New Texas Teacher Evaluation System

Texas will implement a new teacher evaluation instrument and process in the fall of 2017.  A major difference in the new system compared to the current system is that 20% of the teacher’s evaluation will be determined by student outcomes, though districts have options regarding which outcomes they will use.  This is such a bad idea that I am not sure where to begin.  This idea is symptomatic of the current reform thinking in this country, and that thinking is bass-ackwards and totally off the mark.  OK.  Maybe that is where I should begin: how perhaps good-meaning folks are making the wrong rules for the wrong reasons applied to the wrong complex system.  It is a mental model flaw that we must fix ASAP.

Schools and the humans therein are a different type of organization than anything else you know.  Period.  They are not like a mom and pop sole proprietorship, they are not like an assembly line, they are not like a multi-national corporation, they are not like a doctor’s office, they are not like engineers or lawyers, they are not like country clubs or sororities or fraternities, and they are not like the army.  They are very different.  Schools, in my opinion and based on over 40 years of observing and participating in such, are much more like churches or families than any other organization, and they remain different in key ways from even churches and families.  Any strategy to reshape schools in the image of or using as a model any of the above listed organizations is doomed to failure and likely to undermine the very nature of the importance of schooling for the children of this nation.  To make schools more like the private sector dooms schools.  To make schools more like the army dooms schools.  And such efforts have been at the forefront of legislatures across this country for decades now.  As each reform effort or strategy is implemented and results do not change the solution by the implementers has been to do more of the same making everything much worse.  It is a though they are determined to have their mental model work and will stop at nothing to make that happen.  Going faster when one is lost is not helpful.  It is time we stopped and look at the map.

There are several critical attributes of schools that set them apart from every other organization.  First and foremost in my mind is the ongoing intense relationship between teachers and kids.  No other college degreed, certified professional spends as much time with patients or clients as teachers do with kids.  The interpersonal human dynamic of an adult in close proximity and tight quarters with children or young adults for hours each day is a dynamic few can fathom.  Doctors see patients one at a time and only briefly.  Lawyers likewise.  Engineers spend little time with people unless they are in a managerial role.  Not even moms and dads spend so many hours each day with their own children in a small room.  The variables in this relationship include all the vast varieties of human beings, both the teacher and the students.  Parents intuitively sense that the teacher of their child represents a critical relationship.  From the teacher’s point of view the mere numbers of children they work with is overwhelming.  No other organization in its right mind would assign one adult to supervise, monitor, teach and improve 20 to 45 children at a time.  The typical span of control in the private sector is around 8 subordinates per supervisor.  In schools it is 3 times that number.  Just keeping kids safe and engaged is a daunting task made more difficult by the diversity of the kids and their interest in the class and their manners and motivation.  Kids who are hostile or ambivalent to school and teachers become an almost overwhelming variable that is exceptionally difficult to modify.  Moreover, the teachers who have become battle-scarred, wounded and numb to the environment now created by legislatures and kids is a variable that is exceptionally difficult to modify.  I remain amazed that any teacher can avoid that perspective and pitfall.  Until one grasps this dynamic, this setting wherein a bell rings, 30 very different kids congeal in an 800 square foot room, and an adult assumes sole responsibility for them for hours and hours then one does not have a clue what schools are all about.  I recommend every legislator serve one day as a substitute teacher just to get a small taste of that reality.

The second critical attribute of schools is that schools are future oriented.  We are not talking the next quarterly report or even year-end profits.  The event horizon for schools is years and years.  Kindergarten teachers worry about their children when they become high school seniors twelve years later.  High school teachers worry about their students in the same way as they enter “reality” and seek to become productive people, husbands, wives and parents.  Teachers will tell you that one of the greatest rewards of teaching is the return of a former student to thank and praise them for lessons learned years ago.  The millions of kids in public school will someday take their place in our economy and our society and teachers feel that burden to prepare their kids as best as they possibly can.  It has always fascinated me that grossly underpaid adult professionals work their butts off to create the next generation of millionaires and reduce the number dependent on government safety nets to survive.  However, if the school’s orientation shifts from the long-term future of kids to the short-term spring test outcomes, then the school’s mission is thwarted and kids will pay the price in the long-term.

The third critical attribute of schools is the role they play in providing a vast array of services and programs to their students beyond the core curriculum.  Kids are bussed to school.  Schools serve two meals a day.  Schools have a large physical plant and grounds that must be maintained.  Schools maintain a clinic for sick or hurt kids.  Schools provide eye testing, hearing testing, spine testing, nutritional instruction, anti-drug programs, leadership development programs, and anti-teen pregnancy programs.  We provide instruction in music, physical fitness, home economics, foreign language, career education, speech and debate, theater, art and even robotics.  We offer programs for special needs kids, advanced placement courses, International Baccalaureate programs and gifted education.  We offer a vast array of extra-curricular opportunities including boy and girl athletic programs, band, cheerleaders, dance, orchestra, livestock husbandry, and choir.  We support an incredible number of student organizations from FFA, to science clubs, Spanish clubs, chess clubs, drama clubs, student councils, and honor societies.  Every one of these opportunities, and many more, involve teachers who are specialized and who spend many hours above and beyond the regular school day. 

So in this highly complex, multi-mission organization steps a lay person legislature who believes he or she has strategies to improve schools.  The gall of that step is truly amazing.  But when they inaugurate new requirements perhaps from noble motivation, perhaps not, they are killing schools,.

Every reform effort that opens the door to diverting public tax dollars from public schools to private sector profiteers is unethical.  Charter schools are funded by public dollars, cannot offer the programs public schools offer, are exempt from some of the requirements of public schools, and take money from the public school budgets to enrich private sector entrepreneurs.  Vouchers are worse.  They literally allow public tax dollars to be used by the wealthy to send kids to private schools depleting public school funds and saving money for those parents who need such savings the least.

Equally insidious are the so-called reform strategies that include the administration of high stakes standardized tests, accountability ratings for schools and school districts, and teacher evaluation systems that tie student outcomes to teacher evaluation.  It is this “reform” effort that triggered my pen to opine and I return to that specific strategy now in the context created above.

Perhaps it makes sense to evaluate migrant farm workers based on the number of bags of vegetables picked.  Perhaps it makes sense to evaluate assembly line work based on the number of widgets produced in an hour or a day or a year.  Perhaps it makes sense to evaluate sales people based on the number of thingamajigs sold.  But in each of the above settings the outcome used for the measured is inanimate.  Vegetables, widgets, and cars will pretty much do all that we ask of them as they are things, not living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings.  I argue that anytime a person is held accountable for what another person does we have pushed the limits of reasonable accountability to the threshold of incredibility.  And yet we accept the concept of measuring teacher performance based on student academic outcomes as though that makes perfect sense.

If holding teachers accountable for student outcomes makes perfect sense to you, then would you support holding a preacher accountable if members of his or her congregation commit a sin or break the law?  Would you support holding an oncologist as accountable for patient survival rates as a plastic surgeon?  Would you hold a criminal trial lawyer accountable for every client found guilty?  Would you hold a nutritionist accountable for every obese client they serve?  Of course not.  That would be ludicrous.  And yet, we propose the same preposterous system for teachers.

Does the teacher make a difference in student learning?  Absolutely.  Are some teachers able to help kids beat the odds and perform well academically?  Absolutely.  But we fail to seriously discuss the kid variable in all this.  Kids from poor families do not do as well academically as kids from parents of wealth.  Are the teachers of highly successful wealthy kids somehow superior practitioners than teachers of low performing poor kids?  Absolutely not.  If we knew that, all we would have to do is leave the kids in place and move the teachers.  No one is recommending that.  All that gets recommended is removing the teachers and principal in a school where poor kids are low-performing.  I would argue that the teachers of poor, low performing kids are much more likely to be superior teachers than those who teach wealthy high performing kids because wealthy kids tend to arrive at the school house door so much better prepared with a huge support system and strong family commitment to the value of education.  Teachers of such kids can in fact coast and the kids will do well.  That is not possible for teachers of poor kids who must do all that they can to not only teach but to somehow seek strategies to overcome the lack of support, experience and valuing that more likely occurs at home.  Given this double duty for teachers of the poor any consideration of removing them for lack of student performance is totally unethical and immoral.

And do not even get me started on using the state mandated high stakes test to make any of these assessments.  The net effect of high stakes testing has been the reduction of learning for the sake of test-taking.  That effect impacts poor and rich alike.  To use such spurious data to hold professionals accountable is equally unethical and immoral.  (As an aside, I find it almost hysterical that those in the fossil fuel business tend to be adamantly opposed to collateral accountability for environmental demise while promoting such collateral accountability outcomes for teachers.)

Further, how in the world do we hold non-core curriculum teachers accountable using this same cockamamie logic?  We do not give tests in many of the subjects we teach.  I know, the state says, let’s use portfolios of student achievement.  Portfolios?  Do you have children?  Do you keep a scrapbook for each child?  Is it time-consuming?  Imagine doing the same for 150 kids in addition to your other instructional duties.  There are not enough hours in a day to create meaningful portfolios for non-core curriculum teachers. 

And none, absolutely none of these reform strategies actually addresses the root problem.  The strategies that would in fact make a huge difference would be to increase the support services for poor children including food, shelter, clothing, and health care.  Such strategies could reduce the impact of poverty on learning.  The implementation of pre-school programs for all kids beginning at age 3 would help dramatically.  Increasing the salaries of teachers on a sliding scale that is most likely to keep our best in the classroom would help dramatically.  Increasing the overall funding for teachers so that the teacher pupil ratio could be dramatically reduced.  Cut that ratio in half and more students will be successful.  Amazingly, the staunchest supporters of the reform movement strategies that have a net negative effect (high stakes testing and teacher evaluation based on outcomes, charter schools, vouchers, ad nauseum) are also the staunchest opponents of the strategies that would most likely have a positive effect.  One must ask why would elected representatives seek so faithfully to demolish the likely success of public education?

Should educators be held accountable?  Sure.  But the system used must value the professional practice not the layperson’s political theories.  We must first ask teachers what they need to be more successful and then provide those things.  We must find ways to increase the impact of teachers by reducing the number of kids each of them must see.  We absolutely should not, ever, ever use a system that is all punitive and fear generating if we really care about the human interaction between teaches and kids in the classroom.  No professional performs best in a state of fear and the subject of microscopic analysis.  It is in the classroom that learning occurs.  Clearly it is not on Capitol Hill.

Trump?

I am still trying to wrap my head around the possibility of a Donald Trump candidacy or worse, a Trump presidency.  I add this brain warp to the realization there are also people who support Cruz, Christie, Palin, and Huckabee and their ilk.  How in the world can the political party most known for high educational attainment and successful business practices have degenerated into such a quagmire of quacks and snake oil salespeople?  Perhaps I have lost my mind.  I prefer to think that those who support these folks are not using theirs.  This political season represents the largest step backward in the history of American thought.

Personal passion, fear, and anger rule the lives of too many.  Self-image is grounded in false beliefs.  While thoughtful commentators point out that Trump is a racist, a sexist and a bigot, Trump supporters have grown in number.  Why?  I believe it is because his supporters are racist, sexist, and bigots.  When his supporters say they support him because he tells it like it is what they are really saying is he tells it like they are.

How did this happen?  How could the land of the free and the home of the brave become rooted in this anger, this fear, this willingness to offend and attack everyone who does not fit the proposed model American?  How can Trump’s theme to make America great again happen in a nation with a proud history of the extension of human civil liberties to African Americans, women, belief systems other than Christian, sexual orientation other than heterosexual, and races other than Anglo?  Listening to Trump convinces me he wants to make America more like 1950 than 2016.  And that is very dangerous.

I think it happened because the Tea Party, reality shows, fear, anger, Fox “News”, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh, et. al., are all anti-intellectual, anti-pragmatism, anti-secularism, anti-reason, anti-science, and anti-progress unless we are talking about the oil industry.  Thus Donald Trump, Cruz, Christie, Huckabee, Palin, etc., are perceived as viable options for the leaders of the most enlightened, powerful nation on the planet.  The ultra-conservative opinion shapers have for years been lambasting Obama, spreading false rumors, heightening fear, and stoking the anger.  The Republican Party is now reaping what these Neanderthals have been planting:  Donald Trump, a man with no experience in government at all, who has never held even a city council seat, never stood for an election for dog catcher, much less a governor, a senator or a representative is being seriously considered for the Presidency of these United States.  He is a naive rookie when it comes to politics, Washington and foreign policy, and that will be disastrous.  He mostly inherited his millions.  Many of his business ventures have failed.  He was great on “reality” TV when he got to say, “You’re fired!”, but that is not a pre-requisite skill for a President.  He is a racist.  He is a sexist.  He is a bigot.  His ideas are scary as hell:  A wall?  No Muslims in the US?  Kill the families of terrorists?  These are not strategies to return America to greatness.  These are strategies to send us back to the ideological Stone Age and away from our current greatness.  Sadly, that is part of his appeal to folks who do not know and do not understand the American political system or the grounding principles in our Constitution.  And it is part of the appeal to Americans who are also racist, sexist, bigots.  Trump is getting the Archie Bunker vote and the right wing media has helped develop more Archie Bunkers.

It is as though the Republican establishment is now awakening to the Frankenstein they have created.  For every fear tactic, for every stance that was anti-Obama even when the ideas were good if not great, for every threat to shut down the government and attack the resources that help the most needy Americans, for every position that was made for purely political reasons rather than what was best for the country, for every false rumor regarding guns and socialism and a world view the end result is an angry, fearful electorate.  That segment is giving us Donald Trump.

Can he be stopped on his road the Republican nomination?  I do not think so.  There is no viable candidate to take his place.  Cruz in many ways scares me more than Trump, and Rubio has all the charisma of Mr. Rogers.  Republicans are now Trumped.

It is my hope that three changes emerge from this.  First that the right-wing of the Republican Party begins to face the same scrutiny by mainstream Republicans that they use on Democrats.  These folks have been lying, exaggerating and spreading fear and anger for years.  Just as only Nixon could go to China, the only group that can stop this gaggle is fellow, thoughtful Republicans.

Secondly, we stop glorifying a past that in many ways is very embarrassing.  People owned people in this country.  Women could not vote or own property and their preferred position was barefoot and pregnant.  Bathrooms were segregated.   Schools were segregated.  Churches were segregated.  We had a poll tax to stop the poor from voting.  We did not serve children with special needs.  We did not inspect our food or our water.  We did not ensure that the workplace was safe.  We did not, could not, imagine Blacks, Hispanics, women, Muslims, atheists, etc. ascending to leadership roles.  Those were not the good old days.  If you think they were you obviously did a good job of picking your parents (Please read “I am So Smart” on this blog.”)

I saw a frightful video yesterday where student journalists stopped other students on the Texas Tech campus and asked them who won the Civil War.  Only one knew.  The others either did not know what the Civil War was, who fought or who won.  I am tempted to make jokes about TT, but I believe the same would be true on any college campus in Texas and elsewhere.  We have become totally ignorant of the social sciences (history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology.)  Our conservative leaders have promoted the end of understanding the social sciences because if we understand those sciences we might abandon fear, bigotry and sexism.  We have standardized all the social studies tests so that only a certain array of facts must be known to pass the test and the elimination of actual learning in these areas that occurs with classroom dialog, exploration, and analysis, has left us with students who do not know or understand what the American Civil War was all about.  They do not get that it was principally about life-style and slavery.  It was also about federal oversight of state’s rights.  Both issues were settled after a terrible blood bath where everyone who died was an American.  Students do not know that the economic policies of Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush are identical:  what is good for business is good for the USA.  Each of these presidents led us to the brink of economic disaster because those policies do not work. 

I could go on and on.  The point is the third change that must begin to happen if this country is to remain great is that we must teach our students to think, not to pass tests.  They must understand governmental decision making, historical trends and philosophies, the differences in cultures, and the economic impact of each of the philosophies out there.   Those who do not want their children to learn such things promote anti-intellectual schools.  If students are only told of one way to think then they are not capable of thinking.  In Texas we actually have a Lt. Governor who waged war on a state curriculum because one lesson asked students to look at the Boston Tea Party from the British point of view.  This man is clearly not about learning, thinking, problem solving.  The result is non-intellectual students who have no clue about our history and how it relates to the current Presidential Race.  Our kids become Archie Bunker, uneducated, anti-reasoning bigots.

That, in my opinion, is how the Republican Party will end up nominating Donald Trump.  Reasonable, thoughtful conservatives should be scared to death.  I am.

The Grand Old Party and the Good Old Days

The primary election in Texas is over.  I voted.  I won’t shame those who did not vote, but I will tell you that the Australian plan of fining every registered voter who does not vote makes sense to me.  It also makes sense to me to require 18 year-old women to register with the Selective Service.  We are able for the most part to force the guys to do that and there is no reason other than sexism to not ask girls to do that as well.  It also makes sense to me that registration for the Selective Service should include an automatic registration to vote.  

By voting in the primary I joined a political party.  That is how it is done.  If I show up and cast a vote to help select the candidates for that party I become a member of that party, complete with more junk mail and solicitations for money.

And as I sit and watch the national news coverage of the Super Tuesday election several things are obvious to me.  First, very few Americans actually participated in this process.  That is beyond sad.  That is scary.  Affluent Anglos have the highest sense of political efficacy and confirm that with every election.  White folks who earn above the median income, and retired White folks consistently vote.  Women not so much.  African Americans not so much.  Hispanics nowhere near as much.  Hispanic voters outnumber Black voters, but more Blacks vote than Latinos.  If Latinos ever showed up at the polls they would control election outcomes.  It is really no surprise to me that rich White folks (whether they think they are rich or not) tend to vote Republican.  The poor, the minorities and women tend to vote for Democrats.  It angers me that the data shows that most women vote as their husband votes.  So if your husband is an executive in an oil company and you are a teacher making less than $50,000 a year you probably voted Republican with your husband even though it is very clear that the Republican Party in Texas is strongly against public education and strongly for keeping teacher salaries low, and teacher evaluations test score based, etc.  Remarkably, such folks vote for the party that will most harm their chosen profession.  I have witnessed crazy stuff, and this one is not the craziest, but it is the most consistently crazy trend for educators. 

I break it down like this.  The Republican Party for the most part thinks the United States of America is great and if anything they want it to be great again implying we are not nearly as great now as we were in the past.  Their definition of greatness comes from the past, from the Good Old Days for which they yearn.  White folks are scared, and that fear makes them angry at the people they fear.  They are scared of income re-distribution, industry regulation, registration of guns, and government structured health care.  They are equally opposed to the greatest American socialist program, public education.  The rising Hispanic tide is a good target for this fear and anger.  Influx from the Middle East and Southern Asia is equally scary.  To get the Republican vote one has to paint a very scary picture of where we are now, and glorify the days and heroes of yesteryear.  Do that bluntly and you can win.

The Democratic Party for the most part also thinks the United States of America is great, and if anything they want it to be greater.  Democrats tend to look at the current state and long for a different future rather than the past.  Democrats are willing to change stuff.  They are not enamored of the Good Old Days and will fight tooth and nail against returning to a time when a woman’s place was in the home, a minority’s place was in clearly defined subdivisions, schools were segregated, and special needs children were not served.  The Democratic goal is to never return to those days and to continue to march forward with ever new initiatives to improve the future lives of all citizens.  Democrats tend not to be scared or angry which I think makes Republicans more scared and more angry.

Yep, I’m a Democrat.  Among others, I have a degree in history, and there really is no time in the past I can think of that is better than what we have now, assuming the Garden of Eden was an allegory.  I want to go forward.  I want us to improve.  I support being politically correct because it took hundreds of years to get the bias out of our language.  To use such language now is the tool of bullies.  I do not want to change things for the sake of change.  I want to see a problem and address that problem with a solution that propels us to a better future.  I do not want to return to policies we know do not work, like the reduction of federal oversight of the market in 1929 and in 2008.  Those strategies did not work.  I do not want to see us engaged in military conflicts that sap our resources and kill and wound our young men and women.  I do want a military that stands ready to defend us against attack.  I do not want any more Korea’s, Viet Nam’s, Afghanistan’s or Iraq’s.  We have yet to learn from those mistakes in the past.  And, if you want to secure this nation for an oligarchy the first thing you would have to do is dismantle and belittle public education.  I see such efforts as un-American. 

So, there you have it.  Few people will have voted today.  Those few that did will shape the direction of the state which may or may not be where the actual majority really wants to go.  I see the Republican Party seeking a return to some greatness as defined in the past, and the Democratic Party seeking new solutions to old problems so that we may enter a future greater than what we have now. 

It is not called the Grand Old Party for nothing.  And there really are no Good Old Days.  Yes, I have romanticized images from my childhood.  But I also see the water fountains and bathrooms labeled “Colored”.  No one had a computer, no smart phone, no satellite or cable TV, etc.  We are living in the best of times.  And I believe we can still make it better.