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.