The tortoise and the hare and teacher evaluation

What works on a game board doesn’t always work in a classroom.

Bill Gates recently wrote an editorial in The Washington Post, “How teacher development could revolutionize our schools,” in which the Microsoft co-founder argued that most of what we have been doing in education for the last four decades hasn’t worked. But finally, he wrote, we have figured out “the big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems.”

This eureka-sounding prescription for U.S. education recalls an earlier Gates revelation, this one for small high schools as the cure for what ailed urban education.

“American high schools are obsolete,” he announced in a 2005 speech. “Students in smaller schools are more motivated, have higher attendance rates, feel safer and graduate and attend college in higher numbers.”

But after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the creation of more than 1,000 small schools (200 in New York City) with $2 billion, the research showed there was little impact on student achievement. Even some initial gains in attendance and graduation rates leveled off or declined after a few years.

Small schools were not a panacea, and turnover among teachers and principals in small schools was alarmingly high.

Examine the evidence

So what should we make of Gates’ newest prescription, the creation of “exceptional teacher personnel systems”?

Richard Rothstein, a scholar at the Economic Policy Institute, suggests we start by examining his evidence. In a post he wrote on the National Journal Expert blog on Education in March, Rothstein says Gates is misrepresenting recent history. Gates argues that the country has doubled per-pupil spending on K-12 schools over the last four decades, but student achievement has remained “flat” and our percentage of college graduates is lower than that of some other countries.

But that’s not so, says Rothstein. American students have “improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally,” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress since 1980, he writes, with the greatest improvements among African-American and economically disadvantaged students. “These facts … don’t support the story that the typical teacher of disadvantaged children is ineffective,” he says.

The percentage of college graduates has nearly doubled in the last 40 years from 16 percent in 1970 to 31 percent today, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Rothstein’s challenges do not mean that improved teacher evaluations aren’t a good idea. Ensuring that everyone who stands before a class of students is an effective teacher is a commonly agreed-upon goal. Gates, in fact, has funded a promising experiment in measuring teacher effectiveness using classroom observations. And he has been part of a national push to combine test-based assessments with more professional ways of looking at teachers’ practice.

His pronouncement that teacher evaluations are the education solution is disturbing not because it is a bad idea but because if it is seen as a silver bullet, and rushed through, it will backfire.

Implementation at warp speed

Overhauling how teachers are evaluated, awarded tenure or judged “effective” will change nothing if it is engineered as a blitzkrieg from a foundation’s executive offices. Educational change that succeeds is a result of school leaders and classroom teachers working closely together, only implementing new policies and practices after practitioners really work them through. If new evaluations strengthen the teaching force, it will be because they patiently and carefully develop teachers, not because they use data to sort them into incomprehensible percentiles. That is the approach taken by the nations with the highest-performing school systems.

Small schools were also a good idea. But with sky’s-the-limit funding, the implementation ran at warp speed.

Small schools pioneer Deborah Meier said this rapid scale-up caused problems. “Gates has not asked many questions about what will sustain small schools and whether, without other systemic reforms, they can be sustained with quality,” she told Rethinking Schools in 2005. “A small school can be as horrible as a big school.”

Meier worried, “Everybody I know who has taken Gates money is in a serious quandary because they don’t see how they can pay attention to what they have started and still keep starting new schools.”

The race to revolutionize public education may seem heroic. “Bold, Fast Change” has become the urgent mantra of highly visible advocates like Eva Moskowitz. “Transformational change” has become a DOE buzzword for everything from technology to new chancellors in New York.

But the stories that executives and foundation leaders tell themselves about school reform are often clichéd. “Education is complex,” as Rothstein says, and it is not helped by pronouncements that all that went before was bad until the experts found the answer.

The big money

Yet this is where the big money is. In “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” education historian Diane Ravitch writes that unlike older foundations, which gave grants to educators who were implementing changes, the new generation of education philanthropists — Gates, the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation — engineer their own change. “They would not leave local communities to design their own reforms,” she writes. These “venture philanthropists treated their gifts as an investment that was expected to produce measureable results.”

If they didn’t find a group that shared their education goals, Ravitch said, they created new ones.

The money allowed them to set agendas, even the agenda of the U.S. Department of Education, and bought the silence of potential critics. Not a single book has been written questioning their education strategies, Ravitch said.

Next year, New York State teachers will be asked to adopt a complex new evaluation system. The system itself has promise and was developed with teacher input. But like any new, ambitious endeavor in public education, there are sure to be unforeseen issues and concerns.

If educators question some aspects, if they want to modify parts, this does not mean they are standing in the way of progress. More than likely, they will improve it, if they can fend off the silver-bullet brigade.