The list is mind-numbingly long—education lies that won’t die.
I have detailed often the standard manufactured crisis/miracle rhetoric surrounding discussions of education in media, among the public, and by politicians.
Many education lies that won’t die are ideological beliefs masquerading as evidence-based claims; two of the most persistent of those involve assertions about teacher value and merit pay schemes.
Of course, teacher value is incredibly important to student learning; however, this argument is misleading at best, at worst a lie: “Research has shown that the number one factor influencing individual student achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.”
It is an incredibly compelling misrepresentation of the data available, primarily because it appears to support the value of teachers.
Yet, the evidence over many years shows that measurable student achievement is mostly driven by out-of-school factors (OOS) with in-school factors and teacher quality as a subset of that, both significantly overshadowed by those OOS factors:
The paradox is that teacher value is very difficult to measure through student achievement tests. Further, claims about teacher value that misrepresent that value force teachers and students into nearly impossible conditions to be successful.
Locally, a district is revisiting value-added efforts to attract and retain teachers in high-poverty, majority-minority school, paired with merit pay schemes (that have been tried multiple times in South Carolina unsuccessfully).
Value-added methods of teacher evaluation and merit pay are ideological commitments, and both are strongly refuted by a large body of evidence.
Simultaneously with these failed schemes, education is increasingly hostile to teachers—parent organizations framing teachers as groomers and indoctrinators along with states and districts trending toward curriculum bans and scripted curriculum that de-professionalize those teachers:
If we genuinely value teachers—and having been in this profession 40 years, I suspect that on balance we do not—we would address teaching and learning conditions (class size, teacher autonomy, etc.) within a larger effort to address social inequity in children’s communities and homes.
Ideology is not evidence, and education, teachers, and students deserve much better than political leaders and administrators using our schools as experiments of that ideology—especially when we have ample evidence that ideology is flawed.
Maroun, Jamil, and Christopher H. Tienken. 2024. “The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States” Education Sciences 14, no. 2: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the predictiveness of community and family demographic variables related to the development of student academic background knowledge on the percentage of students who pass a state-mandated, commercially prepared, standardized Algebra 1 test in the state of New Jersey, USA. This explanatory, cross-sectional study utilized quantitative methods through hierarchical regression analysis. The results suggest that family demographic variables found in the United States Census data related to the development of student academic background knowledge predicted 75 percent of schools in which students achieved a passing score on a state standardized high school assessment of Algebra 1. We can conclude that construct-irrelevant variance, influenced in part by student background knowledge, can be used to predict standardized test results. The results call into question the use of standardized tests as tools for policy makers and educational leaders to accurately judge student learning or school quality.
The US is in its fifth decade of high-stakes accountability education reform.
A cycle of education crisis has repeated itself within those decades, exposing a very clear message: We are never satisfied with the quality of our public schools regardless of the standards, tests, or policies in place.
The sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations were a peak era of education reform, culminating with a shift from holding students (grade-level testing and exit exams) and schools (school report cards) accountable to holding teachers accountable (value-added methods [VAM] of evaluation).
The Obama years increased education reform based on choice and so-called innovation (charter schools) and doubled-down on Michelle Rhee’s attack on “bad” teachers and Bill Gates’s jumbled reform-of-the-moment approaches (in part driven by stack ranking to eliminate the “bad” teachers and make room for paying great teachers extra to teach higher class sizes). [1]
Like Rhee and Gates, crony appointee Secretary of Education Arne “Game Changer” Duncan built a sort of celebrity status (including playing in the NBA All-Star celebrity games) on the backs of the myth of the bad teacher, charter schools, and arguing that education reform would transform society.
None the less, by the 2010s, the US was right back in the cycle of shouting education crisis, pointing fingers at bad teachers, and calling for science-based reform, specifically the “science of reading” movement.
Reading legislation reform began around 2013 and then the media stoked the reading crisis fire starting in 2018. However, this new education crisis is now paralleled by the recent culture war fought in schools with curriculum gag orders and book bans stretching from K-12 into higher education.
Education crisis, teacher bashing, public school criticism, and school-based culture wars have a very long and tired history, but this version is certainly one of the most intense, likely because of the power of social media.
The SOR movement, however, exposes once again that narratives and myths have far more influence in the US than data and evidence.
Let’s look at a lesson we have failed to learn for nearly a century.
Secretary Duncan was noted (often with more than a dose of satire) for using “game changer” repeatedly in his talks and comments, but Duncan also perpetuated a myth that the teacher is the most important element in a child’s learning.
As a teacher for almost 40 years, I have to confirm that this sounds compelling and I certainly believe that teachers are incredibly important.
Yet decades of research reveal a counter-intuitive fact that is also complicated:
But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).
Measurable student achievement is by far more a reflection of out-of-school factors (OOS) such as poverty, parental education, etc., than of teacher quality, school quality, or even authentic achievement by students. Historically, for example, SAT data confirm this evidence:
Test-score disparities have grown significantly in the past 25 years. Together, family income, education, and race now account for over 40% of the variance in SAT/ACT scores among UC applicants, up from 25% in 1994. (By comparison, family background accounted for less than 10% of the variance in high school grades during this entire time) The growing effect of family background on SAT/ACT scores makes it difficult to rationalize treating scores purely as a measure of individual merit or ability, without regard to differences in socioeconomic circumstance.
Let’s come back to this, but I want to frame this body of scientific research (what SOR advocates demand) with the SOR movement claims [2] that teachers do not teach the SOR (because teacher educators failed to teach that) and student reading achievement is directly linked to poor teacher knowledge and instruction (specifically the reliance on reading programs grounded in balanced literacy).
This media and politically driven SOR narrative is often grounded in a misrepresentation of test-based data, NAEP:
First, the SOR claims do not match grade 4 data on NAEP in terms of claiming we have a reading crisis (NAEP scores immediately preceding the 2013 shift in reading legislation were improving), that SOR reading policies and practices are essential (NAEP data have been flat since 2013 with a Covid drop in recent scores), and that 65% of students aren’t proficient at reading.
On that last point, the misinformation and misunderstanding of NAEP are important to emphasize:
1. Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that. 2. Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea.
Now if we connect the SOR narrative with NAEP data and the research noted above about what standardized test scores are causally linked to, we are faced with very jumbled and false story.
Teacher prep, instructional practices, and reading programs would all fit into that very small impact of teachers (10-15%), and there simply is no scientific research that shows a causal relationship between balanced literacy and low student reading proficiency. Added to the problem is that balanced literacy and the “simple view” of reading (SVR) have been central to how reading is taught for the exact same era (yet SOR only blames balanced literacy and aggressively embraces SVR as “settled science,” which it isn’t).
One of the worst aspects of the SOR movement has been policy shifts in states that allocate massive amount of public funds to retraining teachers, usually linked to one professional development model, LETRS (which isn’t a scientifically proven model [3]).
Once again, we are mired in a myth of the bad teacher movement that perpetuates the compelling counter myth that the teacher is the most important element in a child’s education.
However, the VAM era flamed out, leaving in its ashes a lesson that we are determined to ignore:
VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
Let me emphasize: “the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions,” and not through blaming and retraining teachers.
The counterintuitive part in all this is that teachers are incredibly important at the practical level, but isolating teaching impact at the single-teacher or single-moment level through standardized testing proves nearly impossible.
The VAM movement failed to transform teacher quality and student achievement because, as the evidence form that era proves, in-school only education reform is failing to address the much larger forces at the systemic level that impact measurable student achievement.
Spurred by the misguided rhetoric and policies under Obama, I began advocating for social context reform as an alternative to accountability reform.
The failure of accountability, the evidence proves, is that in-school only reform never achieves the promises of the reformers or the reforms.
Social context reform calls for proportionally appropriate and equity-based reforms that partner systemic reform (healthcare, well paying work, access to quality and abundant food, housing, etc.) with a new approach to in-school reform that is driven by equity metrics (teacher assignment, elimination of tracking, eliminating punitive policies such as grade retention, fully funded meals for all students, class size reduction, etc.).
The SOR movement is repeating the same narrative and myth-based approach to blaming teachers and schools, demanding more (and earlier) from students, and once again neglecting to learn the lessons right in front of us because the data do not conform to our beliefs.
I have repeated this from Martin Luther King Jr. so often I worry that there is no space for most of the US to listen, but simply put: “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.”
While it is false or at least hyperbolic messaging to state that 65% of US students are not proficient readers, if we are genuinely concerned about the reading achievement of our students, we must first recognize that reading test scores are by far a greater reflection of societal failures—not school failures, not teacher failures, not teacher education failures.
And while we certainly need some significant reform in all those areas, we will never see the sort of outcomes we claim to want if we continue to ignore the central lesson of the VAM movement; again: “the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions.”
The SOR movement is yet another harmful example of the failures of in-school only education reform that blames teachers and makes unrealistic and hurtful demands of children and students.
The science from the VAM era contradicts, again, the narratives and myths we seem fatally attracted to; if we care about students and reading, we’ll set aside false stories, learn our evidence-based lessons, and do something different.
[1] TAKING TEACHER EVALUATION TO SCALE: THE EFFECT OF STATE REFORMS ON ACHIEVEMENT AND ATTAINMENT
Joshua Bleiberg Eric Brunner Erica Harbatkin Matthew A. Kraft Matthew G. Springer Working Paper 30995 http://www.nber.org/papers/w30995
ABSTRACT
Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.015 standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence that the effect of teacher evaluation reforms varied by system design rigor, specific design features or student and district characteristics. We highlight five factors that may have undercut the efficacy of teacher evaluation reforms at scale: political opposition, the decentralized structure of U.S. public education, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the lack of increased teacher compensation to offset the non-pecuniary costs of lower job satisfaction and security.
[2] I recommend the following research-based analysis of the SOR movement claims:
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
Part of the problem in debates about schools and education is the relentless use of “teacher quality” as a proxy for understanding “teaching quality”. This focuses on the person rather than the practice.
This discourse sees teachers blamed for student performance on NAPLAN and PISA tests, rather than taking into account the systems and conditions in which they work.
While teaching quality might be the greatest in school factor affecting student outcomes, it’s hardly the greatest factor overall. As Education Minister Jason Clare said last month:
“I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on who your parents are or where you live or the colour of your skin.”
We know disadvantage plays a significant role in educational outcomes. University education departments are an easy target for both governments and media.
For people not in the field of education, A Nation at Risk is either a hazy (or nonexistent) footnote of history or a pedestrian (and obvious) claim that didn’t need a government committee to announce—US public education is a failure.
However, for all its fanfare and eager media coverage, the real significance of the politically driven report is that it set in motion a pattern still vibrant in 2023; mainstream media is constantly fanning the flames of “manufactured crisis.”
A Nation at Risk was a media, public, and political hit, but scholars were quick to note that the claims in the report were overstated, oversimplified, and lacking any credible evidence [1].
In short, manufactured.
From the early 1980s and into the 2020s, mainstream education journalism has hopped feverishly from crisis to crisis and endorsed boondoggle after boondoggle—never once stopping to say “My bad!” or to pause, step back, and reconsider their template.
When the state takes the quantified depiction of schooling that educational researchers provide and uses it to devise a plan for school reform, the best we can hope for is that the reform effort will fail. As the history of school reform makes clear, this is indeed most often the outcome. One reform after another has bounced off the classroom door without having much effect in shaping what goes on inside, simply because the understanding of schooling that is embodied in the reform is so inaccurate that the reform effort cannot survive in the classroom ecology. At worst, however, the reform actually succeeds in imposing change on the process of teaching and learning in classrooms. Scott provides a series of horror stories about the results of such an imposition in noneducational contexts, from the devastating impact of the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union to the parallel effect of imposing monoculture on German forests. The problem in all these cases is that the effort to impose an abstract technical ideal ends up destroying a complex distinctive ecology that depends on local practical knowledge. The current efforts by states across the globe to impose abstract technical standards on the educational village bear the signs of another ecological disaster.
As a result, a stunningly harmful pattern has emerged:
Amanda Ripley was wrong about Michelle Rhee.
Jay Matthews and Paul Tough were wrong about “no excuses” charter schools and Teach For America.
David Brooks was wrong about “miracle” charter schools (and everything else).
[Insert journalist] was wrong about Common Core and VAM.
And now, rest assured it will come to pass, Emily Hanford and Natalie Wexler are wrong about the “science of reading.”
Remember Waiting for Superman?
Sold a Story and The Truth about Reading are the same melodramatic misinformation campaign depending on an uninformed public to sell yet another educational crisis.
There will be no reckoning; there never is.
But some day (soon?) the “science of reading” histrionics will be a faint memory while everyone scrambles to the next education manufactured crisis.
The only things not to be addressed, of course, are the actual needs of students, teachers, and universal public education.
This past week an early career teacher, highly regarded in the classroom and very accomplished in the field of education, received a parental request that a student not be required to read The Great Gatsby. That parent, however, had signed a consent agreement with all texts, including that novel, identified as required reading at the beginning of the course.
The parent then reached out to the administration, who confirmed that the teacher had to assign a different work. This, of course, undermines the teacher and the process established, but it also creates more work for teachers already under incredible strain.
While parental oversight of assigned reading has been common in education for decades, this situation comes as states are increasingly passing parental trigger legislation, which moves the parental power from each parent’s own children to parents being able to ban works for all teachers or students to explore in classes.
That same teacher, frustrated and disillusioned, later that day read aloud their resignation letter to me in the context of telling me that much that they had taught in the first three years of teaching could no longer be taught in the last couple years—and increasingly will be directly banned in the coming year (as my home state is poised to pass its own educational gag order this spring).
The teacher cried while reading the letter aloud, and added that the resignation was depressing; this, you see, was a career they had been working toward since high school—and within 6 years, teaching is dead.
The current anti-teacher climate in the U.S. is incredibly harsh and driven by orchestrated false narratives:
The Left is trying to destroy children’s innocence in the name of 'tolerance.' pic.twitter.com/3lX0PVDg2p
Right-wing media are creating parental trigger structures even without the concurrent legislation:
'You're not alone': @IngrahamAngle launches a new parent portal to give mothers and fathers across America a place to share stories about what their children’s schools are teaching. If you have a story to share, email IngrahamAngle@Fox.com. pic.twitter.com/XcDII4x2DY
While teacher and school bashing (notably as “liberal indoctrination”) has a long history in the U.S., reaching back to Catholic schools fighting for market space as public schooling increased in the 19th century, the current anti-teacher climate has its roots not in Republican politics but in the Obama administration’s education agenda.
Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education heralded an era of education reform that actually doubled-down on the worst aspects under George W. Bush, and that doubling down feed into a growing media attack on “bad teachers.”
Instead of rejecting the standard approaches to education reform begun under Reagan and federalized under W. Bush, the Obama administration turned their blame to teachers and teacher quality. During the Obama years, the great experiment in value-added methods (VAM) devastated the teaching profession.
The perennial paradox of education has always been that teacher quality matters but it remains a very small part of measurable student achievement (only about 10-15%). Therefore, the Holy Grail of the VAM experiment—identifying “good” and “bad” teachers through standardized test scores of students—was always doomed to fail.
But it did accomplish planting the seeds of today’s multi-pronged attack on teachers—the “science of reading” movement blaming teachers and teacher educators for student reading achievement and the anti-CRT/educational gag order movements being linked to parent trigger laws.
Throughout the education reform era over the past 40 years, many of us in education have argued that education reform initiatives are less about improving education and more about killing public education and the teaching profession—charter schools and voucher schemes, Teach For America, VAM and merit pay, demonizing and dismantling unions and tenure, etc., to name a few.
From Fox News lies to parental trigger laws and education gag orders, the evidence is very clear now that this current wave of teacher bashing is definitely about killing the profession, and not about student discomfort.
Let me return to the opening teacher story.
When the parent was asked for reasons why they wanted their child not to read The Great Gatsby—so the teacher had context for choosing an alternate text—the parent responded that they did not want the child (a high school student) to read about inappropriate relationships and sexual content. So here is a point of fact about the insincerity of these challenges; that student had already read and studied The Crucible, without any complaint, a play grounded in adultery.
I am certain some parents challenging what their children are being taught are sincere, but I am also certain the larger political motivation among conservatives is to completely dismantle public education.
Just as I have explained that there simply is no CRT propaganda agenda in K-12 schools, there is no liberal indoctrination/grooming occurring in K-12 (or K-16) education either.
The Ingraham rants are simply political lies.
And these lies are not improving education.
They have one goal and it seems to have been effective: Teaching is dead.
In my upper-level writing and research course, Scholarly Reading and Writing in Education, students have been practicing critical discourse analysis of how media cover selected issues in education in order to compare that coverage to the research base on that topic.
They have recently submitted initial drafts of the major scholarly essay and are now drafting a public commentary drawn from the same analysis. One student in last evening’s seminar approached me with a question.
She was very concerned that her topic seemed to show a distinct disconnect between education policy and the research base, wondering if that was unique to her topic, and why that failure existed.
Her question came during the workshop time after we had read and discussed a recent public commentary of mine on school safety and the threat of gun violence as a model for their commentaries. I noted that her observation was accurate, and that it was not simply her topic, but common across all of public education—as I noted in my commentary that challenges popular school safety measures not supported by research
Coincidentally, I came across the next morning a Twitter thread about the broader failure in education to embrace progressivism:
Agree. I’d bet few could pass a basic history test…
Yet, there were decisive turning points where progressive theory was intentionally marginalized, which is why we now forget
While progressivism in education (often linked directly to John Dewey) has been routinely blamed for causing educational failure, as Alfie Kohn has addressed, the reality is that education has failed progressivism:
The rarity of this approach, while discouraging to some of us, is also rather significant with respect to the larger debate about education. If progressive schooling is actually quite uncommon, then it’s hard to blame our problems (real or alleged) on this model. Indeed, the facts have the effect of turning the argument on its head: If students aren’t learning effectively, it may be because of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices in our nation’s schools.
Kohn’s analysis is a mere decade old, and if anything, his observations have intensified as the U.S. continues to double-down on traditional and technocratic practices such as standards and high-stakes testing.
However, if we look back to 1942, Lou LaBrant exposed the exact same dynamic grounded in a public outcry over low literacy among men enlisted in the military:
Within the past ten years we have made great strides in the teaching of purposeful reading, reading for understanding (the kind of reading, incidentally, which the army and navy want). Nevertheless, we hear many persons saying that the present group of near-illiterates are results of “new methods,” “progressive schools,” or any deviation from the old mechanical procedures. They say we must return to drill and formal reciting from a text book. (p. 240)
However, LaBrant completely discredits the blame:
1. Not many men in the army now have been taught by these newer methods. Those few come for the most part from private or highly privileged schools, are among those who have completed high school or college, and have no difficulty with reading.
2. While so-called “progressive” schools may have their limitations, and certainly do allow their pupils to progress at varied rates, above the second grade their pupils consistently show superior ability in reading. Indeed, the most eager critics have complained that these children read everything they can find, and consequently do not concentrate on a few facts. Abundant data now testify to the superior results of purposeful, individualized reading programs.
3. The reading skills required by the military leaders are relatively simple, and cause no problem for normal persons who have remained in school until they are fourteen or fifteen. Unfortunately the large group of non-readers are drop-outs, who have not completed elementary school, come from poorly taught and poorly equipped schools, and actually represent the most conservative and backward teaching in the United States. (pp. 240-241)
Just 5 years later, LaBrant penned what would become a refrain of her six-plus decades as an educator: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87).
“[T]he considerable gap” between policy/ practice and research has, then, defined public education throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.
Again, as I confront about fortifying schools against gun violence and the research base on those so-called safety measures, practices such as grade retention and even corporal punishment [1] remain policy all across the U.S. despite decades of evidence overwhelmingly rejecting their use. Grade retention, for example, has been formally refuted by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), yet states continue to adopt grade retention based on high-stakes tests for third graders.
As LaBrant challenged decades ago, literacy today is failing students because policy remains anchored to discredited practices and ideologies such as the “word gap,” reading programs, leveled texts, isolated phonics and grammar instruction, and test-prep.
Possibly one of the most troubling examples of this phenomenon is the relentless and bi-partisan obsession with charter schools, especially the abusive practices found in so-called “no excuses” charters. As this review details,
A report, Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap, finds that, though charter schools on average perform no better than traditional public schools, urban “no-excuses” charter schools—which often use intensive discipline to enforce order—demonstrate promising results. It recommends that these schools and their practices be widely replicated within and outside of the charter school sector. We find three major flaws with this conclusion.
This endorsement of “no excuses” charter schools, again, simply ignores the broader research base that cautions against charter schools broadly and “no excuses” practices more specifically.
So, as I answered my student’s insightful question, I noted a few important ways to understand “the considerable gap” between policy/practice and research.
First, educators—unlike doctors and lawyers, for example—have never controlled the field of education. Public education has always been hostage to partisan politics and mind-numbing bureaucracy.
Let me caution here that I am not making a narrow Libertarian swipe at “government” schooling—since we are government—but acknowledging that just as education has failed progressive and critical theory and practice, public institutions have mostly failed the promise of democratic government because of partisan politics and bureaucracy.
Next, and related, the evidence vacuum that exists in the dynamic between political leaders and the public, again, can be witnessed in the school safety debate. Politicians both speak to and perpetuate public misconceptions about fortifying school—the public’s irrational trust in armed police on campuses, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors (all of which have been shown to make schools more dangerous, not safer).
But that same evidence vacuum occurs throughout the adoption and implementation of education policy.
LaBrant’s 1947 unmasking of “the considerable gap” ends with her imploring English teachers and NCTE:
This is not the time for the teacher of any language to follow the line of least resistance, to teach without the fullest possible knowledge of the implications of his medium. Before we, either as individuals or as a Council, experiment with methods of doing specific things or block out a curriculum, let us spend some time with the best scholars in the various fields of language study to discover what they know, what they believe uncertain and in need of study. Let us go to the best sources, and study the answers thoughtfully. (p. 94)
As teachers strike across the U.S. in 2018, let’s us carry LaBrant’s message forward because the only hope that exists for our schools and the students they serve is to close the gap by allowing teachers as professionals to practice our field guided by the evidence too long ignored by the political bureaucracy that has defined public education for more than a century.
[1] The list of ideologies and practices that represent “the considerable gap” is far too long to include in the discussion above, but here are many of the key ones worth recognizing: “grit,” growth mindset, merit pay, VAM, standards, and high-stakes testing. Please refer to the Categories in the right menu for posts related to each of these.
“I’m tired of simply trying to enjoy escapist stories in which people are tortured and experimented upon at black sites run by authoritarian governments, only to have the creators cram political messages down my throat,” said Land, 31, who added that Marvel’s recent additions of female, LGBTQ, and racially diverse characters to long-running story arcs about tyrannical regimes turning social outsiders into powerful killing machines felt like PC propaganda run amok. “Look, I get that politics is some people’s thing, but I just want to read good stories about people whose position outside society makes them easy prey for tests run by amoral government scientists—without a heavy-handed allegory for the Tuskegee Study thrown in. Why can’t comics be like they used to and just present worlds where superheroes and villains, who were clearly avatars for the values of capitalism, communism, or fascism, battle each other in narratives that explicitly mirrored the complex geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War?”
It strains the imagination only slightly to understand how this commentary on comic book fanboys also parallels the persistent combination in education of calling for no politics while using policy and a narrow definition of data and evidence to mask the racial and gender politics of formal schooling.
Let’s imagine, then, instead of the fictional Land an image of David Coleman (who parlayed his Common Core boondoggle into a cushy tenure as the head of the College Board) or John Hattie (he of the “poverty and class size do not matter” cults that provide Hattie with a gravy train as guru-consultant).
A close reading of David Coleman’s mug shot reveals a whole lot of smug.
In his “visible learning” hustle, John Hattie likely prefers to keep his enormous profits invisible.
Coleman and Hattie as technocrats feed the systemic racism, classism, and sexism in formal education policy and practice by striking and perpetuating an objective pose that serves as a veneer for the normalized politics of political and economic elites in the U.S.
Close reading, as it appears in the Common Core, requires readers to emphasize “what lies within the four corners of the text” and de-emphasize their own perspective, background, and biases in order to uncover the author’s meaning in the text.
However, Ferguson adds,
Critical reading, in contrast, concerns itself with those very differences between what does and does not appear in the text. Critical reading includes close reading; critical reading is close reading of both what lies within and outside of the text. For Paulo Freire, critical reading means that “reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world.”
And thus, close reading serves the cult of efficiency found in the high-stakes standardized testing industry that depends on the allure of believing all texts have singular meanings that can be assessed in multiple-choice formats—a dymanic Ferguson unmasks: “The story beyond the four corners of Coleman’s video is one of a man whose agenda is served by teachers following a curriculum that requires students to read in a way assessable through standardized tests he oversees and profits from.”
Simultaneously, of course, keeping students and teachers laser-focused on text only detracts them from the richer context of Martin Luther King Jr. and the broader implications of racism and classism informed by and informing King’s radical agenda.
Simply stated, close reading is a political agenda embedded in the discourse of objectivity that whitewashes King and denies voice and agency to King, teachers, and students.
Concurrently, Hattie’s catch phrase, “visible learning,” serves the same political agenda: Nothing matters unless we can observe and quantify it (of course, conveniently omitting that this act itself determines what is allowed to be seen—not the impact of poverty or the consequences of inequity, of course).
Hattie’s garbled research and data [1] match the recent efforts in education reform to isolate student learning as the value added (VAM) by individual teachers, yet another off-spring of the cult of efficiency manifested in high-stakes standardized testing.
Just as many have debunked the soundness of Hattie’s data and statistics, the VAM experiment has almost entirely failed to produce the outcomes it promised (see the school choice movement, the charter school movement, the standards movement, etc.).
Coleman and Hattie work to control what counts and what matters—the ultimate in politics—and thus are welcomed resources for those benefitting from inequity and wishing to keep everyone’s gaze on anything except that inequity.
The misogyny and racism among comic book fanboys allows the sort of political ignorance reflected in The Onion‘s satire. If we remain “within the four corners of the text” of Marvel’s Captain America, for example, we are ignoring that, as I have examined, “Captain America has always been a fascist. … But … Captain America has always been our fascist, and that is all that matters.”
The politics of education policy seeks to point the accusatory finger at other people’s politics, and that politics of policy is served by the technocrats, such as Coleman and Hattie, who feed and are fed by the lie of objectivity, the lie of no politics.
[1] See the following reviews and critiques of Hattie’s work:
Teachers need autonomy. Thankfully, I teach in a school that does not use curriculum alignment documents or strict pacing guides, and my administration values the judgment of teachers within our classrooms. Teachers in districts that are solely focused on numbers are restricted, and students suffer because no allowance is made for differentiation or reteaching for content-mastery. In districts with strict pacing guides, teachers are left with no option but to stay the course — even when they know they are failing their students.
At the college where I serve as president, we do evaluate student work; we just use a higher-quality method. Our students receive written evaluations not only on every assignment, but also for every course and learning activity. These evaluations are designed to be formative teaching tools.
For similar reasons, we completely stopped accepting SAT and ACT for admissions two years ago, after an internal study revealed standardized test scores are poor predictors of student success at Hampshire. We also recognized the bias of standardized tests against low-income students, and the negative influence of standardized testing on education.
The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) directs states and districts to identify equity gaps in students’ access to excellent educators and transformative school leaders. States are encouraged to use Title II funds strategically in order to identify and remedy these gaps. A new report from The Education Trust draws on ESSA documents and state teacher equity plans to provide guidance to state leaders, including some sound advice—but with significant omissions. The report does not engage with thorny issues around alternative pathways into teaching, and it largely skirts issues around incentives for supporting teacher recruitment and retention in hard-to-staff schools. The report also does not consider what attracts teachers into the profession and into particular school environments. Likewise, the report fails to draw on the explicit remedies sought by ESSA to link high-quality leadership with strong teacher recruitment and retention. Instead, the report casts the teacher equity problem primarily in terms of labor supply shortages and treats teachers like interchangeable widgets. Relying heavily on advocacy sources, it misses an opportunity to unpack the root causes of the teacher retention problem, particularly the corrosive impact of past federal and state policies on the teaching profession. The report does not help state leaders understand how they might build incentives and cultures that draw strong teachers into high-need schools, and they will thus be left with an incomplete and insufficient set of tools for ensuring that all students have equitable access to excellent educators.
Despite the fact that university presidents and the people who run university communication departments are only too happy to have their scholars out building a profile, the academic system is not set up to help them connect with the public. Writing a piece for Maclean’s or appearing on CBC’s The National doesn’t count toward tenure or get you a promotion: publish or perish is about peer-reviewed journals and books.
Time for public engagement is not often budgeted into a professor’s employment – scholars do this on top of their personal and academic responsibilities (I always feel a bit sheepish when I approach a busy prof to write something for me). The challenges are arguably tougher for some women in academia, whose pursuit of tenure or awards is already interrupted by maternity leave or childcare responsibilities.
The responses are predictable online and through social media any time I address teacher quality and policy focusing on teacher evaluation such as my recent commentary on Charleston adopting value-added methods (VAM).
How dare I, some respond, suggest that teacher quality does not matter!
The pattern is exhausting because most responding in indignation first misrepresent what I have claimed and then make the most extreme arguments themselves in order to derail the conversation along their own agenda, usually linked to the charter school movement grounded in teacher bashing and making unobtainable promises.
So let me state here that the central elements of what we know about teacher quality and efforts such as VAM-based teacher evaluation is that teacher quality is not an independent variable (any teacher may be effective for one student and ineffective for another, for example) and, since student high-stakes testing is not designed to measure teacher quality and is more strongly linked to out-of-school factors, VAM is both a horrible technique for identifying teacher quality and, ironically, a guaranteed process for devaluing the importance of teachers.
Teacher quality is unparalleled in importance in terms of student learning, but it is also nearly impossible to measure, quantify—especially through student scores on high-stakes standardized tests.
Teacher quality VAM-pires, then, often have agendas [1] that are masked by their bluster about teacher quality.
Trying to measure and quantify teacher quality is a mistake; linking any evaluation of teacher quality to student test scores lacks validity and reliability—and VAM discourages teachers from teaching the most challenging populations of students (high-poverty, special needs, English language learners).
Focusing on simplistic and inappropriate measures reduces teacher impact to 10-15% of what high-stakes standardized testing measures; in other words, VAM itself devalues teacher quality.
My informed argument, based on 18 years as a public school classroom teacher and 15 years as a teacher educator and scholar, then, is that we must recognize teacher quality is impacted by teacher preparation, teaching/learning conditions, student characteristics, and dozens of other factors inside and outside of schools—many of which are beyond the control of teachers or students.
As well, we must address the teacher quality issues that political and administrative leaders can control: class size, school funding, and most important of all, teacher assignment.
Just as decades of research have revealed that teacher quality accounts for no more than 10-15% of student test scores, decades of research show that affluent and white students are assigned the most experienced and certified teachers while poor and black/brown students are assigned new/inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers.
The charter school crowd’s bluster about teacher quality is pure hokum because charter schools increase that inequity of teacher assignment by depending on new and uncertified teachers such as candidates from Teach For America.
No one is saying teacher quality does not matter—I clearly am not saying that—but dishonesty about teacher quality does lay at the feet of the edu-reformers and the VAM-pires who wave their collective arms any time we call them on their failed policies and their political agendas.
Research analysis at Shanker Blog is among the very best available online, notably the work of Matthew Di Carlo.
The posts there are predictably nuanced and careful, dispassionate—to a fault. As a critical educator, I am on edge when I read these careful explications of educational research because they tend to stand so far back from drawing critical conclusions that they leave a great deal of room for forgiving awful and baseless policy.
Teacher Evaluations And Turnover In Houston is an extremely important post as it unpacks new research on the current era of teacher evaluations spawned during the Obama years, notably the increased use of value-added methods (VAM) that link teacher quality to student test scores.
I highly recommend reading the post in full, but here I want to add a few annotations to address both my concerns the analysis tip-toes when it should stomp and to emphasize a few key takeaways well addressed by Di Carlo.
Let me share a few passages, and I will boldface what I want to address; first, the opening:
We are now entering a time period in which we might start to see a lot of studies released about the impact of new teacher evaluations. This incredibly rapid policy shift, perhaps the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s education efforts, was sold based on illustrations of the importance of teacher quality.
The basic argument was that teacher effectiveness is perhaps the most important factor under schools’ control, and the best way to improve that effectiveness was to identify and remove ineffective teachers via new teacher evaluations. Without question, there was a logic to this approach, but dismissing or compelling the exits of low performing teachers does not occur in a vacuum. Even if a given policy causes more low performers to exit, the effects of this shift can be attenuated by turnover among higher performers, not to mention other important factors, such as the quality of applicants (Adnot et al. 2016).
To address incredibly flawed educational policy, I believe we must be much more careful about distinguishing between political/public claims and then how the research community poses the same issues.
As Adam Bessie has outlined, the “bad” teacher myth was never “sold” in the ways Di Carlo notes above. The film Waiting for Superman is a powerful example of how political and public discourse about “bad” teachers was primarily an argument that teacher quality was the singular or most important factor in student learning, period; politicians and the public almost never added the caveat “most important in-school factor.”
And we must acknowledge that the “bad” teacher movement driving new teacher evaluations including VAM was significantly grounded in anti-union sentiment and union-busting objectives—not about teacher quality or student learning.
But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).
Next, further into the recent post:
Prior to ETI, there was a negative relationship between teacher effectiveness and exits – i.e., less effective teachers were more likely to exit than their more effective colleagues, with effectiveness here defined in terms of validated measures of teachers’ ability to raise students’ test scores (in part because the original value-added scores, unlike the other components of the system, are available both before and after the new evaluations were implemented).
A strong footnote for this important point—so-called weaker teachers were already leaving—is that the real teacher quality problems facing schools, notably high-poverty schools serving vulnerable populations of students, are a lack of equity in terms of teacher assignment (poor students, black/brown students, ELL students, and special needs students disproportionately are assigned year after year to new or inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers; white and affluent students are gifted the most experienced and certified teachers) and the debilitating grind of high teacher attrition, turnover, in high-poverty and majority-minority schools.
Just as school choices increases educational problems such as segregation, VAM-based teacher evaluation does not address the real problems—equitable access to experienced and qualified teacher, and teacher turnover in high-poverty schools—while also increasing those problems.
And finally:
The big finding of Cullen et al. is that the relationship was stronger after the onset of the new evaluation system, with the estimated effects concentrated among low-performing teachers in schools serving low-performing students, who were more likely to exit the district than they were before ETI.
On the one hand, this suggests that the new evaluations worked as intended. Under a system in which principals were armed with better information about their teachers’ performance (full evaluation results instead of single year value-added scores), teachers who were less effective in raising test scores were more likely to exit the district (or be dismissed) post-ETI than they were prior to ETI, particularly in schools serving lower performing students. On the other hand, all exits increased under the new evaluations — including among teachers who were rated as average and high performers. The extent to which this spike is attributable to the new evaluation system per se is unclear, but it served to “dilute” the impact on student achievement of the increase in exits among low performers. There is also some indication that higher-rated teachers were more likely to switch out of schools with low-performing students after ETI (versus before the policy), which would also attenuate the impact of the policy.
The Big Caveat, of course, is that this evaluation process and concurrent analysis remain trapped in the efficient (read: lazy) use of test scores by students to determine teacher quality and effectiveness. That said, this study seems to show that VAM-type evaluations may actually push out so-called weak teachers—while also pushing out so-called effective and experienced teachers.
This preliminary evidence supports what many of us have been warning about during the Obama era of education reform: The “bad” teacher approach to education reform causes more harm than good because it misrepresents teacher quality and further de-professionalizes teaching, such as eroding the current teacher work force and discouraging the so-called “best and brightest” from choosing education as their career.
Di Carlo continues to offer incredibly important education research analysis, and I highly recommend anyone interested in education reform to return to this blog regularly. There you will find careful and crisp analysis—although I will continue to hope for the sort of analysis that will critically confront what lies beneath the political and public discourse about schools, education, teachers, and students.
The story inside the story of the research analyzed above is that beneath the “bad” teacher approach to education reform is a great deal of bad politics and bad media; and we must stop tip-toeing around those facts.
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 