Doing Education Reform Wrong

The geniuses who gave us No Child Left Behind, including Teddy "Most Overrated Senator in US History" Kennedy, are at it again. This is not completely stupid but the dumbass dwarfs the smart. Here's one reason why. I was sentenced to nine years on a school board once, and we feared every other year reporting of state test scores. Why? Because a little town to the south had twins who were test-crunching giants. Every year they took a test in a grade, that town would beat the rest of us like the AFC thumping the NFC and we would have to explain why we weren't doing as well as that little nothing place. Of course, since testing then was every other grade, in the off years the little town scored what you might expect and we were the kings. Nothing changed but who was taking the tests. And the twins' teacher in any given year would earn a bonus for their demonstrably superior teaching . . . until the next year when they would be up for firing for their decline.

So you see, the problems with this proposal go well beyond teaching to test. Grading teachers on what group of kids (and parents, community, activities, etc.) are available each year is seriously challenged and threatens not just stopping learning just to take tests but also the corruption and stupidly we're seeing more and more already. Learning happens not just with a teacher and you have to take all the factors into account when making judgments. If you don’t baseline the kids the teacher has, then the numbers mean little or nothing. For example, rarely is any formal effort made to match kids with teachers best suited to their learning skills, to link this year’s teacher with last year’s or next year’s.

These outcomes are typical “top down” BS that sounds good on paper but will not work in practice, like Merit Pay where teachers judged by admins who were rarely great teachers and proved not committed to it by moving to admin. This new proposal is an educational Iraq—go into it with imperial imperatives and watch disaster happen. You want to get better results? Put money into drawing and keeping good minds into the profession and making sure they’re kept up-to-date on their subject and pedagogy. Make the effort to match students to teachers and curricula. It's not wrong to demand demonstration of student achievement in subjects but, if you do, don’t insist on the traditional “grade” system and then get mad when kids don’t get socially promoted. Base records on student mastery of subject at achieved basics, mastered subject, and excelled, and let kids progress based on “achieving” and then picking how much further they want to go—no more age-based grades. And employers and colleges have to make clear what mastery is necessary for what they want and need. Most of all, we need to encourage “bottom up” efforts that innovate and test new ideas and then disseminate the ones that do—completely the opposite of what these mandated, top-down, “DC knows best” idiocies pull. This isn't rocket science but it does take sense and recognition that people at the top have rarely made things better. You seeing any of that?