Public Education Meets Carrot and Stick: Kids Lose

The only advantage I can imagine to being stuck on the tarmack for 2 hours at Austin-Bergstrom Airport last week while the plane was being de-iced was that I got time to read Greg Anrig's excellent book, Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence that Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, which  has been sitting on my Kindle for a few months now. Anrig, is vice president, programs, at The Century Foundation, author of several books and a former journalist.

Anrig's book begins with a brief history of management theory, focusing on two dominant theories put forward by Frederick Winslow Taylor and W. Edwards Deming. Taylor's thoeries eminated from the idea that workers could not be trusted and so he designed a management style based on punishment and reward. Taylor determined how much a worker should be producing and set workers goals accordingly and then tied their pay to productivity. Modern exemplars of the Taylor approach are bill collecting agencies, customer service call centers and national retail chains (Walmart?).

Decades later, Deming, working in Japan after World War II, argued that long term business success required constant incremental progress, the kind that required workers and management to be deeply engaged in sharing information and ideas with each other. Modern day exemplars of the Deming model include Toyota, Sony, Southwest Airlines and Kaiser Permanente.

Clearly, as Anrig points out, the national political debate over education reform has been driven by the Taylor model of management. There is a direct line from the Taylor model to such reformy ideas as merit pay, standardized testing and tying teacher evaluations to test scores. In other words, education reformers have embraced Taylor's carrot and sticks management style of education that failed the American auto and steel industries and that is currently used for only the most low levels of employment.

Anrig shows that there is ample evidence that this carrot and stick method will not work in schools and plenty of evidence that a more collaborative approach, such as that endorsed by Deming, and used by many of the most successful corporations in the world, is a better way to go.

Anrig cites solid research reports starting in 1990 that support the concept of a collaborative design for school improvement. These studies include those done by the Consortium for Chicago Social Research, The National Center for Educational Achievement and Century Foundation fellow Gordon MacInnes all of which come down to two key findings, strong leadership matters and a strong culture of collaboration between teachers and school leadership matters most of all.

The studies found that change is slow and incremental, but it can be successful in any setting, including in high poverty areas, although change is even more challenging there.

Education reformers do not trust teachers. Because they do not trust teachers, just as Taylor did not trust industrial workers long ago, reformers put forward management plans that seek to control workers, rather than engage professionals in systematic improvement. Education reformers wish to motivate change with the carrot of merit pay and the stick of the highly flawed Value Added Measures (VAMs) tying teacher evaluation to student scores on standardized tests.

We know, and Anrig's book very persuasvley lays out, what works. Collaboration works. Teachers and principals working together to improve schools works. Having teachers compete for merit pay through flawed VAMs, not only will not work, but it will destroy the very collaboration that is so necessary for a highly functioning school culture.

We want teachers working together to share instructional ideas, to puzzle out solutions to persistent problems, to design authentic assessments for students. The concept of the professional learning community, where teachers meet to share ideas and solve problems holds great promise for the continuous improvement of teaching and learning. The test and punish model of the corporate education reformers will inevitably kill collegiality and cooperation and, ultimately, public education.

Concerted group action is the enemy of corporate education reform movement. That is why the reformers demonize teacher unions and support policies that will turn teacher against teacher. By driving a wedge through the profession, the education reformers hope to destroy public education and turn it to a for profit enterprise run like a widget factory. This is one way to distract the public from the real issue facing school improvement - poverty. And poverty is one thing the corporate education reformers do not want to touch. Really dealing with poverty would upset the status quo that is paying off so handsomely for the 1%.

In these times, it is more important than ever for teachers to stick together, not only in the sense of unions, but also in the sense of building and maintaining the kind of collegial culture in the every school  that reasearch has shown is the one true way to effect continuous improvement.

Reading Anrig's book will help arm all in the profession against the false narrative of the corporate education reform movement.

Anrig, Greg. (2013) Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence that Collaboration Builds Effective Schools. New York: The Century Foundation Press.

What is Good Teaching?

Google the question above and you will get thousands of hits. There is no shortage of opinion and no shortage of research into the topic. Most recently, the most comprehensive study of what makes for effective teaching was conducted by the Gates Foundation. Millions of dollars were spent to pin down the answer and the results were published in the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET). The Gates Foundation claims to have figured out what makes a good teacher (Washington Post, January 8, 2013). It should surprise no one that, even with all that time, energy and money, the MET got it wrong. They made the classic researcher mistake; they went in with a presupposition and then they proved what they wanted to prove.

            While the MET project has brought unprecedented vigor to teacher evaluation research, its results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems. (Rothstein and Mathis retrieved from            http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013)

            Although we don’t question the utility of using evidence of student learning to inform teacher development we suggest that a better question would not assume that value- added scores are the only existing knowledge about effectiveness in teaching. Rather, a good question would build on existing research and investigate how to increase the amount and intensity of effective instruction. (Gabriel and Allington, Education Week, November 2012 | Volume 70 | Number 3)

            So, rather than having figured out what makes a good teacher, the Gates Foundation has learned very little in this project about effective teaching practices.  The project was an expensive flop.  Let’s not compound the error by adopting this expensive flop as the basis for centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation systems nationwide. (Greene, J. retrieved from             http://jaypgreene.com/2013/01/09/understanding-the-gates-foundations-measuring effective-teachers-project/)

So what is good teaching? As Jeffrey Mirel (2009) has said, “Teaching is an incredibly complex and difficult enterprise.” Establishing a universal set of criteria is extraordinarily difficult. Here is my list, open for debate, of course, but based on a reading of the research and 40 years of experience watching teachers teach.

·         Good teaching causes all children to learn

·         Good teaching helps all students to learn how to learn

·         Good teaching helps all students believe in themselves as learners

·         Good teaching is informed by deep content knowledge

·         Good teaching is informed by deep pedagogical knowledge

·         Good teaching is engaging

·         Good teaching is nurturing

·         Good teaching communicates a passion for learning

·         Good teaching communicates ideas clearly with relevant and memorable examples

·         Good teaching communicates high, but appropriate, expectations for learning

·         Good teaching happens in well-managed, orderly classrooms

·         Good teaching is well-planned

·         Good teaching provides on-going formative assessment of student learning

·         Good teaching provides occasional summative assessment of learning

·         Good teaching is made better through the  information gained from assessments

·         Good teaching is driven by skilled questioning

·         Good teaching is about caring for students as learners and as human beings

·         Good teaching is about attending the sporting events, concerts and activities of students

·         Good teaching is informed by good listening

·         Good teaching is about flexibility

·         Good teaching is about good humor

·         Good teaching is about sharing expertise with colleagues

·         Good teaching is about constantly improving teaching ability through reflection

·         Good teaching is about constantly improving teaching ability through professional development

·         Good teaching is about constantly looking for ways to improve

·         Good teaching is about including parents in the educational lives of their children

·         Good teaching requires training and experience

For anyone to think that this complex task can be reduced to a number that measures a person’s “value” as a teacher is absurd in the extreme.  I would like to see a measure of the “value added” of a caring teacher who attends her students sporting events, or the teacher who spends all weekend designing engaging lessons, or the teacher who provides a kind word to a child having a difficult day. These things are the “stuff” of teaching and they cannot be measured simplistically.

What do you think? I would love to hear what you would add to the list above.

In my next post, I will outline my thoughts on a teacher "valuation" approach that aims not only at assessing practice, but improving it. Yes teaching does matter and good teaching matters a great deal. Assessing it should be in the hands of people who know something about it.