this.
Josie
@The Moar You Know: What I meant was that, with a parent with such a skewed sense of values, it’s no wonder that the child was a mess. I was a teacher/school librarian for thirty years. Many times the parents that raise a huge fuss over a valid punishment are not good parents and tend to have screwed up kids.
Gex
@The Moar You Know: I had to warn some neighborhood kids (grade school aged) not to hit me or my dog with rocks they were flinging around.
The following week I was known as “hairy-cock c#nt bitch.” I would like to speak to the parents, but my instinct is that parents who raise children who would speak to adults like that aren’t going to side with an adult over their kids.
Shawn in ShowMe
@FlipYrWhig:
Hey, after I win my district seat running on “holding teachers accountable,” that’s for the next schmuck to figure out. But I’m sure it will involve more teacher purification purges and replacing them with Teacher for America younguns’ making 28,000 a year, with sex ed being taught by Susan G. Komen volunteers.
R-Jud
@dogwood:
That, and we don’t know what education is FOR. Is it a massive job training program? Or is it intended to produce people capable of serving on juries, being elected representatives, and all the other stuff that makes a democracy go?
There’s no question there is truth to that. Pretty much any history of public education in the US mentions the fact that in the past, the teaching profession was full of smart women blocked from working elsewhere by institutional sexism. When the blocks came down, they left.
The lingering notion that teaching is mere women’s work probably poisons a lot of people’s perception of the profession to this day.
Gex
@R-Jud: And influences our willingness to pay. I was just thinking about nursing and teaching. Both hugely important. Both originally “women’s work.” Both terribly underpaid.
R-Jud
@Gex: Definitely.
Jefe Le Gran
@Corey: While I would *never* argue for lower teacher wages or against raising teacher salaries. You’ll notice that the sticking points in the strike in Chicago are not salaries. The sticking points are the evaluation system and the conditions of the classrooms.
People love to point out that the US is falling behind in education, but most have no interest in looking for root causes.
Dennis SGMM
@Spaghetti Lee:
This. Education is a sequential process and it involves too many variables for any teacher’s success or failure to be subject to quick and easy quantification. My limited experience was that some teachers reach and educate portions of their students very well. The rest of the class just wasn’t reached and became even more disaffected. The class was then handed off to the next teacher with both the good and bad elements intermixed. If one youngster or another was a “pistol” that would be passed on. Otherwise, it was up to the next one in line to determine the nature of the class and the best way to teach them.
Dan
I hate to read Matt because of his take on education matters. If he actually says something that makes sense, it will be a first about education.
Shawn in ShowMe
@R-Jud:
Our educational system isn’t monolithic. What education is for depends a lot on who is being educated. For years, despite the best efforts of the teachers, the Chicago public school system has served as 1)day care center for elementary school children 2)a talent showcase for college basketball coaches 3)a warehouse for futureless teenagers, until they became fair game for one of the few growth industries in this country, the prison system.
Want to improve education in the Chicago Public schools? Move some labor-intensive companies into their local communities. Give their parents some decent-paying jobs so their kids don’t have to work after school at McDonald’s to make ends meets.
John
@The Moar You Know:
Complete nonsense. Public education in areas where there are insufferable helicopter parents is generally pretty good. The places where we have failing public schools are overwhelmingly the places where most parents take little to no interest in their children’s education.
wenchacha
Some kids are messed up very nearly before their parents ever conceive them. Certainly, after conception, there is plenty that can happen to the pregnant woman that will affect her fetus in a positive or negative way.
There are days when I want a Nanny State that makes sure babies get all their Dr visits, all their shots, healthy foods, fresh air, and loving parents to read to them every day from the time they are infants. Back in my day, I saw plenty of kids in my all-white, rural PA school classes who didn’t have many of those benefits. I can probably rattle off a list of a couple dozen of them who had learning disorders of some kind.
Today, maybe more of the learning disorders are identified, but who is nurturing each child at home? How messed up are the parents, or how weary are the grandparents or other guardians who raise the child? Who helps the child with problems like having a parent in prison, or on drugs, or in a gang, or mentally ill, or just too stressed out by poverty to give much more than a shit about raising a child?
The Moar You Know
@Shawn in ShowMe: Our district won’t hire them anymore. They have proven to be an utter disaster in the classroom.
Who would have guessed that taking kids who had never gone through a teaching program and jamming them into a school with no preparatory instruction whatsoever would prove to be a problem?
matryoshka
@dogwood: I think you’d really enjoy Corey Robin’s post today.
http://coreyrobin.com/
Amusing Alias
For many years I worked for an educational testing company developing standardized tests for K-12 (well, not really for K of course, but we did test first graders in some states). I can testify that no standardized test or aggregate of test scores is a valid measure of teacher performance or competence. This is statistical malpractice. It’s like using a thermometer to determine your shoe size.
Testing companies aren’t going to complain, because they want to sell more tests, but university education and mathematics departments should be up in arms. That they aren’t is a scandal.
The Moar You Know
@John: You are correct in that these schools are not “failing”, although their test scores are slowly going down every year. These schools are going bankrupt, and losing good teachers and administrators every year.
These parents are costing millions of dollars a year, not to mention hundreds of hours of teacher, administration, and lawyer’s hours to force the district to cater to their demands (ever hear of an IEP? Look it up.) money that the district simply does not have any longer – but they have to pay it.
Meanwhile, English classes now have 45 kids per class on average and they’re not getting any smaller. Eventually these schools will too become failing schools.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Corey:
I swear to Gorak the Mighty Potato God that I read a post of his on his pre-Slate blog a couple of years and came away with that impression, strongly.
However, I’ve googled, and you know what? I can’t find it. So I must be mistaken. Apologies.
BTW, his latest article on the subject is here, from only a few days ago. And I agree with most of it (I’d worry about accreditation and the potential for scams).
Asgard
I have made a living in the K-12 testing industry for most of my adult life. I worry that pols underestimate the amount of person-hours that go into making a valid assessment: writers, content experts, editors, art staff, manufacturing. How many people are we going to fire in a period of unemployment? Why does no one seem to understand that demand drives the economy, not availability of goodies no one can afford?
I understand psychometrics better than your average Joe, and I can tell you that, in my opinion, the problem isn’t that kids are getting tested, it’s that the faculties of these schools are making it a big deal. And I get it. The bugaboo is “high stakes” testing. That’s when you must make sure the kids get a good breakfast, and the cafeteria will have extra ketchup for lunch (do they still call it a vegetable?). But blaming testing is no more helpful than blaming teachers.
Children should all eat well every day. And they shouldn’t see “TEST DAY” as the apocalyptic event their institutions unintentionally foster.
grandpa john
@Amusing Alias: Any classroom teacher with a few years experience will tell you the same thing about the current testing rage.
Problem here is like in many other areas the people who know don’t get asked, and the administrations won ‘t involve them in the decision making process.And yes standardized testing has become a giant money making ripoff the deprives schools of money that could be put to much greater use.
Many colleges are now backing off of placing a high degree of acceptance on SAT/ACT scores. They still use them but the have found what high school teachers could have told them, high test scores on SAT/ACT are not in many cases indicative of high achievement levels in college
I fault no teacher who is not willing to be held completely accountable for their students grades based on scores on some test that the had no input in creating
Corey
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Please, no worries. Like I said, the guy just inspires this in people for some reason. The internet is full of people today who swear he said teachers should work for 20% more hours and 4% less pay (he actually believes the opposite).
I’m not really sure why – people just don’t relate to the bloodless technocratism anymore, i suppose.