Education

Diane Ravitch, the former Asst. Sec. of Education in the Bush Administration has writeen a book criticizing the policy she formerly endorsed.  Ravitch's criticism can, I think, be summarized as using the business model for schools--assessment as completely quantifiable, and achievement based on competition.

"The basic strategy is measuring and punishing," Ravitch says of No Child Left Behind. "And it turns out as a result of putting so much emphasis on the test scores, there's a lot of cheating going on, there's a lot of gaming the system. Instead of raising standards it's actually lowered standards because many states have 'dumbed down' their tests or changed the scoring of their tests to say that more kids are passing than actually are."

"There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition," Ravitch says. "Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what's [been successful] for them. They're not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block."

Link is to NPR story and excerpt of Ravitch's book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Ideas section of the Boston Globe today had an article on teacher assessment and suggested that an individual teacher can make a huge difference in how much a child learns in a year (something that the article notes is fairly evident to most parents and children).  Instead of using effectiveness as a teacher to assess teachers, though, our current educational system (the article says) is based on an industrial model:

" We use a one-size-for-all salary structure, in which the only factors used in raises are teachers’ higher-education credentials and number of years in the system, neither of which is strongly linked to their effectiveness. And we often let seniority, rather than merit, drive decisions about where a teacher is placed. It is in many ways an industrial model that treats teachers as identical, interchangeable parts, when we know that they are not."

Unfortunately, the solution the article primarily suggests is, I think, also coming out of that same model--which is to assess teachers based on how their students do on standardized tests.  What both have in common is trying to find an easily quantifiable way to measure--either credentials and seniority or student achievement as measured on test scores.  I think it should be something more along the lines of observation by evaluators and feedback from parents and students.

Grade the teachers