Obama's Town Hall Remarks on "Effective Teachers": Your Take?

by Clay Burell

Published April 03, 2009 @ 03:41AM PT

Part Two on Obama's Online Town Hall Meeting - this one on the subject of "defining effective teachers." [Part One, "Obama's Remarks on Charter Schools," here.]

Q Thank you. I'm from Overbrook High School. I have to say that, because I know all the children are watching. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: All right. Hello, Overbrook. (Laughter and applause.) There you go.

Q Thank you. [...] [S]ince this is a major part of your budget plan and platform: Definitions of effective teachers -- how do you plan to define [that]? And are you willing to have teachers on the platform, in the committees, as a part of developing those plans?

THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely. Well, as I said, the teachers are the most important person in the education system. So if we don't have teacher buy-in, if they're not enthusiastic about the reforms that we're initiating, then, ultimately, they're not going to work. So we've got to have teacher participation in developing these approaches.

I'd argue the administrators and politicians setting policy, curriculum, class size, teacher pay, and working conditions are every bit as important as teachers - and that the students and their families are as important as well. Obama has done well emphasizing the need for parental involvement in their children's education, but could say more about how those parents working multiple jobs can be expected to play such an active role.

I'd also argue that so far, the Duncan DoE has given more power to the corporate world than to the educational. Lots of Gates and Broad staffers in the DoE, no place for Linda Darling-Hammond or others from the education world.

In terms of teachers, how we measure performance -- as I said before, I have been a critic of measuring performance just by the administering of a single high-stakes standardized test during the year, and then the teacher is judged. And that was, I think, the biggest problem with No Child Left Behind. It basically said that you just go in -- (applause) -- here's the standardized test, we'll see how the kids are doing; and because it doesn't even measure progress, you could have a very good teacher or a very good school in a poor area where test scores have typically been low, and they are still punished even though they're doing heroic work in a difficult situation.

--So this seems at bottom a plug for "value-added," "growth model" tests that measure individual students' test scores year to year, and assumes the students of "good teachers" show strong progress, and those of "bad teachers" don't. It sounds good on the surface, but this comment from an EdWeek post suggests the pitfalls of implementation (click "read more" for the rest):

There is absolutely no way around the reality that schemes to measure teachers' effectiveness based on students' test scores are fatally flawed. Teachers work in teams called schools where students' learning is the responsibility of many teachers and professionals during a single academic year and year after year as they progress up through the grades. What if Teacher B's great test scores in third grade are really due to Teacher A in second grade's effective teaching? What if social study Teacher C's growth in test scores in her subject are explained by English Teacher D's work with students in increasing their critical reading skills? Obviously these plans favor elementary over secondary teachers because elementary teachers have one group of students all day for all subjects vs. secondary teachers who see 5-6 different groups of students. Students' learning curves are not a straight up even curve, & there is no way to account for slow-downs or spurts that are unrelated to teachers' effectiveness. It's all nonsense! I can't wait for the day when we stop these seemingly endness futile conversations.

We can add more pitfalls: What if I have ten more students in my class than the other teacher? What if my class is full of lower-achieving students due to scheduling details? What if I have more ELLs or special needs students?

Back to Mr. Obama:

The other problem is that you started seeing curriculums and teachers teaching to the test -- not because they want to, but because there's such a huge stake in doing well on these tests that suddenly the science curriculum, instead of it being designed around sparking people's creativity and their interest in science, it ends up just being, here's the test, here's what you have to learn -- which the average kid is already squirming enough in their seat; now they're thinking, well, this is completely dull, this is completely uninteresting. And they get turned off from science or math or all these wonderful subjects that potentially they could be passionate about.

What Obama doesn't mention is that NCLB has tested math and reading, not science or civics or the arts or character or anything else, since its inception. The result of this has often been a narrowing of curriculum to those two high-stakes subjects, at the expense of all others. How is NCLB to remedy this: more high-stakes tests for all other subjects - and more teaching to those tests?

So what we want to do is not completely eliminate standardized tests -- there's a role for standardized tests. All of us have taken them and they serve a function. We just don't want it to be the only thing. So we want to work with teachers to figure out how do we get peer review, how do we have evaluation -- I was just talking to Bill Gates yesterday and he was talking about the use of technology where you can use videos to look at really successful teachers and how they interact with their students, how they're monitoring students, et cetera, and then you bring in the teachers at the end of the day and, just like a coach might be talking to his players about how you see how on that play you should have been here and you could have done that -- same thing with teachers.

But they don't get that feedback. Usually, especially beginning teachers are completely isolated. They're in this classroom -- they're sort of just thrown in to sink or swim. Instead, let's use a variety of mechanisms to assess and constantly improve teacher performance.

--Besides the added evidence that billionaires with no formal background in education are the experts having Obama-Duncan's ear on education policy, we can note that if actual educators like Linda Darling-Hammond had that sway, Mr. Obama might instead mention her study showing that teacher professional development in the highest-acheiving nations consists of more than Mr. Gates' video exercises (not a bad idea in themselves): they consist of less instruction time and more professional development time. We've written about that before. A re-cap from the Christian Science Monitor:

•In most European and Asian countries, about half of a teacher's workweek, 15 to 20 hours, is spent outside the classroom – preparing lessons, meeting with students and parents, and working with colleagues. In South Korea, teachers spend up to 65 percent of their working time outside the classroom. In Japan, teachers study one another's best lessons in groups and analyze the strengths and weaknesses.

•American teachers are typically given three to five hours a week for planning.

Mr. Obama goes on to an awkward moment in which his questioner won't play "yes-woman" to his leading question:

Now, one thing I have to say -- I know you'll admit this, although maybe you can't on TV, but in private I'll bet you'd admit that during the -- how long have you been teaching?

Q Fifteen years.

THE PRESIDENT: Fifteen years. Okay, so you've been teaching for 15 years. I'll bet you'll admit that during those 15 years there have been a couple of teachers that you've met -- you don't have to say their names -- (laugher) -- who you would not put your child in their classroom. (Laughter.) See? Right? You're not saying anything. (Laughter.) You're taking the Fifth. (Laughter.)

My point is that if we've done everything we can to improve teacher pay and teacher performance and training and development, some people just aren't meant to be teachers, just like some people aren't meant to be carpenters, some people aren't meant to be nurses. At some point they've got to find a new career.

And it can't be impossible to move out bad teachers, because that brings -- that makes everybody depressed in a school, if there are some folks -- and it makes it harder for the teachers who are inheriting these kids the next year for doing their job.

So there's got to be some accountability measures built in to this process. But I'm optimistic that we can make real progress on this front. But it's going to take some time. All right?

--"Remove bad teachers" is a slogan nobody can disagree with. I wish Obama had invited the teacher to explain her resistance to his frame, rather than laugh it off (the same way he laughed off the top question about marijuana law reform from his constituents), and then continue his monologue.

I posted recently some figures cited on CounterPunch suggesting there are little differences in teacher dismissals from unionized and non-unionized systems. Beyond that, though, I'll just add that the subtext here seems to involve the Obama administration's stance on organized labor in general. Obama's demands that the UAW make concessions to bring it in line with Japan's auto workers, for example, ignore the fact that Japan's national health care makes labor cheaper there than here - unless we accept that lower-paying jobs with no health insurance for working families is good enough for America. Obama's support for charter schools also draws into question his position on teacher unions.

It's too early to tell about all of this, I know. Surely much of Obama's behavior right now is geared toward winning a second term. And god knows, he's inherited the worst full plate since FDR. To his credit, he passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and he seems serious about improving health care costs, though along corporate neo-liberal more than traditionally progressive lines.

Anyway, your take on it all?