They assume that negative evaluations (both individual and group) will put pressure on the service organizations to evaluate their internal operations, fire some people, promote others, reorganize resources, change their operations to improve customer evaluations, or go out of business (and fire everyone).
Then there are unionized or government operations, where people are protected by "the contract" (real or figurative), don't have any clear sense of who their customers are, and rise up in great umbrage at the impudence of outsiders thinking their work should be evaluated. (Customers, to people who don't understand the concept, are "outsiders" or "civilians.")
I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.
I'm a parent, the customer, and to participate in this debate, that's all the qualification I need.
This isn't really true for any given business. In theory that's how businesses get better, but there are so many examples of businesses doing something horrible for their customers or society at large and then doing nothing to change their internal processes or staff.
> Then there are unionized or government operations, where people are protected by "the contract" (real or figurative), don't have any clear sense of who their customers are, and rise up in great umbrage at the impudence of outsiders thinking their work should be evaluated. (Customers, to people who don't understand the concept, are "outsiders" or "civilians.")
I don't know other unions, but teachers unions aren't generally opposed to being evaluated at all. Standardized testing isn't the only way to evaluate a teacher and it is argued that student test scores are a bad way to evaluate teacher performance.
> I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions. The author of this post was lamenting that his experience as a professional teacher wasn't relevant to those making policy decisions because they are making their decisions are ideology and personal belief of how things should be.
> I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.
I've always wondered about being a customer w.r.t. public education. How exactly are you a customer? What good are buying with your money? I don't consider students to be a commodity, so I'm curious as what exactly you think you are getting.
I'm not talking about theories about "society at large," because "society" doesn't keep a business in business; paying customers do. "Any given company" with too few paying customers goes out of business, which is an ever-present danger even for companies that try their best. You can treat your paying customers horribly as long as they have no better alternative, as is true of government, union, and other monopoly or near-monopoly situations, or even free market situations where the current crop of competitors are, for the moment, even worse, but companies facing real competition can't do that without losing customers, which is the same as a body losing blood. In a free market, some competitor will figure out how to beat you if your customers don't like you. Even monopolies are of variable durability, and the more poorly you serve your customers (in their opinion), the more people will be looking for a way to provide an alternative and take your customers (and their money).
teachers unions aren't generally opposed to being evaluated at all
No, they aren't generally opposed to being evaluated---as long as they are the ones evaluating themselves. They only object to attempts by "outsiders" to evaluate them.
How exactly are you a customer? What good are buying with your money? I don't consider students to be a commodity, so I'm curious as what exactly you think you are getting.
Too many people in education are confused about this. You are a customer if you are buying something. No, children are not commodities. You don't buy fifty pounds of child per year from a school. You buy education.
Schools are personal service providers like hair stylists. Hair stylists don't sell people, nor do they sell hair. They sell a service that improves people's hair. If you don't like their service, such as insisting that bad stylists can't be fired and you have to take whatever stylist they assign you to, you go somewhere else where, in your opinion, they sell better "hair improvement" service. A hair styling company that acted like the public schools would be put out of business in short order, because they can't afford to pay what the teachers unions pay for political protection of their monopoly.
If education as a service seems like a foreign concept, think of private piano teachers who teach young students. "I don't consider students a commodity" doesn't seem very relevant, yet they are single-subject educational service providers and the schools are multi-subject educational service providers.
And as for what exactly I think I'm getting: Since, strictly speaking, you can't buy skill directly, you buy teaching that creates skill, but you evaluate it by measuring how much added skill is produced, so you are effectively paying for the added skill. To insist that you're not buying skill but teaching would be like saying you're not buying a haircut but the stylist's effort that results in a haircut: meaningless pedantics (that you aren't suggesting, but someone might). If you don't get enough piano skill added to your child for the money you pay, you stop paying the provider and, maybe, look for an alternative provider.
If I put my kid in a private elementary school, I'm still a customer buying knowledge and skills for my kid. I'm just doing a bulk purchase of multiple skills (and including knowing something like world history as a type of "skill").
If I put my kid in a public school, I'm still a paying customer buying knowledge and skills for my kid. The school is still a paid service provider, but in this case, it is one with legislated monopoly power to take my payment from me by force, whether I think their service is worth it or not. Since others without kids are also forced to pay for my kid's education, they are also involuntary customers, but they are buying my kid's education, too.
If my neighbors without kids decided to chip in and pay part of the cost of my kid's piano lessons, they would be customers, too, and would be buying piano-playing skill for my kid. They could be hoping for some benefit for themselves as a result (a source of music for their later years) like a company that pays an external service provider to teach a skill to one of their employees, or it could be altruistic. I'm happy to help pay for the education of a kid whose own parents can't pay. There are things I want to use my money for, and buying useful educations for poor kids is one of them.
But if I, a paying customer, am not getting good enough educational service for those kids from the provider I'm paying and am not allowed to take my money and search for a better provider, I'll be pretty angry about it. Such a situation doesn't benefit my kids or poor kids or customers like my neighbors and me; it merely protects the adults in the politically powerful government-educational industry.
There's a big difference between judging others based on the objectively observable results of their actions and ordering others to do things a certain way. If a non-programmer complains about slow or buggy software from a vendor, that's fair, but if he tries to tell the vendor how to write it, it's a completely different matter.
> Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.
No, we haven't. Having gone to school does not make you a professional. That would be like saying anyone who has used a computer is a computer professional.
Honestly, think about what you're arguing there; 12 years or more in an environment, one ostensibly teaching critical thinking, but you still don't have enough experience to apply critical thinking to that process itself? If that's the case, why did we bother with the schooling process in the first place if it's so incapable of being applied to the thing you've spent the largest part of your life doing up to that point? That's ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure one of the major points of successfully building software is "Talk to the customer/user".
On another place on the Internet, I participate in discussions about military budgets, and there are a certain group of people who insist that since they are soldiers they have the ultimate call on how much funding it should receive. (Spoiler: the answer is "more.")
I agree with the article that we should value the teacher’s input to the debate and that it’s way easier to tell teachers they are doing their job wrong than to do it better yourself, but that doesn’t mean other people cannot have a valid, meaningful opinion on schooling.
Whether or not the "we're professionals" card is valid, I think it should be pretty damned obvious that eating paste in kindergarten does not give you equivalent experience to teaching kindergarten.
It's entirely different on the other side of the podium. Shockingly different, actually. Horrifically, shockingly, terrifying different.
/former freshman-level TA
Gad, the essay rambled quite a bit and confused its own argument. I can understand your concern. These two ideas are conflated. I have no clue as to whether this was deliberate or not. But to me at least the gist was clear: if you're not doing my job, stay out of the business of judging me.
[Insert long discussion about whether the community as a whole has a right to delegate people to tell teachers how to do their jobs. I think this is a no-brainer, "yes", but there are a lot of side issues, most of which boil down to what my initial comment was: we've created educational systems of people which are monstrosities to understand, manage, and make work.]
Then again, maybe that's close-minded of me. For all I know, the next billion dollar software company might have all of its technical decisions vetted by a panel of soccer moms.
I don't. I vote in alderman and mayors who do this stuff. Just the idea that direct democracy is for everything is questionable. You just get bikeshedding and other forms of mass ignorance.
Nor do we vote what jet fighters get bought and how many of them. Obama decides that. You may have voted for him, but that doesn't mean you have this level of granular control because it would be insane if you did.
One of the US's biggest faults is that there's too much direct democracy in the form of referendums and line items brought to popular votes. In my town I vote in everything from all the county judges (30+ people) to the dogcatcher. Elitism and autocracy that go against what Joe Public thinks are needed. If everything was direct, we'd be living in a bankrupt theocracy sending the poor and minorities to gas chambers while enriching the popular and well connected. The people can be as much dictators as a sole individual.
But you don't get to vote on what kind of hose they use, how they store their equipment, or how they go about putting out fires. You're talking about a question of budget whereas in the NCLB it is (or ultimately ended up being) a question of how teachers should actually teach. For this latter sort of question, some amount of expertise or at least experience in the subject should be required.
I will contradict myself a bit by asserting that as a parent I expect a voice in this process, but I'd argue that that does give me some relevant (if tangential) experience with schooling if my child is in school.
This is interesting. My first response is that not everything of value can be measured [1], but then I thought better of it and realized there probably are ways to measure everything of value [2], they're just not easy, obvious, or intuitive, and the odds of convincing a national educational bureaucracy that does things as much for appearance and expedience as effectiveness are probably not great.
[1]: http://blogs.hbr.org/davenport/2010/10/what_cant_be_measured...
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busin...
You do realize that this...
the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare.
...was the result of people who don't do X sitting in judgment of those who do X?
We need tests. Period.
IMO this is the root of the problem. We do not need tests. We need judgments about whether a particular student is ready to move on--from grade to grade, from high school to college, from college to a job. The people who should be making those judgments are those who have the facts: parents, teachers, employers, and the students themselves.
Tests are only a tool that can be used towards that end, and they are often a bad tool. You can't encapsulate human judgment in a formula, but that is what standardized tests mostly try to do.
This isn't really accurate, as in most places you elect someone who then goes on to make decisions on your behalf, presumably representing you and your community's desires and needs. We also don't vote directly on particular one off issues like funding items for fire or police departments. I also disagree that doing things in another fashion is insane, as there have been successes and failures that don't follow the western democratic republic model.
> The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare.
It was not the education system itself that made the bureaucratic nightmare. Testing policy like No Child Left Behind's purpose was to begin to enforce taking measurements and applying those measurements against schools, pupils, and staff. Applying those measurements directly is a problem, as we aren't accurately measuring things, we are sacrificing well rounded education for better test results, and are using those measurements to fire expensive teachers and replace them with newer, cheaper teachers. New programs like Race to the Top make this even worse, as the aim is to now replace public schools with private charter schools, schools which have not been shown to work on the same scale as public systems and will leave people with even less choice.
> As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children. It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need testers? All they ever do is complain!"
This is very true, we need data about what is going on, and most school systems do collect this kind of information. The real core of the issue is what to do with that information.
> In my mind once the tests leave, the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure.
I can appreciate you want accountability, but not having standardized testing won't end education or the profession of being a teacher considering how long education and teaching have been around. Education is not capitalist in nature, so treating it by those rules would be foolhardy.
You are nitpicking a minor error in his post, but the fundamental point remains.
We judge the police department on crime stats without being cops ourselves. We judge contractors based on whether the roads they build measure up to DOT standards. This is true even if the DOT officials are not construction workers themselves.
Similarly, we can judge teachers based on education stats without being teachers. This is true even if we vote directly on education priorities, or indirectly vote for a mayor/president/whoever who does.
Indeed. And as most experienced teachers will tell you, very few parents take the trouble to inform themselves about what's going on with their own children. The children of those who do are generally doing quite well.
Though I can't play piano, I can judge the virtuosity of a piano player quite well - because their performances are public. And it is easy to qualify and quantify what constitutes great piano playing. The complexity of the teaching job is neither public nor easily quantified, regardless of the wishfullness of (clearly) unqualified dreamers and schemers.
As a (previous) K-12 teacher I could talk for hours about the weaknesses of public education. You would leave understanding that few of them are due to the lack of qualified, capable teachers. And you would be the one in 10,000 willing to spend the time to become so well-informed. I recommend that, if you're as concerned as you feel you are, you take that opportunity to talk at length to a local teacher or two. And you'll discover that quick-fixes are not in the cards, that most teachers work long hours for inadequate rewards, and that no algorithmic approach is useful in approaching this difficult (and (potentially rewarding) problem.
You guys (Americans) had a great system which failed your weakest but managed to get you'll to the moon.
And then for some reason your country decided it wanted to test like India and China.
This is lunacy from where I stand. Having walked through the wringer in another country I know exactly what it becomes. Learning divorced from understanding.
Stop testing, break class size in half, increase teacher pay and double the number of teachers. But no one wants to do that because of the daft political climate, fund crunch, difficulty and the alternative of tests.
So a non human solution.
I've seen the end state of the path you have begun walking down, and it is flat out teach the test land.
Students by guides to the material with the shortest most efficient answers written down for memorization.
People realize that multiple choice tests are too easy, so more difficult tests are devised, in the hope of ensuring that it makes sure students are better prepared.
This results in yet more teach the test.
Tests are a poor proxy for checking if someone understands the material.
The argument is that"tests are all you have and better than nothing.".
What people assume is that testing is static, it's not. The testing process is dynamic and exerts a force on the behavior of the students and teachers, and over time over the recruitment and measures of students and teachers themselves.
Suppose we do this. How will we know if it failed or succeeded?
The best bridge I've got so far is that testing is a stop gap between here and wherever we want to get. (I assume the end goal is education over just simple literacy.)
Testing has 2 negative aspects to it
1) Its analogous to the effect nicotine or other habit forming drug/medicine has on its subject/user. After a while they have more than just an alleviating effect, the subject is itself altered to depend and operate under the influence of the chemical.
2) For any sufficiently complex task, tests create narrow fields of focus and reduce creativity and mastery. A movement towards the letter of the law, but not the spirit. If you want non educational examples, take everything from CEO performance, to tax evasion, to behavior in video games. It makes an argument for indirect measurement of outcomes.
At the core of the issue is that absolute terribleness of testing to actually measure anything other than itself, and how there is only a small range of measurable tests that can be conducted which are also applicable at mass scales.
Now I can't see ways to ameliorate or reduce these effects. One attempt has been to 'improve tests' - what with more complex tests and so on. All I've seen it do is create a push for more rote learning and often creates a side effect of whimsical marking.
I'm definitely, not going to argue that we should find a new or improved test. That would be as hand-wavy as saying "testing/measurables will solve it".
I suspect the answer will lie here, and at the intersection of what Panos learned with his cheating scandal. Likely a move towards more peer/group oriented work, which has a real world test which needs to be performed. Which of course would require teachers to have more time to work with and test the final result.
I'll respond and see if I can flesh the idea a bit later. Thoughts?
While I agree with this general point, it does appear that actual educators were not given sufficient voice. Recognizing that you don't always have to do something to judge those who do doesn't mean ignoring them is a good idea either.
(Yes, yes, language is always changing and so on. The linguists in the audience can sit down. I'm not giving up on saving that word.)
It's like rain on your wedding day.
But, let's assume you do get to have a say on whether your local fire station gets to have a new fire truck. You don't get to have a say on who gets hired or fired, or what training they require, or, perhaps most aptly, what people who are being rescued must be or do in a given circumstance.
I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where they spend their money. Nobody gets a free ride. I get to vote on whether the fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on fire. To do this any other way is insane.
The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare. I hate to be blunt but I'll just say it: these folks shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects, much less our kids' education. They (the administration, the consultants, the "blob", the politicians) are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Testing has nothing to do with anything.
As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children. It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need testers? All they ever do is complain!"
I'm not going to continue my analysis because this is an old, tired road, and full of little homespun essays like this which are supposed to make us take sides. I refuse to. We need tests. Period. In my mind once the tests leave, the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure. The rest of it? I'm perfectly open to discussions about the kinds of tests, the types of measurements that would be acceptable, and so on. We've taken a good idea and made a monster out of it, yes. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, that just is another indication of how totally screwed the system we've created is.