Teachers Are Not a Problem. They Are an Opportunity.

This was written by Andy Hargreaves who is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education, in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Andy tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Andy Hargreaves

Woody Allen quipped that when we face a crossroads in life that leads to utter hopelessness or total extinction, we should choose wisely between them. Yogi Berra said that if we come to a fork in the road, we should take it. When Eric Clapton went down to the crossroads, he just fell down on his knees.

In 2014, the future of teaching is at a gigantic global crossroads, but the choices need not be as oddball as the ones that the ABC's of Allen, Berra and Clapton offer us! This week, the Unite for Quality Education movement, organized by the global teachers' union organization, Education International, met in Montreal to advance its campaign of providing universal and free access to quality teachers to all students. This is a bold goal - not just access to education, good or bad, in huge classes or less, with properly qualified teachers or not; but access to quality education and quality teachers for everyone.

Are current trends in their favor or against them? Let's look at some of the most developed economies, including our own - because if we cannot provide quality teachers for everyone here, there is little hope for anyone else.

Some of the signs are not encouraging.

In March, in my home state, a report commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education set out an educational vision for the state in 2030. Although Massachusetts ranks Number 1 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and is one of the top-performing systems on a range of international assessments, the report's leading author, Sir Michael Barber, former adviser on education to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and now Chief Education Adviser to global educational sales giant Pearson unconvincingly portrayed this leading state as suffering from "complacency".

In response, the report recommends two strategic directions for teacher reform that are the opposite of what the highest performing countries are doing - opening up more routes of teacher preparation outside universities, and offering incentives to new teachers to take more pay earlier in their career at the expense of pension stability and security further down the line. What will be the result? A flexible, more easily qualified and more inexperienced profession who will take the money now before they move on to something else.

Now let's turn to the Canadian province of Alberta - consistently one of the highest English and French language performers on OECD's international PISA tests of student achievement. Part of this success is a strong teachers' association that includes principals and superintendents and that has historically worked closely with the province's 40-year Conservative government. This cooperation includes a recently concluded 14-year program to support teacher-designed innovations in 95% of the province's schools with 2% of the education budget. The Alberta Teachers' Association spends around 50% of its budget on professional development, research and policy advocacy, compared to the low single digits in US teacher unions.

This May, an Alberta Task Force for Teaching Excellence, assembled by the relatively new Education Minister, and without involvement from the Alberta Teachers' Association, laid out 25 recommendations for improving teacher quality. The most controversial of these is to impose a bureaucratic system for assessing teacher competence that will be linked to periodic re-certification.

If this can't be done with the existing teachers' association, the report warns, then principals may be separated from it so they will have the line authority to undertake the evaluations themselves. Of course, there are bits of incompetence in any system, but remember: Alberta is already one of the highest performing systems in the world. As international change expert Michael Fullan has put it in Canada's leading national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, to impose this change across the whole system would be like scorching the lawn to get rid of a few weeds.

So, ironically in some high performing systems that have succeeded in part due to their highly qualified, high status and stable teaching professions, there is a movement, against all the international evidence, to weaken the teaching profession in the name of economic "flexibility" and external accountability.

By contrast, a number of educational systems that have been declining or struggling seem to have grasped the significance of Joni Mitchell's old lyric "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? So they are pushing the teaching profession the other way.

Take one of the biggest basket cases of urban educational reform: New York City. After years of unnecessary upset and upheaval in the Bloomberg years that had no overall positive impact on student achievement, the city has come to an agreement to end a 9-year dispute with its unions. Under Mayor Bill De Blasio and the city's Chancellor and lifelong educator, Carmina Farina, the agreement has taken pay off the table until 2018 by making a reasonable and very modest settlement that now enables teachers and schools to focus on improvement. It has created a Union-Department panel to review and approve innovative and flexible ways to figure out how to improve student learning in 10% of the city's schools. It is establishing pilot programs to increase parent-teacher interaction (as well as time for teachers to engage in these interactions), and also scheduled in-school time for teachers to engage in peer-to-peer professional development. This recognizes the fact that US teachers currently spend less in-school time away from their own classes than almost all other nations, especially the highest performing ones.

The agreement will also streamline teacher evaluations by almost two-thirds - from 22 components down to 8 - and it will balance this with an expedited process to remove teachers who demonstrate unprofessional behavior. New York City is giving up on the one-size slams-all strategy of standardization and the war of all against all of charter school competition to embrace a more professionally inclusive approach.

Then there is Sweden. Once the poster child for social democratic excellence and equity, in the past decade, since its aggressive introduction of market-driven educational reforms, Sweden has experienced the greatest deterioration in PISA scores out of all OECD countries who were performing above average in 2003. Sweden also shows the greatest deterioration in educational equity between these dates. Sweden's educational reforms, especially its profit-based "free" schools (many of them owned by hedge fund companies) are modeled on the Anglo-American reforms of England and the United States. So it is not surprising to see that Sweden's educational performance is falling further and further behind the other high performing Scandinavian countries and moving more towards the low performers of England and the US, whose strategies it has adopted.

With an election looming in September, major political parties are responding to public unrest with Sweden's educational decline in a number of ways. Elevating the status and quality of teachers is one of them. Proposals include raising teachers' salaries, reducing the administrative burdens on teachers, and raising the bar for teacher qualifications so teachers do not come from the lowest ends of the graduation range as they do now.

One more country that is educationally endangered is Wales. Despite its exemplary record in educational equity in a fully comprehensive public school system, Wales is in the bottom third of all the countries who participate in PISA, it is the lowest ranking of all the four UK countries, and it is the only one of these to differ by a statistically significant degree. Last Fall, the Welsh Government invited the OECD to undertake a visit to review its improvement strategy and I was one of two experts who served on the five-person team that did this work.

Our report was published in May and included a number of recommendations on building the professional capital of the teaching profession. This included provisions to attract higher quality individual human capital into the profession, not by setting up a market of providers of teacher preparation outside the university system as the country's English neighbors had done, but by strengthening the existing system of university-based teacher education.

Our report also recommended extending a very promising government-funded program to encourage recently qualified teachers to acquire Masters' degrees. We also stressed that social capital (how well teachers work together) is as important as the human capital of what teacher are able to do alone - and to this extent we advised that a nationwide commitment to building strong professional communities among teachers should be strengthened by giving these communities a clearer focus and by supporting them with government funding so they could occur in school time.

Last - as the BBC and other media highlighted - we said it was important for the government not to get sidetracked by raising its scores on PISA, but to establish a compelling and uplifting vision of what it wanted Welsh learners to be. This, we said, would not only provide a direction for teaching and learning, but would also raise the status of Welsh teachers as the people who would have to realize this vision for their nation.

So whether we are Massachusetts or New York; in Canada, Scandinavia or the UK, when we stand at the crossroads of teacher quality, which path should we take - to build teachers up or break them down? The answer isn't in the earlier ABC's of forking paths.

Instead, we could do no worse than revisit the educational achievements of LBJ - Lyndon B Johnson: 36th President of the United States. After the life-shaping influence of being a public school teacher at the start of his career, Johnson built and left an immense educational legacy in the early childhood education reforms of Operation Headstart and in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that assigned Federal resources to offset local inequities.

Standing at his own crossroads of educational and social change, Johnson was clear about the path that America should take. "Education is not a problem", he declared. "Education is an opportunity". It's time we said the same about teaching and teachers.

Teachers are not a problem. They are an opportunity.

Help this video go viral

This video is a message from New York parents to New York's new mayor Bill de Blasio about how testing is corrupting schools and hurting children. I think Alberta needs to think carefully about how this relates to our use of standardized testing in grades 3, 6 and 9 and the Diploma exams in grade 12.

Education Insanity in New York

Education reform in the United States is insane.

Don't believe me?

Watch this video and try and make sense of what has been going on in New York.



For more on how public education is being destroyed in the United States check out these posts:

Reduced to Numbers

United States: How not to reform education

New York's New Tests

What has Finland not done?

Judging Teachers via test scores

We need more principals like Carol Burris

We need more principals like Carol Burris

Carol Burris is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores that has been signed by more than 1,500 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens. Check out the letter here.

Burris often writes about how standardized test-based reform and test-based accountability regimes are squeezing the life out of classrooms and undermining public confidence in public education (check out a couple of her posts here, here, here and here)

We need more principals like Carol Burris.

New York's New Tests

With the recent release of standardized tests results in New York, Carol Burris wrote a post about what these lastest standardized test results really mean:

The bottom line is that there are tremendous financial interests driving the agenda about our schools — from test makers, to publishers, to data management corporations — all making tremendous profits from the chaotic change. When the scores drop, they prosper. When the tests change, they prosper. When schools scramble to buy materials to raise scores, they prosper. There are curriculum developers earning millions to created scripted lessons to turn teachers into deliverers of modules in alignment with the Common Core (or to replace teachers with computer software carefully designed for such alignment). This is all to be enforced by their principals, who must attend “calibration events” run by “network teams.”

Burris isn't alone. Other education leaders are voicing their concerns over how public education is being highjacked by profiteers -- check out this open letter from Superintendent Joseph Rella:

We've all heard the expression: "If it sounds too good to be true -- IT IS!" I believe the converse is also correct: "If it sounds too BAD to be true -- IT'S NOT!" And so it is with the test scores. They are not true. They are not connected to student learning in any way.

So what's going on here? Why are standardized test scores being used to discredit teachers and schools? Anthony Cody's post From School Grades to Common Core: Debunking the Accountability Scam is a must read:

Here is the bitter truth. Standardized tests are a political weapon and can be used to tell whatever story you want. The campaign to hold schools and teachers "accountable" for test scores is a political project designed to deflect responsibility away from people who have gotten obscenely wealthy over the past few decades. The concept of "failing schools" is a bogus one. Schools are being shut down not in the interest of the children who attend them, but in order to create opportunities for new players in the education marketplace. 

Teachers have been beaten down by the drive for "accountability" and most of our leaders have been so intimidated they will not directly take on this scam. Instead they nibble around the edges, complaining that we are "testing too much," or that tests and standards are "misaligned," as if getting everything perfectly lined up would make the system work. It won't. If we are going to reclaim our schools from those attempting to privatize them, we must confront and refute the false indictment that is used to condemn the schools and the educators who work in them.

For a closer look at the corporate interests behind the Common Core, check out this video:



The Common Core is not a grass roots movement made by teachers. In fact, it's not even a curriculum -- it's a massive data acquisition program that will place certain corporations in line to profit off of children and tax payers.

After a decade of failures with No Child Left Behind and it's standards based, test driven school reform it would appear that the United States is prepared to double down on their failures by merely making the standards and the tests tougher with the Common Core and "next generation tests":

The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they're even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core's “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college. 

This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding curriculum, standards or testing.

How does this all end? Who knows, but I would wager a bet that nothing good will come until the real professionals empower themselves to be leaders among their colleagues in a bid to finally refuse their cooperation with distant authorities and foreign bureaucrats because public education, like democracy, only exists for those who demand it exist.

Ridiculously difficult or just ridiculous?

Questions about a talking pineapple on a standardized test in New York has attracted criticism.

The passage is a parody on the famous  Aesop fable about the tortoise and the hare, but in this version a talking pineapple challenges a rabbit to a race. Because the pineapple can't move, the rabbit wins easily, so the other animals who bet on the winner eat the pineapple. 

Students were required to answer some baffling questions about why the animals ate the pineapple, and which animal was the wisest.

You can see the passage and the questions here. 

In response to the public outcry to this nonsensical passage and questions, the New York Department of Education announced that the questions would not be counted against students.

Governments have a vested interest in ensuring that these tests never see the light of day in the public. Oh sure, the government will tell you secrecy is needed for security reasons but this is at best a partial truth. Governments need standardized tests to remain a secret so that the public can't see how utterly ridiculous they really are.

In his article Confusing Harder with Better, Alfie Kohn explains:

How many of us need to know this stuff--not just on the basis of job requirements but as a reflection of what it means to be well-educated? Do these facts and skills reflect what we honor, what matters to us about schooling and human life? Often, the standards being rammed into our children's classrooms are not merely unreasonable but irrelevant. It is the kinds of things students are being forced to learn, and the approach to learning itself, that don't ring true. The tests that result--for students and sometimes for teachers--are not just ridiculously difficult but simply ridiculous. 

"It is not enough to be busy," Henry David Thoreau once remarked. "The question is, what are we busy about?" If our students are memorizing more forgettable facts than ever before, if they are spending their hours being drilled on what will help them ace a standardized test, then we may indeed have raised the bar--and more's the pity. In that case, school may be harder, but it sure as hell isn't any better.

Standardized testing is a relic from our primitive schooling past, and our race to nowhere via testing flies in the face of an old Chinese Proverb:

Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.

We need more teachers like this

If you are proud of your high testsandgrades or ashamed of your low ones, you are a part of the problem.

But if those who get low testsandgrades speak up against them they are easily labelled as 'sour grapes'.

That's why those who get high testsandgrades have a responsibility to speak up and reject any accolades. Because they know that standardized tests measure what matters least. They also know that the costs of standardized testing are entirely unacceptable.

In New York, teachers are now evaluated and ranked according to their students' standardized test scores. While it's true that we should all speak out against this malpractice, it's especially important that the high scoring teachers do so.

That's why Julie Cavanagh, a teacher from Brooklyn, is so important. Cavanagh writes::

According to the numbers, I am a highly effective New York City public school teacher. But you won’t see me jumping for joy over the news.

This is one of many of ways to refuse our cooperation with test and punish accountability regimes.

Of course another method is for parents to say "Not with my child you don't".

Darling-Hammond on Evaluating Teachers

There's a lot of talk in education about accountability and teacher evaluation. Recently, New York released their Teacher Data Reports that ranked teachers according to their students standardized test scores.

Diane Ravitch has taken a strong stance against this kind of bastardized accountability and now so has Linda Darling-Hammond in her article Value-Added Hurts Teaching, she writes:

I was once bullish on the idea of using “value-added methods” for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. 

Why? 

First, test-score gains—even using very fancy value-added models—reflect much more than an individual teacher’s effort, including students’ health, home life, and school attendance, and schools’ class sizes, curriculum materials, and administrative supports, as well as the influence of other teachers, tutors, and specialists. These factors differ widely in rich and poor schools. 

Second, teachers’ ratings are highly unstable: They differ substantially across classes, tests, and years. Teachers who rank at the bottom one year are more likely to rank above average the following year than to rate poorly again. The same holds true for teachers at the top. If the scores truly measured a teacher’s ability, these wild swings would not occur.
Third, teachers who rate highest on the low-level multiple-choice tests currently in use are often not those who raise scores on assessments of more-challenging learning. Pressure to teach to these fill-in-the-bubble tests will further reduce the focus on research, writing, and complex problem-solving, areas where students will need to compete with their peers in high-achieving countries. 

But, most importantly, these test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach. In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students. This is true even when statistical methods are used to “control” for student characteristics.

Reduced to Numbers

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." 

-Albert Einstein

Last year, teachers in Los Angeles suffered under the LA Times printing of teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores.

This year, New York teachers are the target of a naming and shaming operation that took place when the New York media published evaluations that ranked teachers by their students' standardized test scores.

There's a lot wrong with all this and Diane Ravitch aptly explains how reducing the quality of a teacher to a score and then making this unreliable and invalid data public is nothing more than a ploy to undermine public confidence in public education.

The problem here isn't just that these teacher evaluations and rankings were made public -- although making them public certainly does make things worse -- the real problem here is that the complex work of teaching is being reduced to a number at all.

Teacher evaluations via test scores are prone to such error that they are not valid or reliable regardless of whether they are public or private.

After reading one New York teacher's response to being labelled "below average" despite what other anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests, I took note of one of his points:

As with many things in life, teaching cannot be simplified into an algorithm.

What if the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the most important things that happen in school cannot and should not be reduced to a number?

What if Rog Lucido is right in saying:

We delude ourselves into thinking we have measured learning because we uncritically accept the premise that 'learning is measurable'.

How many teachers are demoralized or angered about having their complex work reduced to a number but then go to school the next day and do exactly that to their students?

With every crisis there comes an opportunity. Could it be that there is an opportunity for us all to see that neither teaching or learning should be reduced to numbers?

If there's a silver lining to all this I hope it is this:

It wasn't until the system tried to grade teachers that teachers could finally see why they should not be grading students.

For more on abolishing grading from school check out this page.

To join a movement for abolishing grading, check out The Grading Moratorium.

You might also want to check out Alfie Kohn's article The Case Against Grades.

Judging Teachers via Test Scores

I've written before that the US is the anti-model for how to reform education.

Well, they are up to it again. This time New York has released a new way of evaluating teachers.

Diane Ravitch explains:

Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

As an Albertan, I have seen signs that our education system is perhaps moving in a very different direction than the US.

However when I see someone like Jim Dueck featured in the Edmonton Journal, and Rutherford talk radio show, I get worried.

I get worried because Jim Dueck is involved in reviewing applications for competition for federal funding under Race to the Top. And it is because of Race to the Top that many states are marrying standardized test scores to teacher evaluations.

Next time someone like Jim Dueck gets air time on the radio or face time with the minister of education, I wish they would bring all this to the public's attention.

Canadians should not be too quick to dismiss the idea that the lunacy of high stakes standardized testing, vilification of teachers, merit pay and other corporate reforms can come to Canada.

The 49th parallel does not offer some kind of inherent insulator to this madness.

We must all be aware that all it takes for destructive education reforms to become reality is for good teachers, parents & students to say and do nothing.