Controversial opinions. Long road with sharp curves ahead. Author spent too much time in school, as both a student and a professor. YMMV.

My guess is that the article deliberately omitted the main point: As good as the teacher was and as good as the performance of her students was, the evidence from the testing of that teacher on her 4th grade students on 4th grade work was that that teacher added relatively little to what her students already had when they entered her class. Or, in a sense, with the way their teacher evaluation system works, the good teachers of her students were in K and grades 1, 2, 3 so that by the start of grade 4 the 4th grade students were already doing really well at grade 4 work and, with the way the measurement of amount added by that 4th grade teacher was done, that teacher was seen to have added relatively little. So, adding relatively little, she was evaluated as not doing well.

Added? Why the emphasis on added? Well, suppose you are teaching 4th grade, your students come into your class struggling with 1st grade work (it can happen), you work hard, and in the one year get your students good at 1st grade work, 2nd grade work, and 3rd grade work, whew, three years of work in one year, but, still don't have the students good at 4th grade work. So, such a teacher, taught three years of work in one year, should, still, be rated very effective. So, likely such situations are the source of the interest in measuring what was added.

Now measuring the added amount is likely, in some cases, tricky both for both testing and statistically. And, likely the severity and rigidity of the system kept the 4th grade teacher from moving her 4th grade students on to 5th and 6th grade work and, instead, kept them grinding away at just the 4th grade work they already knew so well that the teacher had little to add. And if she had moved her students ahead to 5th and 6th grade work, then the test, of just 4th grade work, would not show that progress and the teacher again would be measured as not adding much.

So, net, for a 4th grade teacher, a really good 3rd grade teacher is a tough act to follow!

It's sad to see such stress and struggle with K-12 teaching. We are so wound up with the goal of "no child left behind" and, to this end, coming up with systems to beat up on teachers that don't get us to that goal, that we have really poor systems of evaluation and, with high irony, fail at some basic academic tasks and have far too many false alarms. Bummer.

Or, if you can't do statistics well, then don't do statistics at all. We're better off with no statistics than with bad statistics. Have I seen some really bad, we're talking brain dead, statistics in K-12 education, up close, and personal? Yup!

Net, I wouldn't trust the Statistics and Evaluation Branch of the New York State Department of Education to get 2 + 2 = 4 correct. Why? I've seen just way too much fumbling with statistics. Or, bluntly, effective application of statistics to important real situations is mostly quite far beyond the abilities of ordinary organizations -- it's just too hard for them; they just can't get it right; they make messes and do harm.

Here's one way to slow down nearly any application of statistics: Go to some statistics texts, get the assumptions, and then demand that the assumptions be justified. One assumption? Sure, independence -- that assumption is so powerful that, in anything much closer to daily reality than quantum mechanics or dice rolling, it is essentially impossible to justify.

Looks like the goal of "no child left behind" has generated a massive bozo explosion.

My dad was a fantastic educator, and his description of the ideal in education was a student sitting at one end of a log and a good teacher sitting at the other end. Try to characterize this educational environment with statistics? As they say in New York, f'get about it.

But, really, no worries, mate: There is a safety valve -- the main source of education anyway, the home. E.g., I had a friend who went to a NYC school where most of the students knew only two words, and they could say those two with a wide variety of variations. The abbreviation of those two words was just "MF". That's all they knew. Not very articulate, but, then, usually they did get their meaning across, but, then, their meaning was not very advanced, either.

My friend? In the third grade, he was sick at home for a week with the flu, and his mother was shocked to discover that he didn't know how to read. So, in that week, she taught him. Then he knew how to read. In school? Maybe he also learned different ways to say MF.

Education? He did quite well: Got PBK at SUNY, Ph.D. at Courant, and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His education was (1) in K-12 or (2) at home? Three guesses, the first two don't count! Or, four years, K-3, the schools couldn't teach him to read, and his mother did it in a week.

Yes, maybe by grade 12 he knew the binomial theorem, and maybe his mother didn't teach him that at home, but, really, still, his education, the real key to his education, was at home.

My dad told me about a basic book on education, Dewey, Democracy and Education. So, since I was spending so much time in school, I wanted to know why and read the book. At one point Dewey defined education -- passing down from one generation to the next, where he was quite clear that what gets passed is both the good and the bad, not just all good. Well, net, most of that passing down happens at home, and there's next to nothing K-12 can do about it.

Actually, a lot of people understand this basic fact and, thus, want education to start at birth, that is, have the government provide the basic home parenting in, shall we say, at risk situations. I believe you will find that our current President is in favor of this! In other words, he sees the at risk situations as so hopeless that for a solution it is necessary to replace the home itself. Maybe he's correct.

Sorry 'bout K-12: I trust that it really can do babysitting, that is, keep the kids off the streets and, thus, mostly out of crime and drugs, keep the sixth and seventh grade girls from getting pregnant, etc. For much more, well, in some of the at risk situations, tough to have much more; or watch the PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education-of-michell...

with "The Education of Michelle Rhee". She tried. She was good. She tried hard, really hard. In the end, she accomplished basically zip, zilch, zero and nichts, nil, nada. The teachers themselves commonly believed that the goals were just hopeless. Or, she was unable to make the K-12 schools make up for poor homes. Sorry 'bout that. But didn't we know that already?

Well, maybe George Bush believed that education happened in K-12 and that, thus, we could solve the problem of poor education by a program like No Child Left Behind in K-12. Well, W also believed that "The Iraqis are perfectly capable of governing themselves", i.e., have the country stay together, as one country, a democracy, and not split apart into Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Others, with fighting, torture, atrocities, civil war, little problems like those. So, just help the Iraqis write a constitution, hold elections, and all will come together singing "Why Can't We Be Friends?". Where did W get that really strong funny stuff he'd been smoking?

Bush 41 was smart enough to stay the heck out of Baghdad. Bush 43 was not. Maybe W was not the brightest bulb on the tree. "No child left behind"? I understand: W, if your father had only had that goal in mind!

"More educational statistics, Ma!". Then, for the poor performers, "off with their heads!*. Might not make the situation much worse!

YMMV.

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