The New Republic

I'm all for tying teacher performance to student performance... but I've seen no good proposals to do this. Tough standards will mean more kids fail to test "adequate" or higher. Tough standards also ignore years of neglect students may have received at the hands of poor teachers, terrible schools, and inappropriate curricula. Should a mathematics teacher in a high-needs school be penalized if his or her students don't perform as well because they're lacking the skills their suburban counterparts have mastered? What about English instructors in a school comprised of new immigrants who are struggling to learn the language? At the secondary level, if the primary education of the students is lacking enough to impact performance, which teacher(s) should be fired?

- bcbaird

January 13, 2010 at 10:31am

bcbaird hit on the exact right point. This whole debate seems to treat all students as some kind of widgets, and the debate is on who can move the widgets down the assembly line fast enough. Schools shouldn't be teacher centered, but student. Grouping in a host of students, all of different intellects, backgrounds, etc. on nothing more than geographical proximity and age is the mistake. Real reform recognizes student ability first and foremost and puts them in classes of likeminded other students. In China schools are separated by ability, there are key schools where the best and brightest attend, and then down from there. It is ostensibly the way our University system works. The flaw in China is the money (and ability) only flows to the key schools, we have the freedom to train our teachers how to teach to each ability, thereby offering more intensive training and one on one to the most at risk students (who won't be disrupting classes as they are presently constituted.) This also recognizes different teachers have different strengths (and would soon recognize those that have none). The Dead Poet society type teacher would work great in a class of overachievers, he would bomb out in a class of delinquents whereas an unpolished teacher from the streets would work great. Of course, I also know this won't work in the states, it would mean busing students (or even providing dormitories). It would also mean recognizing from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, this merit based approach (and also reality based one) would never fly where far too many parents imagine their children are budding geniuses if only they had a good teacher.

- blackton

January 13, 2010 at 12:05pm

As I've noted before, discussions about education-system fixes ignore the primary cause for student failure: their parents. One rarely even reads the words "parent" or "parents" in any such discussion. Student achievement is hugely determined before a kid ever walks into an elementary school classroom. Yet for a variety of reasons, parent accountability is rarely discussed. Education reform needs to start before conception, when a future mother's intake of nutrients and poisons begins to enhance or limit the future brain of a human being who does not yet exist. The reform needs to continue by providing either aggressive preschool availability and standards, successful involvement of parents in early childhood intellectual development, or, ideally, both. We've come to the place in this country where we think the primary responsibility to educate a child is the society's. It's not. It's the parents', which is one big reason why 30% of our students aren't finishing high school. Unfortunately, reinstating parents' responsibility and authority requires cultural shifts that at this point we seem unwilling to make. Righting every wrong accrued by bigotry and poverty will do little unless Mom and/or Dad ensures that Junior walks into first grade with a basic respect for his peers, with an understanding of the alphabet, with many evenings of being read to sleep under his belt, with exposure to counting, with exposure to three-dimensional object relationships, with some practice in the hand/eye coordination needed to successfully manipulate a pencil, with exposure to artistic expression (e.g., finger painting, play-doh, beating drums), with the ability to share with peers, with nonviolent behavior, with the ability to practice basic hygiene and personal safety, with regular rest and adequate nutrition, with current vaccinations, with the ability to maintain attention and focus in an environment devoid of electronic stimulation, with hearing and vision tested as adequate and corrected as needed. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Every parent should be held accountable for every single item on the above list, and more. We do not allow a parent to beat a kid with a baseball bat--that's child abuse. Failing to prepare a child for society is a softer form of abuse, but it is still abuse. Why is this tolerated? We lack the courage to attack this problem at its core, so instead we play these little games of throwing good money after bad.

- williamyard

January 13, 2010 at 1:01pm

yard, while I agree with what you say about parental responsibilty, I think people are more resilient than you give them credit for. I know in China kids from an early age go to boarding schools and live a far more disciplined, regimented, and physically far more rigorous lives. My wife as a student slept with 7 other girls in a room the same size as a college dorm room, one light bulb, no heating in winter. She was not in a key school, in fact she was in one of the lower ranked schools (all students have the same accomodations). Yet her education was of sufficient quality that last year she was admitted into a nursing program in the states and she has maintained an A average, this in a language not her own. And her parents are (were) rural peasants who grew up during the anti-education times of the Cultural revolution. Suffice it to say, they didn't spend much time reading to her (they didn't even have any books). Of course I agree in the importance of parents, but education is the responsibility of all of us. I hate to say it, but in outcomes and behavior, the schools in China far surpass ours. I am not saying we should adopt their system, but we can learn from it. And how much better we can be with all of our own resources. We do this with our University system (which is merit based) so why can't we do it before then?

- blackton

January 13, 2010 at 2:00pm

blackie, I don't mean to imply that responsibility is either/or. It's both. Relying on engaged parenting to the exclusion of functioning schools does no more good than the reverse. However, I stand by my assertion that the single most critical and yet most pooh-poohed aspect to a child's successful education, at least in this country, is the involvement of the parents, not the school. And while highly literate parents are a plus--a culture of reading and intellectualism is then more likely to be instilled in someone growing up in the home--it's by no means necessary. I know successful adults with graduate degrees whose parents were barely literate immigrants yet who made sure that their kids were exposed to reading, numbers et al. from Day One and who laid down the law as the kid moved through school. It wasn't a situation of doing homework while watching TV. It was a situation of the TV being cold and dark until the homework was done. You see this ethos early in the careers of people like Justice Sotomayor. You don't see it early in the careers of guys doing 5 to 8 with good behavior at San Quentin.

- williamyard

January 13, 2010 at 6:10pm

yard, I completely agree, needless to say, in Chinese dorms there is no TV. And as to all of the extracurricular activities, there ain't much of those as well. They have PE and Soccer, not much else, and as to the Soccer there are no school teams etc. The High School I taught at kids started at 8:00 AM and finished at 4:30, and for students who lived at school mandatory study hall from 6:30 to 8:30. 10th graders there do Calculus. School was also for 240 days. There is little we can do to enforce good parenting, though you are absolutely right that is extremely important, but at least we can mitigate bad or wrong parenting. In the end though, you are absolutely right since I doubt America will ever adopt these kind of reforms, so the role of the parent is paramount.

- blackton

January 13, 2010 at 7:04pm

I think most of what both of you are saying is right. But poverty - especially in America - can be a deceptive indicator. There's nothing about growing up poor that means you won't succeed in school. But in concentrations of poverty you begin to see trend lines for risk factors. Each individual factor may not explain much, but add them up, put them in a classroom and you have a very difficult teaching environment. American poverty is going to look very different than Chinese poverty, right?. I mean why are these people poor? Is it because they have emotional issues, drug abuse, low-impulse control, incarceration, etc.? I agree that a more structured, intensive environment is what will be the most cost-effective and efficient model. But that takes funding. I have yet to see a innovative program - charter or otherwise - that is scalable, mainly due to lack of funding. Performance pay is great in theory. But I have yet to hear anyone explain how to do it in a way that is able to accurately link pay to performance. Like the first commenter said, how could you possibly evaluate different sets of children using the same criteria. But then how do you change the criteria in a way that is accurate? The whole system is already skewed completely out of whack in that you have teachers' jobs in troubled populations already being considerably more difficult, getting blamed for the population's continued failure, now being asked to accept an incentive system that looks as if it will set up an incentive structure that will only further codify existing structural inequities. Moving any child from point a to point c is going to be more difficult in poorer populations. Now not only do your test scores suck, but no bonus for you. Gee, now I REALLY don't want to work in the ghetto! And believe me - plenty of teachers do it for the children, even if no one else appreciates or understands what they do. Last thing on parents - william you write, "Unfortunately, reinstating parents' responsibility and authority requires cultural shifts that at this point we seem unwilling to make." I'm not sure what you mean by "we". What I thought we were talking about here were poor, dysfunctional parents (like the 17 year old mother I had in a class last year). Of course they're not going to change - if they knew how they would. The question is how we get them to do it. Obviously they aren't going to do it on their own - and the kids are the ones we're trying to get at. Whether its the carrot or the stick doesn't matter to me. I just want something that works.

- elirector

January 14, 2010 at 11:15pm