Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, … now Maryland, Illinois, and the list goes on. In all, slightly more than half the nation’s states have new laws that link teacher evaluations to student performance data, like the data gleaned from standardized test scores.
In Illinois, inclusion of student-growth data for teachers’ evaluations is only happening in the Chicago Public Schools during the 2012-13 school year. All other school districts have until the 2015-16 school year to begin incorporating student-growth data into teacher evaluations, but it’ll count for Illinois principals beginning this school year.
Even with the delays, education policy experts are, frankly, baffled that the idea has come this far as fast as it has.
Linda Darling-Hammond, et al., write in the Phi Delta Kappan (via Education Week), “Research reveals that gains in student achievement are influenced by much more than any individual teacher.” Because the list of factors, including in-school and out-of-school factors, that affect student performance on standardized tests is long and probably impossible to control, people in this camp say that any system of evaluating teachers that relies on these test scores is fundamentally and fatally flawed.
In fact, when it comes to test scores individual students turn in, they tell us more about the socioeconomic status of the student than any single teacher’s effectiveness, as found by this 2005 study out of Northwestern and the University of Wisconsin.
Some educators also caution that most of the tests were designed to determine which students needed extra help, not for the purpose of evaluating teachers. One high school principal writes in the Washington Post that when test scores are used for purposes other than their intended purpose, “the relationship between the child and the teacher, and the child and the school, changes. Some children become more desirable than others. Some children might be looked upon as getting in the way of achieving a goal.”
But corporate education reformers, the Obama administration, organizations like Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and others with backgrounds in business, including highly successful business, point to the fact that the quality of teachers is an important factor in determining the overall success of a student. Our way of evaluating teachers, therefore, should be objective and based on what is being produced: student success or the lack thereof.
The process of quality evaluation in schools should, they say, make it easier to fire bad teachers, despite any union protection, and make way for new talent. For example, Thomas Kane, who leads the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The project has been working with 3,000 teacher-volunteers in six school districts to test different forms of feedback for teachers, including their students’ gains on test scores. Ours and other recent studies confirm that achievement-gain measures provide valuable information and should not be ignored. … We should focus on gains in test scores, not end-of-year scores. Any estimate of how much the student has improved while in the teacher’s class must take into account the fact that students start at different points. We want to know how much a teacher contributes to student growth during the time students are in that teacher’s classroom.
And while even the proponents admit the system is imperfect, they correctly point out that any evaluation system would be imperfect, including those used in schools up to this point, which relied heavily on in-class observations by principals or other staff members, who may be biased for or against certain teachers and corrupt the data for the evaluation. They add that many new teachers, just out of college, are having trouble finding jobs despite their eagerness, in part because bad teachers at struggling schools are hard to get rid of and there are no openings being created for them.
Opponents of the new teacher evaluation systems argue that any personal bias is an employee-employer relations problem and should be dealt with as such. While getting bad teachers out of the system is important to this group as well, they see the dramatic shift to a reliance on test scores as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
And speaking of employee relations, cheating has been reported in several districts across the country, most recently in East St. Louis (Ill.) District 189. The district’s schools have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress nine years in a row, and the Illinois State Board of Education has moved in to dismiss the district’s board, although the takeover is being held up by court proceedings.
A principal at one elementary school has denied allegations that he gave all students unlimited time and kept returning test booklets, advising students to correct their answers on the ISAT. As reported in the Belleville News-Democrat, an investigation found that “One student said that there was only one answer that could be correct, if you … had the test returned to you the fourth time.”
This is the future of education reform in America: whenever someone’s job is on the line, their efforts at work are no longer directed at self-improvement; their effort, their energy, will be expended to keep their job. Boundaries get blurry when someone’s job is on the line.
The ISO 9000 quality standard in business
For educators (and students) who wonder where on Earth this new evaluation idea came from, it came from business. Let’s look at the ISO 9000 quality standard, which is the certification businesses like to say they have, because just having that underwritten stamp of approval from an independent auditor says to their customers their “quality” as a business is high. It’s largely an indication that the company conforms to certain published standards, such as document-control and accounting practices.
The standards and the review of those standards are completely unbiased and objective, performed by a person who has no knowledge of the company’s specific line of business but is just examining the company’s compliance with those standards. Getting the ISO 9000 certification doesn’t really mean you’re producing a high-quality product, just that your business practices comply with published standards, which are narrow in focus and don’t say one word about the quality of your product as a business. Sound familiar?
Anyway, it’s cumbersome and expensive for many companies to maintain the ISO 9000 standards. They have, as I said, nothing to do with the specific business the company is in, and they don’t reflect any of the personal motivation people who started the company had for going into business in the first place.
Furthermore, maintaining the quality standards so they meet the approval of independent auditors can take a company’s employees away from the business of the company, as research tells us:
“Criticizing quality is like criticizing the Queen Mother,” according to one contributor to John Seddon’s research for this attack on ISO 9000—commonly viewed as the quality standard to aspire to but, in Seddon’s view, a process which actively handicaps those companies which adopt it, and takes them further away from “quality” as it should be understood today. Lays down ten major arguments against the ISO standard, with case examples of what happened as a result of implementation and how those outcomes impacted on customer-defined quality. Gives some background to the development of the standard, and argues that it is, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, a serious threat to organizational performance.
You can read the report if you have paid access (or purchase it for $25), but let me tell you the crux of it: When managers put maintenance of the ISO 9000 standards above customer service, employees cheated, because they felt a connection with their customers. They cheated on the measures of the standards, that is, not on the customer service.
Schools have a very similar situation. Like business, they need to ask themselves why they’re trying to dictate which measure of quality schools should use—standardized tests—and getting them to spend all kinds of money and effort just to use that “one size fits all” measure. What are the motives behind the switch? For business, it was presumably making it easier for Business A to work with Business B, to sell them their products. But schools aren’t selling anything. They have a very different mission, and quality teaching is not measured by profit or compliance.
Teachers teach not because they make a lot of money, but because they care about students and want to see them succeed. Turning their attention away from their customers, i.e. students, will force them into an “employee” mode, away from a “teacher” mode. They will cheat on the measures of quality in order to maintain, as stated in the research, their “customer-defined quality.”
Conclusions
Common sense, as well as 2-decade-old research, tells us that teachers will cheat on the measures of quality, simply because their specific line of business is way more important to them. They will generally be unwilling to sacrifice their connections to students in order to provide accurate data about standards affected by just too many factors besides teaching effectiveness.
And if their jobs are threatened, well, I don’t even need research to tell me they’re going to cheat. And this cheating will ultimately deprive kids of the extra help they need, which brings us back full circle to what these standardized tests were designed for in the first place. As John Seddon’s report said, the evaluation process used by our schools should not be “a process which actively handicaps those [schools] which adopt it, and takes them further away from ‘quality’ as it should be understood today.”
We also have heard for many, many years now, that because schools have properly spent so much money on math, reading, and special needs, other aspects of school and life for kids have been cut or are in jeopardy of being reduced drastically. I’m not knocking tending to the needs of every child, and I’m certainly not suggesting kids shouldn’t learn math and other core subjects as thoroughly as they can, according to their potential, but we have seen art, music, physical education, and other studies like those suffer as a result of schools complying with the measurement of a standard we’re not even sure works.
This is merely one type of “active handicapping” coming to a school near you. Others will pop up in one state or the next as this system spreads like a wildfire across the country, adding to the handicap of our schools and threatening our competitiveness in future generations.
