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When we think of corruption, we usually think of someone like former Governor Ed Edwards of Louisiana, who was once being interviewed on 60 Minutes by Mike Wallace:

WALLACE: They say you can be bought for $100,000.

EDWARDS: That’s an outrage! It would take at least half a million.

In the world of education such people can also be found, but their corruption, though bad, is not the most worrisome to me—not yet, anyway. More troubling is the intellectual corruption one finds in the tendency to tolerate or even encourage a vitiation of what we expect a course of study to do, and then to use that degraded expectation as a new standard. In fact, this kind of intellectual corruption, not the greased-palm kind, is what Donald Campbell was originally referring to in the paper in which he pronounced Campbell’s Law. In that 1975 paper, a school district came in for sharp criticism because it permitted a profit-making company to turn part of its education into a course of test preparation. The extent of subsequent corruption can be gauged by recognizing that what seemed egregious in 1975 is becoming normative now, and that the schools of whole districts, whole states, are becoming test-preparation factories producing pink slime education.

It is no accident that this “education” tends to be the kind that can be administered and graded by machine, rather than the kind typified by I.I. Rabi and his chalk talks in Pupin Hall. At the level of high school it turns into the kind of education deplored in a recent “open letter” from an uncorrupted (and retired) teacher to colleges and universities. Often deplored, but not always rejected: Georgia Tech will soon offer an entire master’s degree on line through MOOCs.

The article reporting Georgia Tech’s new degree shows a third kind of corruption. I mean a corruption of reportorial perspective whereby the plan is headlined as a “New Frontier”—a most loaded metaphor—followed by the claim that it “could signal a change to the landscape of higher education,” whose breathlessness is qualified by the weasel-word “could.” Strangely qualified: the next sentence celebrates the power of MOOCs to tap into unsuspected reserves of Mongolian scholarship, as revealed by a perfect multiple-choice test score in Ulan Bataar–or was it the Gobi Desert?

The article admits—in the fourteenth paragraph—that in San Jose if not in Mongolia, and in three on-line classes rather than a unique case, on-line “learning” is in trouble. The admission is expressed thus: the classes are “now paused because of underwhelming student performance.” Paused? Underwhelming? Why did the reporter not say, “The classes have been suspended because the students in them were doing poorly”?

My guess is that CSUSJ, which had been trying to develop a hybrid course comprising some on-line instruction and some classroom instruction, had pushed too far in the on-line direction, curtailed the live instruction, and discovered that its students foundered—a result that could have been predicted. A more straightforward, less tendentious report would include such information if it was available, but if the angle is “new frontiers” instead of “what really works?” that will not happen.

New frontiers!  Spare me the corruption of the purpose of language and reporting, as well as the other kinds.

During my holiday trip, which ended earlier this week, I spent a lot of time with friends who used to be colleagues in teaching. Most of them still teach; a couple are administrators. They work in every kind of place from “privileged” secondary schools to state-run universities to public elementary schools. Their spiritedness varies from still enthusiastic to beaten down. Amidst all that diversity of background, situation, and motivation, one attitude runs through the entire group: Contempt of and exasperation with the Ed Biz’s bureaucracy- and foundation-driven Reform of the Year “movement” and its disappointments.

This blog is full of postings[1] giving examples, of which the two most egregious are No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and RAce to the Top (RAT). NCLB, which mandated universal proficiency in twelve years, is now acknowledged by most people with IQs in three digits to be a dismal failure from whose provisions states are stumbling over each other to be excused. The problem is that to be excused, states must pledge themselves to RAT, whose grants are given conditionally on adoption of the Common Core and “Value”-“Added” “Metrics.” The same government that mandated perfection in twelve years now “mandates[2]” the more-or-less immediate adoption of a whole new curriculum, with predictable results.

Why is the Reform of the Year “movement” so unproductive or counterproductive? Some ideas from my talks with former colleagues suggest themselves[3]:

1.       Its roots are political and economic as well as pedagogical, and from these roots strange and invidious growths proceed.

2.       At the bottom of its assumptions lies a rooted suspicion of or contempt for teachers. You can’t have a good “system” of education if you despise the people that are at its core. Asked by a reporter to explain Finland’s success in education, one principal said three words: “teachers, teachers, teachers.” How many American reformers and the administrators they impress would say the same?

3.       Concurrently, there is no investigation of administrators as a class to determine how competent, savvy, and humane they are. What hope is there of producing better schools if they are to be presided over by incompetents and second-stringers?

4.       Like many typically and counterproductively exigent education reformers, Ed Biz “leaders” will have their way not because their reforms tap into the collective wisdom of the human race or will produce sensible results in the fullness of time, but because these reformers want them, now, and will have them even at great cost. At one point in the movie Downfall, Hitler, asked to justify an order, says, “It is my will.” Raise your hand if you know administrators and other Educational Personages who justify their choices that way. Keep your hands up if they made you proud and happy to be a teacher.

5.       Speaking of the collective wisdom of the human race: it is amazing how harebrained educationist schemes manage completely to avoid the tonic test question “Is it wise?” when being hatched. Why should anyone expect a sudden accession of good sense and humility from people evidently under-endowed with these qualities? Many of them seem to have taken their education degrees at the Grand Academy of Lagado. How can we expect them to preside over teaching, which Barzun calls “an act of endless discretion”?

6.       And what primarily motivates the teachers required to participate in the typical top-down reform program? Lyrics from a ditty by W. S. Gilbert suggest the answer: “Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock / From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.” Titipu and the Ed Biz are a long way from the intellectual and organizational world of Edwards Deming.

7.       While I see much of the “research” that undergirds current reform movements as suspect or non-existent, I didn’t arrive at that conclusion through discussions with my former colleagues. Their own rather cynical view of “research” is that it is cherry-picked to justify claims that someone already wants to make and programs someone already wants to start.  They would not be surprised to learn how empty much of it is, and their curiosity sensibly turns away with distaste from spending the time to find out.

8.        No reform takes place in a cultural vacuum or a closed system, but much of the Educational Reform Movement assumes closed systems and vacuum-packed assumptions that would not survive critical examination or open air.

9.       Slowly, slowly catchee monkey, says a proverb. What does the education reformer say? How many educational monkeys has Arne Duncan?

The reason for more than the usual number of links in this posting is my strong sense, after returning from talks with my former colleagues, that the trouble we are now seeing for the Common Core could have been anticipated and turned aside with proper programs properly planned and executed in the fullness of realistic time. It’s all there: both the predictable bad consequences of the bad programs and, like Helen Epstein’s “Invisible Cure,” many of the unseen or unnoted solutions that will actually work.

Often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.—Abraham Lincoln[1]

Having been a teacher for twenty-six years, I have many friends in the profession, if I may so describe the calling—the job—the facilitatorship—the clerkship we share. I give the “profession’s” names in the order of decreasing importance and dignity through which government mandates and the Ed Biz and its shills are taking us on the road to “Value-“ “Added” “Metrics,” the RAce to the Top (RAT), and “blended learning.” During my summer holiday, having returned to the US for my first visit in some time, I have heard many recitations of current conditions in American education. The story is not pleasant

The conditions mentioned do not arise in any other “advanced” country. No one outside the US appears to be abandoning well-funded well-regarded public education. No one is talking about on-line “schools” or instruction. No one is implementing commercially produced programs of “blended learning.” No one is guaranteeing universal proficiency at reading and math and then backing away from the guarantee because it is impossible. No one is hiring teachers who have not received thorough and effective training. No one is thinking of firing teachers because their students do poorly on multiple-choice tests of their “learning.” And almost none of these countries do as badly as the US in educating their students.

Good teachers have some thoughts about these programs and failures, but almost no one is listening. My colleagues are gloomy about the prospect of education for the great mass of the people, but they have ideas about how that education should proceed. Since their voices go unheard, as do voices of others who are critical of what is happening in many American schools, their worries are likely to be realized.

Hence the quotation from Lincoln. His practical sense told him when an idea was unworkable—something that research evidently cannot do. Hence the many harebrained schemes for “improvement” that promise miracles and produce messes. To take one of many: NCLB has turned schools into test-taking factories in which the education received has been thinned out to the vanishing point, in an effort to shore up test scores in a mere two subjects. If that is not amputating a body to save a limb, I—and my friends—don’t know what is.

I am distant from anything e this week and next. I hope to have a posting again before long.

One of my students in Theory of Knowledge just qualified for entry to a highly regarded global business program, partly on the strength of his ToK Paper and Presentation and the marks they earned him. In a recent email to me he thanked me for the help he had pulling his work together, and added that he thought Theory of Knowledge would end up being the best preparation he got for that program.

The reason is, briefly, that the Paper requires students to examine a general claim about knowledge judiciously and fairly, using examples in the contemporary world to make a judgment about it. The Presentation takes a “real-life situation” facing the students (or our world) and asks them to abstract a “knowledge issue” from it, dealing with that issue in a balanced way before offering a judgment. Some of my students, including the one I mentioned above, went through three or four drafts to reach the impressive results they handed in.

But studying the humanities has always had a beneficial formative effect, and in fact Professor Barzun says that history’s chief effect “is formative. Its spectacle of continuity in chaos, of attainment in the heart of disorder, of purpose in the world is what nothing else provides: science denies it, art only invents it. One might suppose that an astute synthesis of the items in the daily paper would supply it, but the paper lacks charm and solidity; its formative effect is nil, as one can see from sampling public opinion…. History is a means of cultivation much more than of instruction.[1]”

Barzun goes on to say that history properly studied is “an antidote against cultural poisoning”: “It heightens resistance to the superstitions of the day, the flood of conventional knowledge—all of it plausibly wrong—that the surrounding sources of information keep spreading like a sterile sort of manure over contemporary thought.”

It is an “antidote against credulity,” for “the most difficult choice is not simply what to believe but what mode of thought to trust that leads to belief.”  The failure to provide this antidote is shown in “so-called educational research, where the sense of evidence is at its feeblest and the knowledge of history apparently non-existent.” Raw credulity accounts for the acceptance of the Coleman Report in 1966, whose astonishing claim was that schools bring little to bear on students’ achievement.

It is an antidote against homogenizing, the intellectual tendency “to naturalize the disparate, to force discrepancies out of logic’s way,” and to be reductive, thereby allowing the production and acceptance of over-reductive and absurd “studies” like, for example, Max Nordau’s showing that artists are mental degenerates.

It is an antidote against overintellection, including pedantry and the replacement of feeling and vividness in mental endeavors by “processes” that give “abstract notations of phenomena and…new symbols for instinct.”

It is an antidote against self-centering, the placement of the self at the center of all knowledge.

If Barzun was right in ascribing to the study of history all these good effects, we should be teaching it. Instead, “humanities programs get a fraction of the funding that STEM programs do,” and public intellectual health is exposed to danger. What whirlwind will we reap by sowing this wind of ignorance?

[This is a reprint of an old posting, but with an afterword.]

A recent article in The New York Times reported the city schools’ ending book purchases at book fairs of small “trade-book” vendors in favor of mail order from large suppliers operating in remote locations. While it is always sad to see a local fabric of professional relationships ripped up by the demand for cheapness, that was not what made me take a second look at this article.

It incidentally reported on what trade books the schools bought and explained what trade books are for. The article said that these books, including novels and works of non-fiction, “are intended to fill out lesson plans” and “supplement textbooks.” I guess that in this view books of poetry are also intended to fill out lesson plans, though the article doesn’t mention them. It did mention that the city schools spend a third of their book budget on trade books. This is sad news to someone like me, who have taught English without a textbook for many years, as is the view that “trade books,” i.e., books, might be considered “supplements” in an English class.

Are the books most ordered by the New York schools novels? Are they works of non-fiction like, say, Richard Hofstadter’s America at 1750? Are they poetry anthologies like The Rattle Bag, edited by a Nobel-Prize-winning poet and a Poet Laureate of England? No, they are guides to prepare students to take standardized tests. This dispiriting statistic is a confirmation, if one were needed, of the test mania now submerging American public schools, those dikeless Low Countries of learning. If I were to recommend a “trade book,” i.e., a book, to read in order to understand where test mania comes from, I would choose Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, whose chapter on “Tulipomania” I have shared with students for many years.

To return to “trade books,” i.e., books: which textbook would they supplement? So many English textbooks are so bad: The sidebar distractions—the smeary dreary badly colored pictures—the little boxes of crap—the inane assignments: where does one begin the catalogue? You might say, “Rather than begin a catalogue, begin with the literature.”

Let’s take poetry as an example and counterexample. I mentioned The Rattle Bag, which many of my classes of 9^th-graders used for many years. This book is so immediately appealing to them that I find the best way to introduce them to it is to give them half an hour or so just to browse and read. By the end of that time most have found a favorite, shared it with their neighbors, and begun looking for more. By the end of the poetry unit their favorites and mine have become a part of their study and experience. And their favorites can be surprising: not just Nash or “Frankie and Johnny,” but also Blake and even Thomas Hardy.

I attribute the success of this anthology to the likes and dislikes of the anthologists, who clearly chose poems that tickled them or took the tops of their heads off, which is what you would do when choosing poems for a good anthology rather than a textbook. Can a textbook be so good? It is difficult. In 1967 Lionel Trilling published one called The Experience of Literature. The success of this book was a sad one. It contained fifty-two prefaces to works in the collection, each of them a masterpiece of criticism written by a master of prose who could have the top of his head taken off by a good poem. Teachers complained that the prefaces left them little to say, so they were removed (the prefaces, not the complaining teachers). Students were still left with Shakespeare and Sophocles, but deprived of a keen critical intelligence by their side. The prefaces now appear separately as a “trade book,” i.e., a book. I use one of them, passing it out to the class, when teaching Hopkins’s “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” to 12^th-graders. The textbook with prefaces is out of print.

Wallace Stevens complains of the white nightgowns in his poem “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” that “none of them are strange.” What would he think of the poetry collected in many current textbooks? It is unexceptionable, and it can fill out a lesson plan, but it’s like a 180-day diet of mashed-potato sandwiches. When a highly capable student of mine, a Berber from Algeria, decided to examine Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” in the collection of the same name to see how it gets from its startling opening to its stunning conclusion, he was not in the mood for mashed potatoes, and he should not have had to eat them. He engaged forcefully with the poem and came to an exceptionally good understanding of it, and his classmates congratulated him.

Everything he (and thereby his classmates) came to understand that week about English was the result of his engagement with a poem that he could not shake off. By contrast, most students have no trouble shaking off the material in a bad textbook, and I am sure they will shake off much of what they “learn” in a course of preparation for a standardized English test. We would do far better to imagine lesson plans supplementing good books than the other way around, and to teach those books, not the tests that follow them.

* * *

I republish this posting the day after the I.B. results came out, and it seems necessary to consider what I have said in light of the very real demands that externally set examinations place on students and their teachers. Before I became an all-I.B. teacher, I could work with students on poetry in different ways than I do knowing that they must all be able to produce well-written answers to questions about poetry as a genre and poets they have studied as well as extemporaneously written commentaries on poems they have never seen before. Nonetheless, I believe that I still  teach students first and foremost to “read the poem,” as Professor Koch would have said, while concurrently teaching them how to make a solid written argument. This ends up partly “teaching to the demands of the test,” but by way of teaching to the demands of a coherent intellectual life as an adult.

By following the I.B. curriculum’s requirements to teach collections of work by single poets rather than an anthology of many poets’ works, I find that the students can hear better the way poems speak to each other as well as to their readers and hearers. It adds a depth and keenness to their analysis that a survey could not produce. And it is still possible to expose them to a variety of poetic types. If they have to read poems by Yeats, Frost, Bishop, Lawrence and Hopkins as well as Antony and Cleopatra, they will end up having seen a good sampling of the possibilities of poetry, and that is a good thing regardless of test scores.

By the way: My students did well.

[This is a reworking of an old posting.]

Much has been made of a study[1] that shows a correlation between the “effectiveness” of teachers as determined by the scores of their students on “value-added metrics” and these students’ success in their later lives as determined by “markers.”  This muchness put me in mind—again—of Flannery O’Connor’s remark that “[t]he devil of educationalism that possesses us is the kind that can be cast out only by prayer and fasting.” In my less sanguine moments I lack O’Connor’s optimism and wonder whether even prayer and fasting will always work, though hope springs eternal. I wonder what could possess whole communities of educators to be stunned by a complex statistical study incorporating years of data on millions of students when it concludes that children with good teachers do better than children with bad teachers. One of the devils in the legion seems to be rather dim, but in examining the report I will try to give the devil his due, and to draw attention to some of his partners.

The original report is impressive in its thoroughness and the care with which its authors make and qualify their claims, even to the point of lessening the value of their study. They note, for example, that teachers in the study were not “incentivized based on test scores.” That means they were not plagued by the temptation and results of cheating, teaching to tests, and other “distortions in teacher behavior” that make the basis of value-addition different from what it would be in a population whose members had been “incentivized”—that is, in the real world of Atlanta, Tennessee, and New York. We are expected, nevertheless, to believe a study of “non-incentivized” teachers has something to say to districts whose teachers were looking over their shoulders at the Value-added Reaper as he made his progress through their ranks. Two additional problems with applying this study to teachers in RAT[1] programs are that the use of “value-added metrics” encourages teaching to tests (the most-purchased books in the New York schools are books of preparation for tests) rather than to goals beyond the classroom, and that evidence in research as well as the educational experience of the human race shows that teachers who teach to tests get worse results than teachers who don’t.

The authors of the study caution that some elements of the value-added equation require “observing teachers over many school years” and may not apply in a “high stakes environment with multitasking and imperfect monitoring”—which is, precisely, the kind of environment in which hasty consequential decisions will be made on the basis of imperfect applications of the equation over the short term.

They point out as a justification for their aggregate numbers that “observable characteristics are sufficiently rich so that any remaining unobserved heterogeneity is balanced across teachers,” but those who want to use “value-added metrics” to make consequential decisions will be applying the equation to particular individuals without correction for “unobserved heterogeneity.”

They note that their study did not include the effect of peers and of parental investment in value-addition. While everyone agrees that the teacher’s effect on what students learn is pronounced, this seems like a tremendous omission that could have serious undeserved consequences for the teachers whose students’ peers and parents had  significant bad effects on the learning for which the teacher is held exclusively responsible.

The authors state that the study’s assumptions “rule out the possibility that teacher quality fluctuates across years.” Can such an assumption be valid? Raise your hand if the quality of your teaching was as good in your first year of work as in your tenth. No hands? Of course not!

Turning from my bright class back to the study, I have some further questions. The study claims that “value added is difficult to predict based on teacher observables.” Does this amazing claim mean that the study advocates using a “metric” of evaluation with no observable connection to the behavior being evaluated? Or does it mean that unlike their students’ work, the teachers’ work cannot be observed, diagnosed, and corrected? What has happened to cause-and-effect and lifelong learning?

I want to understand in non-mathematical terms how “academic aptitude” is factored into the equation so that teachers will not be “penalized” for taking classes of difficult or refractory students. It seems to be a single number (η_i) in the equation, but how is it derived? A lot hangs on the way teachers are “made responsible” for students’ work when their aptitude for it may have a share in the responsibility.

I would like to know how many years’ value-added ratings they think a teacher should receive before the ratings can be said to reflect his or her actual performance, and I would like to understand the basis for this determination. It is one thing to say that we have some aggregate statistics that show teachers in general have certain effects on their students in the long run, and a rather different thing to say that these statistics can reliably rate individual teachers in one or two goes. This is particularly true given that the authors themselves say some elements of the value-added equation require “observing teachers over many school years.”

Having asked my questions I now make a couple of observations. One of the study’s authors, according to The New York Times, says that value-added metrics should be used even though “mistakes will be made” and “despite the uncertainty and disruption involved.” It is disturbing to see someone so fastidious in the drawing of conclusions become so sweeping and remorseless in applying them, particularly when the study itself has just spoken to the need to “weigh the cost of errors in personnel decisions against the mean benefit from improving teacher value-added.”

The problem with basing decisions on “mean benefits” is that they have particular consequences. The authors have said that they think it would be more cost-effective to fire ineffective teachers (even mistakenly ineffective ones) than to give bonuses to effective ones. It is time for people who say stuff like this to start “balancing” cost-effectiveness and ethos-effectiveness. Who is going to be attracted to a profession governed by such principles and assumptions? “Drifters and misfits,” as Hofstadter called them? And if no teacher behavior correlates to “value” “addition,” what prospective teacher will join a profession in which it cannot be said with confidence what he needs to do in order to be successful?

Time for a little exorcism!

Let me end with a note on the ad-hominem stereotype that people who are against value-added “measurement” are unionists, educational bureaucrats, or people with tenure to lose in a change of system. In my twenty-five years as a teacher I have never worked within a tenure-granting system.  I have never been in a union shop, nor have I been a member of a teachers’ union. I have never held an administrative position in education except that of Department Head. I have never worked in a teachers’ college. If I am against the kind of practice discussed in this posting, it is not because I have a hidden interest. It is because it seems wrong. I mean both wrong-headed and culpable.

[1] “The Long-term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood” by Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Johah E. Rockoff of Harvard. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17699.pdf

Most teachers, including me, somehow know that much in teacher training depends on the classroom practicum, where ideally we learn to put into practice what we theorized about in our teacher-prep lessons—or, sadly, where we learn what we should have been taught in those lessons, but were not. A third, even worse possibility is that the practicum is as bad as the classroom studies. My teacher preparation veered between the second and third kinds: though one of my four cooperating teachers was a brilliant model, the other three were absentee landlords. My supervising teacher, a nameless apparition, mysteriously appeared twice during my four months of preparation like the Angel of Bethesda except that she worked no miracles. If she was transparent, it is because she was invisible. Fortunately, I had a lot of compensatory support from my faculty colleagues during my first year of teaching. Two colleagues visited my classroom and commented on my lessons; they and others allowed me to watch their teaching, where I was like a dry sponge in Lake Superior.

A large study[1] released only this week offers the cold comfort of validating my impression, claiming that in general, the preparation of teachers in the U.S. is rather poor[2]. The study is particularly hard on the student teaching programs it reviewed[3], rating only 7% of them as providing “strong support [to student teachers] from program staff and cooperating teachers.” In case you wonder, “strong support” means certifying the quality of the cooperating teachers, requiring supervising teachers to make at least five classroom visits, each with written feedback, and having a clear plan for helping unsuccessful student teachers deal with the bad news they must receive. If you are shocked that only 7% of the teacher-training programs reviewed provided these seemingly sensible and necessary elements of good student teaching support, you clearly do not know what is going on in American teacher education. One wants to ask how things could be so bad.

But there are other questions to ask, not just of the targets of this study, but of the study itself. Why, if the methods it recommends for certifying student teachers work as well as they do, can we not apply those methods to the evaluation of already certified teachers? Why, if administrators would be spread too thin in doing so, could schools not adopt peer-review programs to complement review by administrators?  Why does this study prefer a narrative-based qualitative method for evaluating student teachers but then adopt the discredited “value”-“added” method of evaluating certified teachers and cooperating teachers? How can we be sure that an administrator knows good teaching when he sees it? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, if I may include a non-quantitative consideration in this discussion.

G.K. Chesterton said that, as used in modern times, the term “‘progress’ is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” It would disturb the elegant compression of that line to add “…or, in education, the positive either[1],” but I will risk some inelegance to make the point that educational progressives or reformers often open campaigns whose ultimate objectives and sense of present deficiency are unclear or unsettled.[2]

Take for example the Common Core. Its ultimate objective is universal career and college readiness by the end of Grade 12. It sounds noble, but to any precise meaning of the aim we are far from having settled down. I delight in the thought that Common Core graduates in their millions will have read and understood Chesterton, as the curriculum requires them to do[3]; but I am skeptical that this is what will actually happen. In short, I see here a comparative without a superlative.

Nor is the positive from which we are mandated to progress very clear. Is the reason students need progressive measures that the curriculum they study is now unsatisfactory? That the teachers who teach it are unfit? That they themselves are feckless? To each of these problems—if they are real—different remedies would need to be applied. A new curriculum will do no good if the teachers are poor and the students unmotivated; while if they are good and motivated, it may be unnecessary. Diane Ravitch has repeatedly pointed out that there is not much study behind the Common Core to determine whether it will do what it is supposed to do.

But I want to talk about personal progress now. At the school where I teach, the teachers work for the most part in shared faculty offices rather than their classrooms. Two gains emerge from this way of working. One is the stronger sense of shared professionalism one finds in a faculty who literally as well as figuratively work together. The other is the constant stream of ideas, suggestions, discussions, resolutions that I encounter when speaking informally to my colleagues there. The likelihood that these kinds of improvement will occur in an atomized school where teachers decamp to their private rooms is far less than in arrangements like my school’s. If it is true that education schools produce undistinguished teachers, how will they learn to be distinguished in an environment with little opportunity to gain from what their colleagues have to offer?

There are times when I miss my privacy, and sometimes, to get it, I will move to a quieter spot for work and study. I also miss the decorative variety that some teachers bring to rooms that have become their turf. But I would hate to give up the flow of ideas about teaching and thoughts about students that a shared workspace brings, though obviously such communication can take place in all kinds of space[4]. And I appreciate that, unlike the grand superlatives discussed above, a highly achievable and notable improvement is taking place in my own particular workspace. I would even go so far as to call it progress.

[Time for another look at this posting of mine from a year ago.]

An old joke has it that when you mate a crocodile with an abalone you get a crock o’ baloney, but surely there must be other ways of producing it: how does such an abundance of baloney come to appear in the field of education? Why are so many educationists also balonists[1]?

One respected philosopher says that a balonist (not his word) is primarily concerned not with telling the truth but with promoting or protecting himself, or with keeping the boat he is on from being rocked. Such a person’s relationship with the truth is therefore accidental and opportunist; it yields truth claims that are phony. One current truth-tussle can illustrate.

Four professors, from Stanford, Cal Berkeley, and the University of Arizona, have been studying “value-added models” (VAMs) of evaluating teachers[2]. Here are just some of the results:

1. At least seven factors other than the individual teacher figure in students’ success. These include home and community supports and challenges, peer culture and achievement, and of course the specific tests used to “measure” “achievement.”
2. VAMs are inconsistent. Only 20% of teachers rated at the top or bottom of their district rankings retained those ratings in the following year, and when rated by different tests, 40 – 55% of teachers got “noticeably different scores.”
3. Teachers’ value-added “performance” is affected by the students assigned to them. One set of figures documents the experience of an English teacher whose rating changed from the first (worst) to the tenth (best) decile from one year to the next. The change was attributable not to his sudden emergence from a vegetative state, but to the fact that his students in the second year numbered fewer English learners, Hispanic students, and low-income students and more students with well-educated parents.
4. VAMs can’t disentangle these other factors influencing students’ (and “therefore” their teachers’) performance. Take for example an elementary school teacher who had been voted Teacher of the Month and Teacher of the Year in Houston, where her supervisor had rated her as “exceeding expectations.” She was fired as a result of her VAM scores, which showed wide fluctuations across and within subjects. These scores did not correct for her lower value-added in 4^th grade, when English learners are mainstreamed in her school district. Take also the VAM scores of teachers that “flip-flopped when they exchanged assignments.” When such stories start to circulate, guess how many teachers will accept assignments to classes with disadvantaged students!

Other ways of evaluating teachers, discussed at length in this article and in passing in these postings, are available and have been shown to work. Why, then, do we see such reliance on VAMs?

One answer is in the nature of a balonist. If his primary purpose is to serve not truth but himself, he does not particularly care what the truth is. Another, in this case, is in the nature of this particular baloney. Though rank and gross in nature, it seems to simplify and explain so much, and to deflect blame so effectively from the balonists using it, that it is irresistible to them. Finally, it jibes with a public tendency to be satisfied with crude methods of identifying and punishing members of undesirable classes of people. A complex problem can be simplified. Villains can be “found” and eliminated. The phoniness of the baloney doesn’t matter. The balonists—say, a cabinet secretary or the superintendent of an urban school district—can be seen as “tackling problems” and “making tough decisions.” What could be more desirable, except the truth?

[1] This term, indispensable when talking about education, can be found in The Didact’s Dictionary. A balonist produces his own hybrid of humbug and b*******.

[2] “Evaluating Teacher Evaluation” by Linda Darling-Hammond et al., Phi Delta Kappan, March 2012. I thought this article well worth the five dollars it cost me to download it.