Posts by Doug Noon
Crazy Talk
Published February 23, 2009 @ 10:00AM PT
Crazy Talk
Sec. of Education Arne Duncan believes that standards, incentives, and accountability will bring us to the educational promised land. He means business. Literally. Sec. Duncan now has $5 billion in incentive grants to give out, and he's relying on "help from career officers and consultants," to help him "tie teacher pay to classroom performance." He's seen amazing things happen, and he's learned a lot from his friend, Joe Klein. He wants:
...states to use other funds allocated in the stimulus package to adopt accountability-oriented reforms along the lines of some recent New York City initiatives, such as the creation of a comprehensive data system, called ARIS, and the introduction of a program that gives some teachers bonuses based on their students’ test scores.
His program is doomed. It's doomed because it's aimed at the wrong target, and it can't be fairly implemented. With test scores as the standard of excellence, very few teachers will be "incented" to apply themselves. We know that standardized tests measure students' backgrounds more than real learning. And we know that students with special needs require more time and attention than the achievers. We also know that, due to the fact that poor and affluent people tend to live in different neighborhoods, some schools serve more challenging populations than others. None of that is a matter of chance.
No amount of education will improve economic opportunities for people until they can look forward to good-paying jobs, health care, and decent places to live when they leave school. The cost of narrowly focusing on incentives for teacher quality without attending to other vital educational outcomes leads to what Richard Rothstein calls goal distortion, resulting in unintended consequences. His paper, Holding Accountability to Account details the perverse results that come from using performance incentives in the fields of health care, welfare administration, and other public and private policy domains.
Some highlights from a quick read of the paper:
- The notoriously inefficient Soviet economy used performance incentives as a regulatory mechanism (p. 13).
- Although risk adjustment in medicine is more sophisticated than controls for subgroups in education, health policy experts still see the inability to adjust medical performance incentive systems for risk as their greatest flaw (p. 32).
- In a variety of fields, clients more likely to be responsive to treatment are preferred. This is known as 'cream-skimming'. Schools of choice, such as charter schools, may use a variety of interview and recruitment procedures to discourage enrollment of difficult-to-educate students (p. 40).
- It is usually not possible to tell whether subgroups in some schools outperform the same subgroups in others because a great deal of important information about students, beyond race and lunch-eligibility, is not collected (p. 45).
Rothstein devotes a section of his paper to a discussion about intrinsic motivation, and cites the work of Edward Deci on self-determination theory. Management theorists have concluded that public employees tend to be more motivated by the goals of the organization than private sector employees, who are relatively more motivated by monetary rewards. This finding has powerful implications for any teacher incentive system.
Injecting business talk into the education public policy environment creates a toxic set of conditions. In Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, Neil Postman describes how certain kinds of talk contaminate our semantic environment, distorting complex situations beyond recognition, and contribute to a form of "collectivized nonsense".
The language of the business CEO is not appropriate to the purposes of public education, and it maintains an invasive presence there. Julia Whitty's investigation into What Invasive Species Are Trying to Tell Us suggests that we, humans, may be the leading invasive species planet-wide. Global capital, and the propaganda it generates, is a primary transport mechanism. Whitty opens with an anecdote:
Les Gibson takes me out to teach me how to hunt, which is what he calls fishing. Despite the fact that every public beach in Queensland, Australia, has been periodically closed this season due to blooms of box jellyfish, and despite the fearsome saltwater crocodiles living here, Les strides confidently into the bay with a pair of 10-foot-long bamboo spears and his wooden woomera, the multipurpose Aboriginal atlatl, or spear-thrower.When I ask him if he worries about jellyfish, he tells me Aborigines have a cure for the venom. Do scientists know about this cure? I ask. No, he says, they never ask us anything.
Indeed. Why should the "leaders" and "experts" ask teachers anything? They know all they need to know to maintain the collectivized nonsense that supports the disintegrating status quo.
Standardized Incoherence
Published February 06, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
[Doug Noon has been teaching in Fairbanks, Alaska since 1983. He teaches sixth-grade at Denali Elementary School, and holds a M.Ed. with a focus in language and literacy. He lives with his wife and family outside of Fairbanks. He blogs at Borderland. Welcome aboard, Doug. - Eds.]
The Obama administration's education agenda tells us that "America faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy." Business elites chime in. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and he had some advice for Barack Obama: “Go after the teacher unions.” The media picks it up, and it's stuck on reverb, repeating endless hollow variations on the themes of accountability, incentives, and choice.
When the big talk trickles down to the classroom, it's still only talk. I watch my sixth-graders as they spend time each week working with their kindergarten buddies - an arrangement in which we make time for the older and younger kids to get together. They count and read, play games, build things, or do craft projects - whatever needs doing that day. The kindergarten teacher wonders sometimes why so many kids start school as eager young explorers, and then gradually disengage as they move through the grades, either dropping out or learning to just get by.
The policy people and the business gurus tell us they have the answer. Everyone knows we need standards. So now we have content standards, performance standards, professional standards, proficiency standards, and even standards for parent involvement. We measure annual progress with standardized assessments. And to make sure we take them seriously, there are consequences. Management is measurement.
The economic argument for public education, with it's attendant call for increases in math and science expertise, has been with us since Sputnik - most of my life. Yet there is nothing "new" or progressive in any of it, other than the 21st Century prefix. Alfie Kohn takes a poke at the competitiveness agenda by asking why we should stop at mere 21st century skills:
Essentially, we can take whatever objectives or teaching strategies we happen to favor and, merely by attaching a label that designates a future time period, endow them (and ourselves) with an aura of novelty and significance. Better yet, we instantly define our critics as impediments to progress. If this trick works for the adjective “21st-century,” imagine the payoff from ratcheting it up by a hundred years.
Kohn says that "Education is first and foremost about being first and foremost. Therefore, we might as well trump the 21st-century folks by peering even further into the future."
Since rank has its privilege, the privileged still want to do the ranking. And so the geniuses who plunged the world into financial turmoil are using the crisis to sell people on the idea that teachers and unions are the problem. Why anyone would buy any of that is beyond me.
The 21st century education discourse is mired in contradictions. The standards movement is a backward push toward worn out conventions and basic skills, while the soaring rhetoric about global competitiveness calls for out of the box thinking. Teaching to the test constrains curriculum, while kids come to school needing and wanting to understand a world that is rapidly being wired for instant access. We need excellence and creativity, but we're willing to settle for minimum competency and compliance. The standards we lack are standards of coherence - standards to ensure that education is, above and beyond everything else, meaningful. How can any project succeed without the support of its beneficiaries?
The problem here is not one of will, or governance. The problem is curriculum, the technology around which our ideas about school and knowledge itself is organized. Until we recognize that the problem schools face is not technical or organizational, but conceptual, it will not change. If we want things to be different, we have to do things differently. It's time to start thinking big.
