Two Views on Education

Two Views on How to Fix Education

How Bill Gates Would Repair Our Schools


By Fred Hiatt
Monday, March 30, 2009; Page A17

You might call it the Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee philosophy of education reform.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder turned full-time philanthropist, visited The Post last week to talk, among other things, about how to improve schools for the nation's poorest children.

That so many children in this country cannot live up to their potential because they are born in poverty and attend terrible schools is one of the nation's greatest scandals, as Gates pointed out in his recent letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Disclosure: Melinda Gates is on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.) "Only 71 percent of kids graduate from high school within four years, and for minorities the numbers are even worse -- 58 percent for Hispanics and 55 percent for African Americans," he wrote. "If the decline in childhood deaths [in developing countries] is one of the most positive statistics ever, these are some of the most negative."

The foundation has spent about $4 billion seeking to improve high schools and promote college access since 2000, along the way gaining valuable experience on what does and doesn't work. Based on those lessons, Gates names two priorities: helping successful charter school organizations, such as KIPP, replicate as quickly as possible; and improving teacher effectiveness at every other school.

In both cases, institutions stand in the way. School boards resist the expansion of charter schools. Teachers unions resist measuring and rewarding effectiveness. In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master's degree or teacher's certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject -- these all are mostly irrelevant. It follows that some of the money devoted to rewarding teachers who get higher degrees and to pensions accessible only to those who stay 10 or more years should go instead to keeping the best teachers from leaving in their fourth or fifth years.

One purpose of measurement would be to deploy the best teachers to the neediest schools, and pay them accordingly; another, to fire the worst teachers. But the main point, Gates said, is that effective teaching can be taught: "The biggest part is taking the people who want to be good -- and helping them."

President Obama and his education secretary, former Chicago school superintendent Arne Duncan, are on the same wavelength. During an electronic town hall forum at the White House on Thursday, Obama cited as his priorities pre-K education, charter schools and teacher effectiveness.

Obama and Duncan both stress that teachers shouldn't be judged on standardized tests alone, but they want better standardized tests to measure how much a student improves in a year, so that teachers can be rewarded or held accountable. Like Gates -- with whom Obama had discussed teacher effectiveness the day before his town hall meeting -- they want more emphasis on helping teachers who want to improve. But they also believe that ineffective teachers shouldn't be retained automatically, as is usually the case now. "And it can't be impossible to move out bad teachers, because that brings -- that makes everybody depressed in a school," Obama said, " . . . and it makes it harder for the teachers who are inheriting these kids the next year. . . ."

As it happens, these are the principles that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is seeking to bring to Washington schools. Like Obama, she says that she wants to work with, not against, teachers. But so far their union has done everything it can to block her, including preventing District teachers from voting on her proposals. The union, among other differences, wants performance judged school-wide, not -- as most reformers would say -- on a mixture of school and individual teacher performance. Union locals, controlled by long-serving teachers, also, not surprisingly, tend to favor pay and pension structures that reward long-serving teachers, not the best strategy to attract the brightest from a generation that doesn't envision spending 20 or 30 years with one employer.

During a visit to The Post at the beginning of this month, Duncan, without commenting directly on the D.C. contract talks, endorsed Rhee's approach.

"We have to reward excellence," Duncan said. "Reward, incent, spotlight excellence -- which is what she's trying to do. We also have to make it easier to get rid of teachers when learning isn't happening.
"The pendulum in the country has swung too far to adults," Duncan added. "She's trying to swing the pendulum back." Maybe the winds blowing from the White House will help Rhee push the pendulum toward an emphasis on children first.



What’s Wrong with Our Schools?
by Deborah Meier

April 2009


Recently Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, in his article “How Bill Gates Would Repair Our Schools” (Monday, March 30, 2009) explains the answer is: replicate KIPP and more Charters. The trouble is simple, the article explains that institutions stand in the way. School boards resist the expansion of charter schools. Teachers unions resist measuring and rewarding effectiveness. In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master's degree or teacher's certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject -- these all are mostly irrelevant.

The absence of a correlation between good teaching and the teacher’s own education, certification, or deep knowledge appears pretty astounding. Even Teach for America lays its claim to fame, for example, on the value of an Ivy League diploma.

What is intriguing is that neither Gates nor Hiatt stop to wonder if the absence of correlation might indict the tool for measuring the impact of teaching: standardized test scores.

If I reported on studies showing something similar in the field of health—that seeing a credentialed doctor didn’t prove any more successful than consulting the man on the street—I would face somewhat more skepticism, I suspect. What kind of measuring rod could I be using, would be the first question. Ditto if I argued that you do not apparently need to know how to play an instrument well to teach it well, you might want to know how I defined “well,” and how I measured it.

But lo and behold, by some measure that passes the sniff test for Gates and company, teachers don’t have to be well-educated people to pass “it” on to kids. He may be right: if tests are “it.” Then what is needed, apparently, are trained drill sergeants that explicitly teach testing skills. When I started teaching this was something that the test companies explicitly called cheating! (Sort of akin to my artificially raising the temperature on the thermometer as a child when I wanted to stay home from school.)

Psychometrics—as a discipline—was built around a different paradigm: prepping, they argued, literally invalidated the results. (On LSATs, Lani Guinier pointed out that there is reverse correlation between high scores and lawyer’s performance of public service. Which do we value more?)

In the new aggressive drive for higher scores—by any means--have we lost something more important?

Imagine a concern over the driving skills of Americans which focused on the low scores on the standardized bubble-in portion of driving tests. We might conclude that current driving instruction— with it’s focus on the road test—was having no impact on test scores. Shock and surprise. We might then decide that we were wasting money on driving instruction. How about intensive prepping for the test and less driving of the car? Lo and behold neither class size, driving experience or expensive simulations seemed to matter when it came to the paper-and-pencil driving test. Maybe those who preferred to take the old-fashioned driving road test could go to expensive private schools for it. In the name of equity though the cheaper bubble-in test would do as well.

It wouldn’t take long before some smart sociologist noted that we were ignoring the critical measure: road accidents. In fact, road accidents and driving test scores were having a decreasing correlation. (And alas rich people couldn’t escape being victims of bad drivers too.)

Unfortunately there is no real life definitions of being “well-educated.” In education we have literally mistaken the test for the real-world measure, and then cut off opportunities for those who didn’t perform well on the test. There is no road experience to fall back on. In fact real experiences with the subject under study is less and less fashionable.

If we judged musicians on the basis of paper-and-pencil simulations, we wouldn’t need musicians to train future musicians either. That would make school music programs easier. Think how much we could save if we didn’t even need instruments to play on, and could teach music testing skills in a large lecture hall, or via distance learning programs.

Is there an alternative? Yes. Of course. But it would take teaching intellectual, social and moral habits with the same seriousness as we teach soccer, tennis or the piano—when we want excellence. No other field of endeavor except K-12 education has such absurd ratios of “supervisors/teachers” to pupils, has such little respect for “hands-on” expertise, or cares so little about the side effect of its instruction. We haven’t even stopped “doing” reform for a few hours to ask what the purpose of schooling is, above and beyond incarcerating youth for 12 years and then sorting them out at the end.

Shame on you, Mr. Gates.

Shame on you Mr. Hiatt for assuming that Bill Gates is an expert on education.

–Deborah

© 2009 Deborah Meier