If You're Not Prepared for Power, You End Up Like Steve Litzow

....because he's had a bad week, and it's going to get worse.

On Wednesday he held a hearing about making the reading test in 3rd grade a pass/fail proposition; this, at the exact same time that we're changing both the standards and the testing to meet the demands of the Common Core.  It's a bad idea that was copied from Florida, exactly like another one of his bills, and this did not go unnoticed by the Senate Democrats.

What Litzow has done, essentially, is picked up the gavel, pulled down his pants, and showed his butt for all the world to see, and as the  Democrats line up to kick it with aplomb you'll see those "reform" bills that do pass out of the committee be on strictly 6-5 party line votes, and I'm not sure what'll happen when Jerome Delvin leaves to go be a County Commissioner back home.  The members of the Majority Coalition will then be asked to make some absolutely terrible votes where they'll get zero Democratic support on the floor, and then those bills will die in the House.  If Washington really is an education reform backwater, the way that Senator Tom is fond of saying, it's only because Litzow's committee is working hard to set ed reform back 20 years.  Well done!

Other reading:

The Bush Foundation is reading out to the states
Corporate Interests Pay to Play

Read more here, if any.

A Fail by the State Board of Education

No, not Core 24--this time, it's their Facebook Page:

Earlier this week whoever maintains their page posted a link to the Tacoma News-Tribune editorial about the Masters pay bump along with the question, "Do we need to change the way we pay teachers?" They didn't question the source material, they didn't stand up for the teachers--they just passed along the big lie without question.

Right now, the State Board is far more interested in reform than they are in education, and it's annoying.

Read more here, if any.

The Nagging Question of Teacher Quality

If you set the way-back machine to October 2nd (yes, I'm a bit behind in my reading) you'll find this neat commentary by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. It's not the most ground-breaking article--pay enough attention, and you'll see 20 or more like it in a year--but there is some thought there that bears attention, particularly this:

Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

.....

Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.

New forms of identifying good teachers and weeding out poor ones — by carefully assessing their on-the-job performance — have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.

This can be done without turning the traditional system of teacher tenure on its head. Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.

Developing such a system would be difficult. But it’s both doable and essential. Getting serious about teacher quality as opposed to harping on tiny variations in test scores would be like moving from a jalopy to a jet.

These are the good intentions with which the road to hell is paved. Some thoughts:

1) The thought taht you can judge a teacher from their first couple years in the clasroom is a tough one for me to agree with. My first year was great; the kids performed at a high level, and I felt really good about what I was doing. My 2nd and 3rd years were terrible, and I seriously thought about leaving teaching. In my 5th year I was voted Teacher of the Year for my school and getting great results again.

It's a cycle, like many things in life. If you use results as a sole measuring stick in those first few years, you're going to run some people out of the profession who have a chance to make a real difference.

2) The idea that you can wed classroom performance and evaluation without impacting the tradition of tenure is a bit naive. If you look at how the kids do on their tests as an evaluation tool you're going reflect negatively on many, many teachers, fairly or not, and that will have an impact.

3) I wish I had a good answer for getting the best teachers to the kids who need them most, I really do. The pisser for the academics who think about these kinds of issues is that all the free-market, Taylorized incentives in the world aren't going to get the hueristic answer, for the simple fact that people change, their goals change, and how they teach changes. I might to a great job with the kids I have, but there's no way of knowing if I can replicate that with inner-city kids or not beyond experimentation that I don't want to be a part of.

I don't know what the answer to teacher quality is in the system we have now. Intuitively, I don't think that the recent NYC merit pay proposal is a step, for many of the reasons that NYC Educator discusses in the link. Intuitively, it feels like extending the school day should work, but as Ken over ad D-Ed Reckoning is fond of pointing out all the extra time in the world won't make a difference for the kids who get it if we keep on with the same lousy practices that have gotten the same lousy results.

Read more here, if any.