Tag Archive for 'Kevin Carey'

“An Unavoidable Element of Subjectivity”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 10, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and accountability. 3 Comments

Schools need much more than merit pay to recruit and retain good teachers, argues Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed.  “They need strong leadership, good facilities, safe working conditions, and the right kind of organizational culture,” he writes. “You can’t paper over the lack of those things by simply tacking on a salary bonus, even a big one, to the existing steps-and-lanes pay scale.”

Carey’s reasoned (and reasonable) take on merit pay feels like a welcome departure from the teacher-quality-and-test-scores über alles refrain more commonly sung by accountability hawks.  Especially in his recognition that “we need to build schools great people want to teach in, and that means fully recognizing their value in all ways, including pay.”

The great schools of the future will be professional meritocracies in a way today’s public schools are not, but not by adding test scores to the mechanistic logic of an industrial-age salary scale. Rather, they’ll spend a great deal of energy on getting the conditions and culture right, and then negotiate substantially higher and substantially more variable salaries with individual teachers. It will be an expensive, time-consuming, imperfect process with an unavoidable element of subjectivity. It will also be much, much better than what most schools use today.

Agreed.  I’d also wager there isn’t one teacher in a thousand who wouldn’t welcome merit pay in a school that spent “a great deal of energy on getting the conditions and culture right.” 

The phrase “unavoidable element of subjectivity” also strikes me as a recognition of the infinite complexity teachers face in working with our most disadvantaged students (any attempt to move past mindless “teachers fear accountability” sloganeering is a welcome development).  Guest-blogging over at Joanne Jacobs, the always insightful Diana Senechal captures the dilemma of nuance-averse accountability well.  “With dumbed-down tests, vapid literacy programs, an overwhelming focus on test prep at the exclusion of essential subjects, and unreliable rating systems, we end up taking a yardstick to a void–and declaring miracles whenever we please,” she wrote.  The flip side of that — the thing that teachers reasonably fear — is that it is too easy to declare failure whenver we please, and hold teachers solely responsible when they are too often reduced to foot soldiers with no control over what or even how they teach. 

This cannot be said often enough: teachers are not by nature accountability-averse.  They are, however, sensibly averse to having an extraordinarily difficult and complex task measured by crude and simplistic tools.

Update:  John Thompson, a vocal teacher advocate who also viewed Carey’s post favorably, takes up a similar theme at This Week in Education.  “I’ve never understood why ‘reformers,’ who are angered by the terrible results of policies set by principals and central offices, respond by attacking teachers who do not set those policies. But the answer, which the New Teacher Center makes clear, is not to attack principals but to use ‘contextual data’ to enhance teacher and principal quality and create a learning culture which attracts and retains educators.”

Ready, Fire, Aim

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 21, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 7 Comments

At The Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey attempts to take on Diane Ravitch’s criticism of Race to the Top, accusing her of…well, I’m not sure exactly. But his criticism of Ravitch’s take on tying teacher evaluations to test scores is noteworthy. 

No state has ever really tied teacher evaluations to test scores in a methodologically valid way and made those evaluations meaningful in terms of compensation, hiring, tenure, and other things people care about. So Ravitch is just engaging in garden variety chicken-and-egg obstructionism: you can’t prove X works because nobody’s ever tried it; you can’t try X because nobody’s ever proved it works.

Well, no.  It’s not that it’s never been tried.  It’s that there is not a way to evaluate teachers fairly by using test scores.  I guess I’m obstructionist too, since like Ravitch I don’t see the benefit of coming to vast conclusions based on half-vast data.  Commenter Ceolaf nails the problem precisely: 

“It is not merely a case of banning a practice or allowing it. Rather, it is a case of mandating it. Require — or pressuring very strongly — states to adopt policies that are unproven is the issue. We knew that seat belts save lives, so requiring states to adopt seatbelt laws made sense. We knew that lowering speed limits saved gas, so requiring states to lower theirs to 55mph made sense. But that is not the case here.”

Just so.  But argue that this well-intentioned idea has too many problems to be taken seriously and you’re immediately a status quo loving, running dog lackey of the teachers unions, or as Carey describes Ravitch, the ”go-to name-brand anti-Obama quote on K–12 issues.”

Oy.

Maybe we can make this simple and unambiguous:  Accountability?  Good.  Figuring out if a teacher is competent or incompetent? Very good. Using tests to determine the difference?  Not very good.  In fact, not possible.  Forcing states to do it anyway? Not very smart.  Being incurious about the impact such a move will have on education?  Unforgivable. 

When did “not very good but it’s the best we can do” become a way of making policy?  When did suggesting we can do better become heresy?

Teacher Quality, Unintended Consequences, and the Baseball Achievement Gap

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Education News and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

New York’s Department of Education is beginning to measure the performance of thousands of elementary and middle school teachers based on how much their students improve on annual state math and reading tests, the New York Times reported last week. A joint letter to NYC teachers from Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten explained the data is intended to “empower teachers with information useful in our teaching. In this same vein, the letter expressly prohibits the use of that information for evaluating teachers, in both annual ratings and tenure decisions.”

When the plan first came up in February, Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the New York Daily News, comparing value-added data to the pioneering work done by maverick baseball general manager Billy Beane. The subject of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball, Beane has often managed to keep his small-market Oakland A’s competitive with deeper-pocketed teams by rejecting conventional baseball wisdom in favor of data-driven decision-making. “By crunching numbers without prejudice, Beane discovered that certain statistics that really mattered on the field, like on-base percentage, were being hugely undervalued in the player job market,” Carey wrote. “While scouts and other executives made decisions based on personal bias and flawed perceptions, Beane kept to the statistical bottom line.” Seen through this lens, the hope and promise is that we can find equivalents to on-base percentage in teacher performance that drive student achievement.

The Moneyball comparison, however, strikes me as a potentially dangerous analogy. Here’s why: Players are to baseball teams as students — not teachers — are to schools. Teachers succeed by getting the best performances from their students. Their closest counterparts in baseball are managers and coaches. Baseball executives like Billy Beane do not use data to help ordinary players over-perform. They use data to replace underperformers with overachievers.  To run a school like Billy Beane runs the Oakland A’s would mean regularly replacing low-scoring students with high-scoring students.

That would be one way to close the achievement gap. Continue reading ‘Teacher Quality, Unintended Consequences, and the Baseball Achievement Gap’

The Biggest Loser

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 4, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Who you callin’ a loser?  You’re not a loser.  I’m the loser! 

That’s the upshot of Mike Petrilli’s post over at Flypaper on who’s doing a worse job on education, the Dems or the GOP.  Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey has written a piece for the American Prospect titled “How the Dems Lost on Education,” which per Petrilli, ”is a call for Democrats to get on board the school reform train, particularly when it comes to NCLB-style accountability, charter schools, and public school choice.”

Not so fast, says Mike.  “I don’t mean to be ungracious, but if we’re talking about winners and losers, there’s a strong case to be made that NCLB has been a boon to the left and an embarrassment to the right.”

What with its race-based accountability system, Great Society-style aspiration for “universal proficiency,” disdain for the needs of high-achieving students (not to mention white and middle class kids), and enthusiastic expansion of the federal role in education, it looks to me that the Dems are winning big on education lately. And here’s the kicker: they get to promote progressive policies and regain their historical political advantage on the issue to boot. Compare that to the “Republican” scorecard. How are we doing on promoting educational excellence? Cutting red tape? Promoting private school choice? Making the public schools system more efficient? Getting rid of terrible teachers?

Petrilli says he’s going to write a piece on “How the GOP Lost on Education.”  I think he’s kidding.  Maybe.

More questioning of assumptions:  Eduflack wonders why accountability is seen as a Republican idea.  And why supporting teachers is associated with Democrats.