As you all know by now, President Barack Obama won re-election Tuesday, even if Florida, upon counting the accepted provisional and absentee ballots—Mr Obama won by fewer than 50,000 votes in the state out of more than 8 million cast—swings to Mitt Romney. The margin will be 332-206 if Florida chose Mr Obama, 303-235 if it chose Mr Romney.
Like many organizations, the political views of our group (a) are extremely diverse and (b) don’t matter all that much. However, where the election concerns the schools, they matter a lot. Both Mr Obama and Mr Romney were setting similar end goals for our schools, although Mr Obama’s solution calls for more government and less privatization while Mr Romney’s solution calls for less government and more privatization of public schools.
This is a debate raging across a very divided electorate and hence nation right now. We have also argued before that we need to take advantage of and celebrate our differences of opinion rather than becoming paralyzed by them. The English political philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill once noted that
It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.
He wrote that in 1840, and oh, how wisdom has a way of coming back ’round!
What Mr Obama affirms
Mr Obama is introducing programs that are aimed at lifting people who are in poverty up. Education, “the great equalizer,” is one such government-run program. We can argue whether the federal government should tell our states whether kids should know how to add fractions in fourth grade or fifth grade—or, increasingly, in first grade (j/k)—or that should be left up to states, but Mr Obama is correct in asserting that poverty chokes any effort by schools to make improvements.
What the left denies
People on the left deny that schools, despite high levels of poverty, can take other steps to improve the quality of education for students. Although many federal programs instituted under President George W Bush and continued under Mr Obama make an attempt to improve schools anyway despite the poverty—evidence: many new state laws that require teacher evaluations to include some assessment of student growth—the president’s position is to the center of this argument and most leftists deny that real reform can take place without addressing poverty. This is simply incorrect—evidence: lots of schools in poverty produce a high proportion of students who excel.
What Mr Romney affirms
Mr Romney issued a whitepaper on education, which asserted that quality teachers make quality schools, so we should fire (or retrain) bad teachers, retain good ones, and look for effective ways to recruit good teachers into the profession. It doesn’t get any truer than that, although it’s very difficult to measure this over a lifetime (a few people have tried, though).
What the right denies
The political right denies that the standardized tests used in our current models of student growth and included in all our new laws about teacher evaluations are statistically flawed. They were not designed to assess teacher quality; they were designed to test how well a school or individual teacher was teaching the basic curriculum established by our states. For example, we can use these tests and other assessment instruments to say, “Teacher X does a more effective job at teaching her fourth graders how to add fractions than Teacher Y teaches his,” but when it comes down to it, that’s about all we know from these tests. We ask so much more of teachers than what’s in a state curriculum that this denial by the right is simply not true.
Summary of affirmations and denials
The right affirms that teacher effectiveness can be measured by standardized tests, which the left denies, saying it’s not as simple as giving students a test or two. This debate has paralyzed us, since we now develop standardized test after standardized test that do not accurately measure teacher effectiveness. It has also polarized America, with the right wanting standardized test scores to contribute to a very high percentage of teacher evaluations and the left wanting them to contribute essentially nothing to teacher evaluations. Both positions on the spectrum represent denials of known facts and are therefore wrong.
The left affirms that poverty thwarts any good effort at school reform, since if a child is insecure about where his next meal will come from or if his walk home will be safe, he can’t exactly focus his attention on learning the curriculum. The right denies the large effect of poverty and the role it plays in our schools, pointing out that a few schools rise from impoverished communities to produce excellent students. They keep insisting on reform in the face of poverty, which just leads to louder debate and more paralysis: nothing is done to improve some schools in bad states of disrepair or unusable or outdated learning materials, and one out of four students reports being bullied.
Finding a common enemy, not necessarily common ground
We have come to a realization that it is impossible to try to find common ground between the left and right. It doesn’t get us anywhere. Instead, we should engage in a fight against a common enemy, which we can define as schools that fail our communities and children.
All that is necessary is for the left and right to accept the truths they now deny so we can work productively based on what each side has affirmed. That’s all it takes to be pragmatic and work toward solutions rather than continuing debate. Look, both sides have weighed in on the debate, and each side is correct in part and incorrect in part.
The Chicago solution
Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, in crafting a deal with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, put the teacher evaluation system to the test. She agreed to use standardized tests as part of each teacher’s evaluation on a trial basis for the first year. These statistics are flawed, as the left asserts, but some measure of student improvement must be included in teacher evaluations, as the right asserts.
In fighting against a common enemy—bad teachers in positions of trust in our schools—Chicago has forged a practical solution. This gives everyone time to evaluate the situation and make things more effective. If the tests currently being used don’t assess teacher effectiveness—and they don’t, as the left correctly affirms—we need to develop assessment instruments that do measure teacher effectiveness, as the right correctly affirms.
However, those measures of teacher effectiveness must take other factors, such as poverty, into account, as the left correctly asserts, but not be biased for or against poverty, as the right correctly asserts. That’s a tall order, but if both sides can now work together, it is well within our reach.
Much will be said in the coming months and years about the approach taken by the Obama administration in education, and criticism is fair game. We’ve even criticized many programs quite thoroughly ourselves. But even if the left is in the White House, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives will, we hope, bring important affirmations to the table as we try to work out a solution to the enemies of bad schools and bad teachers.
