An Inconvenient Truth About Teacher Quality

by Robert Pondiscio
December 5th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice, Literacy, Teaching | 11 Comments »

If teacher quality is the most important school-based factor in student outcomes, then why are math scores rising, while reading scores stay flat?  Do we just happen to have really good math teachers and really lousy reading teachers?  That can’t be: in the case of 4th grade teachers, the exact same teachers are responsible for both subjects.

Or maybe it’s not the teachers. Could it be the curriculum?

That’s the question posed by Dan Willingham and David Grismer in an op-ed in the New York Daily News this morning.  They point out intriguing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that has been hiding in plain sight:

“Reading scores over the last 20 years have been flat. But in math, scores have increased markedly. A fourth-grader at the 50th percentile in 1990 would score at about the 25th percentile compared to the kids taking the test in 2009. That’s an enormous improvement.

“This raises an uncomfortable question for teacher quality advocates: If teachers are so vitally important, why have fourth-grade math scores dramatically improved, but reading scores have flatlined, given that — at least at the elementary level — the same teachers are responsible for each?

Perhaps the secret sauce is not who’s teaching but what’s being taught.  It’s a lot easier to align standards, curriculum and assessment in math. “There is little controversy as to the subject matter to be covered, and the order in which one ought to tackle subjects is more obvious,” Willingham and Grissmer write.  “Indeed, substantial effort has been made over the last 25 years to develop coherent math standards and curricula from K-8.”

In reading? Not so much.

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog, there’s no direct correlation between the subject matter that gets taught and tested in reading.  We teach random, incoherent content that bears no relation to the passages children ultimately encounter on their reading tests.  We insist on teaching and testing the “skill” of reading comprehension when it’s clearly not a skill at all.  Willingham and Grissmer conclude:

“Yes, overall teaching quality would improve with a more sensible method to usher hapless teachers out of the profession. Better teacher training would help too. But in addition to these longer-term goals, policymakers ought to focus on ensuring that the unglamorous but vital work of curriculum design is done properly. The popular perception is that America’s teachers are largely ineffective compared to international peers. But the data show that when given a clear, cogent curriculum to work with, they’re a lot stronger than we think.”

Education Week

by Guest Blogger
November 21st, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Education Practice, Teaching | 16 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

Last Friday, the Illinois State Board of Education proposed new rules that will link teacher performance to their students’ performance on assessments. Up to thirty percent of teacher evaluations will be based on how students perform on tests, and while I understand the value of student progress in evaluating teachers, it’s certainly not the main thing that determines success in education. My mind has been on assessments lately because I just came out of a week defined by what I initially labeled a colossal assessment failure. I gave unit tests to cap off a couple of weeks in Latin and English grammar, and things did not go well. My students failed, failed, failed, and as teachers are wont to do, I used the transitive property and concluded that I had failed, failed, failed.

I spent the following weekend going over the assessments, my preparation, my teaching, the students’ homework scores, and found that the week of failure was much more complicated than one faulty assessment or a failure to teach some critical aspect of the lesson. As I could not go back and re-do the previous month of teaching, I decided to move forward, and figure out how to turn failure in to a learning experience. Once some time had passed, and I’d gained the benefit of hindsight, I wrote about the solution I came up with in my blog, Coming of Age in the Middle . I wrote about my teaching methods, but mostly, I wrote about how I had managed to make it through the week without tucking my tail between my legs and quitting my job.

A writer friend of mine liked the post, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, my failure was in the Gray Lady herself. When K.J. Dell’Antonia wrote her piece on my blog, titled “What Good Teachers Do When Kids Fail,” in the New York Times’ parenting blog Motherlode , the comments fell into two distinct camps: Parents who wished their teachers had more time to address student failure and teachers who lamented that they had no time to address student failure. A few teachers wrote about the time they took for re-writes and remedy, but for the most part, the message from educators was one of regret and frustration with a testing-centric schedule that did not allow for reflection.

The solution I came up with for my students required humility on both sides of the classroom – I had to admit I had failed my students and my students had to admit that they had not held up their end of the pedagogical bargain – but mostly, it took time. Time that, according to the comments after the article, most teachers just don’t have. I handed out blank tests and asked the students re-take the assessment as an open book exercise. They were asked to work in pairs I had strategically assigned, and teach each other the material on the test. They were required to not only find the correct answer, but to show why all of the other answers were wrong. This process ate up two classes, and as I only see my Latin students twice a week, this one remedial exercise burned an entire week of the school year. Clearly, this is simply not an option in many classrooms. Maria, from Baltimore, MD, wrote:

“I am a public high school math teacher. It’s only November, and I’m already 10 days behind schedule in one class, 3 days behind in another. And this is without me taking any sick days, no snow days, just a few days away from class for . . . you guessed it, administering the No Child Left Behind tests. I would love to have students retake their tests and learn from mistakes, but thanks to NCLB, and curricula that are an inch deep and a mile wide, we need to press on to the next topic.”

Many comments stressed the vital role that failure plays in education. Dr. Kim, from Ithaca, NY wrote,

“We need to allow students opportunities to fail. Too often our kids are afraid of failure. If we don’t fail, we’re not pushing our limits–we’re not challenging ourselves. I have a friend who is an amazing skier who says “if you don’t fall, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.” This is true. Plus, we learn much more from failure. Our brains are programmed to remember those things with strong emotional attachments — positive or negative. Failures are memorable.”

I completely agree that some of the best lessons are learned from failure. Failure can shock a student out of complacency, particularly among those students who are smart enough to do well on a bare minimum of effort. Middle school is the ideal time for this time of shock; the stakes are still low(ish) and the potential for growth is huge. I’m not one for sports quotes, but in this case, baseball player and coach Vernon Law had it right. “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” It would have been much easier to teach the lessons first and give the test after, but in the end, I think the experience taught all of us a greater lesson. Everyone has to admit to failure – teacher and student. As a result of this failure, I grew as a teacher and they grew as students. Crossroads Academy was built on a core virtues curriculum as well as a core knowledge curriculum, so our journey through this week of failure became an important part of the students’ character education. That’s where commenter T. Zinner of Boston hits the nail on the head:

This article goes to the heart of our goal as parents and the ideal of teachers: creating individuals with strength of character. The happiest and most successful people seem to be the individuals who take their talents and face obstacles either directly with perseverance or creatively so that the obstacles are no longer viewed as challenges. This is the case for the most exceptional physicians I work with, the patients who live fully despite illness and friends and neighbors who create lives of joy and depth in the face of unexpected loss or change in circumstance.

That’s the kind of teaching I love to do, teaching that helps students become better people, teaching that takes into account the unpredictability inherent teaching adolescents.

But this sort of teaching is increasingly not what is valued today, and it’s certainly not what counts as quality teaching or a gauge of student progress. Failure makes people nervous because in order to find anything of value in the situation, everyone has to face their role in the failure. It would have been much easier for me to fail the students and move on, or curve the exam so much that the failure got lost in a sea of amended numbers. The grades would have looked good, the students would have felt good, and everyone would have been satisfied with my performance. But lurking under this neat and tidy appearance, my students would know. They would know they had not really learned the material, that I had swept something under the rug. Worse, I would know that somewhere down the line that gap in their education would come back to haunt them.

Assessments are often blunt instruments, and to decide a teacher’s worth based on student testing measures just one small fraction of the learning that goes on in the classroom. This one assessment failure taught me valuable lessons about my teaching methods, the quality of my assessments, and the courage of my students. Two of my students summed up our week perfectly as they handed in their remedy exam: “I think I learned more from that one failing grade than from any A,” and “You know, now that we have gone through every question, that test really wasn’t that hard.”

My sentiments exactly.

Students Have “Complete and Ultimate Control” Over Achievement

by Robert Pondiscio
August 26th, 2011

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Posted in accountability, Teaching | 35 Comments »

Will Fitzhugh didn’t get the memo.

Everybody knows that teachers are the alpha and omega in education.  The only thing standing between every child, a college degree and a lifetime of prosperity is that child’s teacher.   This is “settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants,” observes Fitzhugh.  But students still exercise “complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be” in a school, he notes.

“This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.”

Fitzhugh, the publisher of The Concord Review, the only known journal to publish research papers written by high school students, laments a view of education and ed policy that does not acknowledge students’ responsibility for their own performance, and instead assumes they are merely “passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”

“Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools.  What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them.  Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.”

The view that teachers are the prime movers is not just wrong, but stupid, Fitzhugh concludes. “Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that, ‘For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.’”

Says Who? Lots of Folks, Actually…

by Robert Pondiscio
May 9th, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Educational Policy, Opinion, Teaching | 29 Comments »

Whitney Tilson, ed reform’s most aggressively outspoken acolyte, is cranky with those who think reformers “don’t acknowledge the importance of factors outside of a school’s control like poverty.”  And he’s none too happy with the idea that reformers “demonize teachers.”  In his latest ed reform email blast, he throws down the gauntlet:

“I challenge anyone to show me even one quote from one leading reformer who says that reforming the schools is all that is needed or who believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance.”

Excuse, me Mr. Tilson, I think you dropped your glove.  Let me get that for you.  It took me all of 30 minutes of Googling to come up with these memorable bon mots:

1.  “By our estimates from Texas schools, having an above average teacher for five years running can completely close the average gap between low-income students and others.” Steve Rivkin, Rick Hanushek, and John Kain.

2.  “Having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” Robert Gordon, Tom Kane, and Doug Staiger.

3.  “We know for poor minority children, if they have three highly effective teachers in a row, versus three ineffective teachers in a row, it can literally change their life trajectory.”  Michelle Rhee.

Reading these quotes in rapid succession feels like watching the old game show Name That Tune.  Isn’t anyone going to say “I can close that gap in TWO years”?  OK, reformers….Close that gap!  But, in fairness to Tilson, at least no one is saying poverty and outside factors aren’t a factor and teachers can overcome every obstacle. 

Er….um….well….

4.  “Florida is debunking the myth that some kids can’t learn because of life’s circumstances. The state has proven that a quality education and great teachers can overcome the obstacles of poverty, language barriers and broken homes. Florida is now forging a seismic path for modernizing the teaching profession nationwide.”  Jeb Bush.

5.  “What I know for sure is whether your family is well-off or not, functional or dysfunctional — no matter what your familial circumstances are — a great teacher can overcome the challenges that a child is facing so that they have a good chance of a productive life. I’m not discounting the effects of poverty or kids coming to school hungry, but we can’t use that as an excuse for not reaching our kids. At the end of the day, you know and I know, great teachers who took kids from improbable circumstances and catapulted them to great lives and we have to ensure that this is the norm and not the exception.”  Kaya Henderson, DC Schools Chancellor.

OK, well at least no one within the ed reform movement is making the mistake of saying things are simple and easy.  No, that’s the Amen corner’s job.

6. “Repeat after me: We can’t have great schools without great teachers.  And when you start with that simple truth, the solutions become pretty clear. Let’s recruit our best and brightest. Develop the ones we have to become better teachers. Reward the ones who are doing a great job. Recruit and train talented principals. And after trying everything, help find another job for those teachers who aren’t cutting it.” Waiting for Superman director Davis Guggenheim.

7. “We know what works now and should just go ahead and fund it.” Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter.

Right.  Well at least we have a Secretary of Education who sees the big picture in all its nuance and complexity.

8.  “I think you need a number of things. I think that’s part of the difficulty here  is people look for one simple answer. So, do great teachers matter tremendously? Absolutely. And give an average child three great teachers in a row, and they’re going to be a year-and-a-half to two grade levels ahead. Give the average child three bad teachers in a row, they’ll be so far behind they’ll never catch up.”  Arne Duncan.

The Duncan quote is particularly interesting because he starts out by saying a number of things need to be done, but then states just one thing—teachers, naturally—is enough to get kids not just where they need to be, but ahead.

OK, so if teachers have come to suspect that the world looks at them and thinks the only thing standing between every child and upward mobility is them, it’s not something they just made up.

We are deep into a not terribly productive cycle of rhetorical excess, oversimplification and magical thinking from all sides.  I have often commended the work of Nancy Flanagan, veteran teacher and frequent commenter on this blog, whose Teacher In a Strange Land blog runs at Education Week.  Over the weekend she launched a cri de coeur, calling Duncan out for preaching education as social justice and a ticket out of poverty, while pursuing an agenda of market-based reform.  “I am heartily sick of politicians and educational entrepreneurs using ‘civil rights’ and ‘social justice’ as a rhetorical shield for advancing their own interests and commercial goals,” Flanagan thundered. 

“It’s time to remember the Freedom Riders, who risked their very lives fifty years ago this week, to achieve democratic equality. Not segregated charter schools which a handful of lottery-winners get to attend. Not classrooms staffed by two-year adventure teachers . Not watered-down, low-level curriculum and test items.”

I’m deeply sympathetic to many of the items on Flanagan’s bill of particulars.  She loses me, however, when she presumes to judge who is or is not entitled to wrap their reforms in the language, history and terms associated with the civil rights movement.  Frankly, I find myself increasingly likely to stop listening to anyone these days, regardless of their cause or concern, the moment they start nattering on about the new front in the civil rights movement, who favors the status quo, who puts the interests of adults ahead of children, or whose reform is more disruptive. 

News flash:  This #$%@! is really, really hard and bewildering in its complexity.  But you knew that.

What Do Teachers “Produce”?

by Guest Blogger
April 12th, 2011

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education News, Education Theory, Teaching | 18 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

In a recent head-scratcher of an article in Education Next, economist Eric A. Hanushek puts forth the argument that effective teachers produce higher salaries in their students.

The logic? Well, according to labor data, students whose high school test performance is one standard deviation above average (that is, students at the 84th percentile) can expect to earn 10 to 15 percent more per year than the student of average achievement. Hanushek assumes, apparently, that this high performance was the result of large gains over the years (as measured by test scores). We’ll get to that in a moment.

Now, according to Hanushek, if we consider that a “high-performing” teacher (at or above the 84th percentile) produces achievement gains of 0.2 standard deviations above those of students with an “average” teacher, and if one takes into account attenuation over time, one finds that such teachers will boost their students’ collective earnings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The figure offered for a teacher in the 84th percentile with a class of 20 students is $400,000 per year; even a teacher in the 60th percentile will raise students’ earnings by $106,000.

With all due respect to Hanushek, I find that his argument oscillates between the silly and the scary. The silly part is this: there is no evidence (as far as I know) that students in the highest percentiles in high school are those who made the greatest gains on their standardized tests over the years. In fact, I suspect that most of them did pretty well on those tests all along. The top level on many of these tests is not very high; once you reach a certain level of proficiency, your gains don’t show. Unless it can be demonstrated that these top-percentile students did indeed have the greatest gains—and that their teachers had the highest value-added scores—the argument flops.

Also, there’s no reason to assume that “high-performing” teachers—those whose students make the greatest gains—bring their students to the 84th percentile or higher. It is quite possible that the larger gains occur at lower levels. For many reasons, I suspect that they tend to cluster around the average—but whether or not that is the case, there is no indication that they continue in linear fashion up to the top.

As for the scary part, let us take the argument to its logical conclusion. Suppose teachers could “produce” higher salaries in students, and suppose the “highest-performing” teachers produced the highest salaries, on average. Wow—then you’d have a cadre of test score virtuosi churning out lawyers, CEOs, social network inventors, surgeons, and change readiness consultants by the thousands. Now, some people enjoy those professions, but not all do.

Who, then, “produces” the foresters, violinists, English professors, marine biologists, simultaneous translators, teachers, firefighters, museum guides, electricians, editors, and cabinet makers? Does this fall to the not-quite-so-high-performing teachers? If so, maybe the ultimate “effectiveness” is not entirely desirable. This does not mean, of course, that anyone should settle for so-so teaching and learning. Yet we cannot assume, across the board, that more or higher equals better.

Now, most people want a good salary, up to a certain threshold. Very few want to live in poverty, to depend on others, or to be left without choices. But beyond that threshold, many may choose a profession or job that doesn’t pay spectacularly but is otherwise rewarding. Many want to keep their job low-key so that they can do things outside of work.

I realize that that isn’t quite the point—that we are talking about the difference between those who reach a certain level of achievement in school and those who don’t—and the consequences of such a gap. But even there, many ambiguities remain. Although high achievers tend to earn higher salaries, not all do or wish to do so, nor do lower achievers (within a certain range) necessarily end up lost and impoverished.

What do teachers “produce”? If there is free will, they produce nothing. They teach, inspire, and encourage their students; they demand the best of their students; and they point to many possibilities, through the subject matter and their own examples. They help students reach a point where they can support themselves and do something they enjoy. But it is the student who takes off and does it—often making choices that confound the teachers and parents. That is how it should be. Otherwise, for all our fanfare over the Future, we would be trapped in an eternal Industrial Age, with teachers turning out remote-control dolls.

Diana Senechal’s book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in November 2011.

The End of the Rock Star Teacher

by Robert Pondiscio
February 15th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Educational Policy, Teaching | 40 Comments »

Note: A version of this post appears today on the website of Education Next, which recently asked me to review Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and Steve Farr’s Teaching as Leadership.   The review of the Lemov will run in the upcoming issue of Ed Next, but is on the magazine’s website today.  A blog post about the Farr book appears here.   — rp.

The first five words of Doug Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, are “Great teaching is an art.”  This is not a promising start. 

Well over three million women and men stand in front of classrooms every day in the U.S.  It is too much to hope for, and always will be, that more than a small percentage of them will be artists, great, bad or mediocre.  The degree to which we pin our hopes for large scale school improvement on attracting artists and rock stars to the classroom is the degree to which we plan to fail.  With an average salary of $52,000—an income level on par with electricians, probation officers, and funeral directors – teachers will not be recruited exclusively from the top ranks of college graduates. 

All is not lost.  After dispensing with those five poorly chosen words, Lemov spends the next 300 pages of his remarkable book completely contradicting his opening sentence, demonstrating in convincing detail that teaching is not an art at all, but a craft—a series of techniques that can be identified, learned, practiced and perfected.  In doing so, he has produced what may be the most important education book in a generation.  His focused, obsessively practical study of what makes teachers effective could—and should—shift the terms of our increasingly vitriolic national debate from “teacher quality to “quality teaching.”  This is no mere semantic distinction.  The difference is not who is in the front of the room. The difference is what that person does.  Lemov’s achievement is to examine effective teaching at the molecular level.   By doing so, he may have rescued education reform from its implicit dependence on classroom saints and superheroes.   It is an indispensible shift.  If teaching effectively is something for the best and the brightest, rather than the merely dedicated and diligent, education reform is finished, now and forever. Read the rest of this entry »

Sandra Stotsky on Ed Schools

by Robert Pondiscio
November 15th, 2010

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Posted in Teacher Training | 26 Comments »

Mike Petrilli’s complaint that ed reform is in danger of morphing into the compliance police brought an interesting rejoinder from Sandra Stotsky in the comments section of this blog last week.  Stotsky, a leading authority on standards and teacher quality,  suggests that reforming education means reforming our schools of education.   Dr. Stotsky prescribes the following:

1.  Eliminate education schools as they now exist. Place the preparation of 5/6-12 subject matter teachers under the control of the academic departments whose content they should master to the extent the department itself can justify (for the grade levels they will teach). Each academic department should have funds for hiring pedagogical faculty adjuncts (preferably good teachers of the subject) for the methods coursework they need and student teaching supervision. Grades 9-12 teachers today should be required to have a MA or MS in the subject they teach. State governments can require and make these changes.

2. Place the preparation of primary grade teachers in 3-year dedicated pedagogical institutes, with candidates drawn only from the top 25% of high school graduates.

3. Eliminate all federal funding and regulations for K-12. Federal agencies should focus on faculty research and training of graduate students.

4. Eliminate the single-salary schedule.

Stotsky has more than a point in her indictment of ed schools.  I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find many teachers who strongly agree with the statement “my ed school thoroughly prepared me for my classroom experience.”  And it’s curious that many who think the answer to fixing education is “just fire bad teachers” aren’t equally adamant about fixing the pipeline that produced those “bad” teachers.

Questioning the Teacher Quality Orthodoxy

by Robert Pondiscio
October 19th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Teacher Training, Teaching | 15 Comments »

Teachers might be the most important in-school factor in student achievement, but is that necessarily a good thing?  Dan Willingham’s latest at the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog notes that when teachers are viewed as the essential ingredient in reform models, the impetus is to fire unsatisfactory teachers and hire better ones.  “I’m no economist, but this approach sounds expensive,” Dan writes. ”If teaching were more consistent,” he notes, “characteristics of individual teachers wouldn’t matter so much.”

For example, we might try to make teaching more consistent by improving teacher preparation. Right now, teacher preparation just doesn’t matter very much. Most teachers say that it didn’t help them, and there is scant evidence that the type of training teachers receive has much impact on their teaching.  Naturally, if teacher training has little impact, and teachers are left to their own devices, characteristics of the teacher will end up mattering a lot to teacher quality.

Willingham also points out that a consistent curriculum might also make teacher quality a less volatile variable by making lesson content more consistent across teachers.  A set curriculum might hamper the creativity of individual teachers, but Willingham cites the words of one principal who told him: “With my really good teachers, if they bend the curriculum, I kind of look the other way. But I don’t look the other way with my struggling teachers. For them, it’s a safety net.”

“It could be that both or neither of these ideas, if pursued in any detail would prove workable. But alternatives should at least be considered,” Dan concludes.  “Teachers are the most important in-school factor; we should not automatically assume that’s a desirable state of affairs.”

Edupundit Myopia

by Robert Pondiscio
October 18th, 2010

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Posted in accountability, Curriculum, Teaching | 12 Comments »

“The consensus among Edupundits is that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement,” writes Will Fitzhugh, the founder of the Concord Review.  “Meanwhile, practically all of them fail to give any attention to the basic purpose of schools, which is to have students do academic work. Almost none of them seems inclined to look past the teacher to see if the students are, for instance, reading any nonfiction books or writing any term papers,” he observes.

Fitzhugh has long been a champion of non-fiction reading and writing, and high academic standards that too often students make it to college where ”they encounter nonfiction books and term paper requirements which they hadn’t been asked to manage in high school.”

One of the sad and damaging consequences of this myopia among Edupundits is that everyone but students is imagined to be responsible for student academic work. As Paul Zoch has so regularly pointed out, the message that sends down the line to students is that their job is to get through high school with a minimum of work, while it is someone else’s responsibility to educate them. The result is that, whatever gets decided about dropouts, vouchers, union contracts, budgets, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, curricula in all subjects, school management issues, and the like, our students are not working hard enough on their own education.

“Far too many of our high school students are waiting for someone else to set demanding academic standards, Fitzhugh concludes.  “But after they slide through high school and emerge, they are mightily sorry they were not asked to do more and held to a higher standard for their own academic work.”

“Many students, especially those whose parents aren’t college-educated, have no idea what skills, knowledge and work habits are required to pass college classes,” adds Joanne Jacobs, commenting on Fithugh’s post.  “They pass classes labeled ’college prep’ with B’s and C’s. They think they’re doing well enough.  If they knew they were in remedial prep they might work a lot harder.”

“An Immodest Proposal–Or, Rather, a Done Deal”

by Guest Blogger
October 16th, 2010

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Posted in Essay, Humor | 7 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

It is a melancholic experience to leave the comfort of one’s own Neighborhood and wander through beer-sticky streets, ears aching from the wails of illiterate and impoverished adults and babes, and to apprehend, as one strides past the grim Institutions with their barred windows and metal detectors, that behind those walls pace Bad Teachers who impoverish our Culture, Spirit, and Economy as they turn out tender ignorami no better prepared for the merciless World and Workplace than a suckling babe is prepared to navigate the Skies.

And yet, we stand on the brink of a golden realm—one of unforeseen fortune and fortunetelling—the realm of Science, the power and speed of Value-Added Assessments. Not since Herbert Spencer published his great Principles of Psychology have we been so close to unlocking a Science of Mind. We can calculate in an instant whether a Teacher is good or bad, and then use such calculations to build better Teachers and thus a better World. No one knows better than the ordinary man or woman how vexing the Problems of Life can be; therefore I, who speak on behalf of all of you, offer my gratitude to Science for plowing through the Muck and showing us the way to Success, to which each of us has a Right.

This new Science of Value-Added Assessments (that is, of evaluating Teachers by their students’ test scores) has been maligned, transmogrified, mocked, even criticized, by a full host of well-meaning but overly thoughtful Thinkers—Economists, Historians, Journalists, and, to no one’s surprise, Teachers themselves. The Los Angeles Times made the tragic mistake of exposing this tender Science before it was fully on its feet—by publishing the names and ratings of Los Angeles public school Teachers. Even ardent value-added proponents were saddened by this act. I, too, wept over the LA Times’ injustice and ineptitude—but not because I doubted the virtue of Value-Added Assessment, public or private. Rather, it distressed me that our Science was being offered up for Inspection—nay, poking and cutting— while it was still learning to walk. When you learn of its true Purposes and Destiny (which I have gleaned from secret interviews with Experts who requested Anonymity) you will surely agree that no better and firmer Science could possibly have graced our Land.

Value-Added Assessments offer only limited benefits to existing Teachers. When a new Teacher enters the classroom, her fate is 65 percent sealed, according to a Statistician. Oh, I have heard of the promises of Professional Development, but whoever has visited one of those Professional Development sessions knows that such promise resides largely in the Imagination. They are filled with Nonsense, I regret to say. I have heard that Teachers make Improvements over time, but many of them leave before they have a chance to improve, and those who do improve would have done so anyway, with or without Value-Added Formulas. Teachers leave or stay, improve or don’t, in accordance with their own Efforts, Education, Inclinations, and Abilities, not to mention the Conditions in which they work and the Quality of the Curriculum. In addition, we know that Human Nature left to its own Devices contains many Flaws. Each of us consists of many parts, some excellent, some not. Unless we have millions of Dollars and a willing Surgeon, we are unable to mix and match our pieces.

Therefore, the future of Value-Added Assessments lies not in rating the whole Teacher, but in rating her individual Parts. Should we determine that a certain part is effective in the classroom, we will recruit new Teachers with a matching Part—or, better still, the Part itself. Compiling successful characteristics, we will ultimately compose the Perfect Teacher. Such efforts are already underway. Teach for America has Formulas that identify successful Personality Traits; Doug Lemov has assembled a Catalogue of successful Classroom Practices. Yet Body Parts play a much larger role in Teacher Effectiveness than has been suspected; an education CEO told me recently, “It is the Body that we tend to disregard, yet even the Greeks were aware of its Importance.” Let me begin with one overlooked example: the Chin.

You may have assumed, dear public, that all Chins are equally successful in the classroom; with our abundance of Data we have found this not to be so. Pointed, protruding Chins, especially those that tremble, produce significantly lower student test scores than rounded but defined Chins, raised upward slightly and held still. Non-Chins and hidden Chins, surprisingly, have mixed results, but when they are lifted to about 15 degrees past horizontal, they tend to correlate with a slight improvement in Test Scores (in Mathematics, but not in Reading). Astonishing as this may seem, it is not the only Discovery of its kind.

Like Chin shapes, Nose shapes are associated with Effectiveness of Teaching. A sharply upturned Nose has been found to correlate with low Test Scores, but not the the very lowest (these are reserved for the Running Nose). A large Crescent Nose correlates with slightly improved Test Scores, though Results fluctuate and depend on the Subject. Noses that honk when they blow tend to provoke Laughter in the Classroom but not higher Scores, except in AP Physics. The best of all Noses—the Nose of the Highly Effective Teacher—is triangular, with modest Nostrils, and not especially large. Incidentally, a Doctor has disclosed that those who undergo “Nose Jobs” do not experience a change in their Teaching Effectiveness. It is their natal Nose—the Nose that rode with them into the World—that tells the Truth about how they will teach.

I am not authorized to divulge the nature of the secret Negotiations between Value-Added Scientists and Facebook, if they are indeed in progress, but I will hint that perhaps—just perhaps—Facebook with its vast trove of personal Data can help us find the best Chins and Noses for the classroom—and from there, Elbows, Fingernails, and Livers. Face recognition technology allows us to peruse millions of photographs in a very short time, and Facebook Users are already sharing Pictures of other Body Parts. You may object that Noses and Chins and such have little to do with Mathematics or Grammar, but I assure you that schools no longer teach Mathematics or Grammar. They teach Success. To this end, you will agree, we need successful Teachers—or, rather, Parts of Teachers. But how, you may ask, can a Part of a Teacher Teach? It is not in vain that a great Futurologist said, “Virtual Schools are the Future.” Virtual Schools allow us to take a Chin, Nose, Liver, Knuckle, Lock of Hair, Tone of Voice, Assertive Attitude, and Proven Technique, put them together, and make an Ideal Teacher.

Once the Ideal Teachers have been Data-determined and assembled from Ideal Parts, we will fill our Virtual Schools with them. At that point we will fire all of the imperfect Teachers—in other words, everyone. We will announce our great appreciation for the Humans who have toiled year after year, with great heart and spirit, under difficult Conditions. We will explain to them that while we do not fault them for being human, we cannot afford Humanity any more. Humanity simply does not make enough progress or stand up to global Competition. We will roll out our new composite Teacher—an unprecedented specimen of Perfection, a melding of Looks and Career. All test scores will soar through the Roof, but we will have no more need for said Roof or for human Structures in general. We will find ourselves whisked up to a new plateau of High Online Performance Everywhere (HOPE), where it never rains and Scores never go down. Just what that World will look like, we do not know, but it will be devoid of Complications, Gradations, Melancholy, Joy, Love, Challenge, Modesty, and Discernment, all codewords for the decrepit old Land in which we lived (or through which we wandered from time to time). You will not miss Humanity’s wending Ways. We promise you this. As a New Breed, you will not realize they are gone.

Diana Senechal, a former (and possibly future) NYC public school teacher, is writing a book about the loss of solitude in schools and culture.

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