JONATHAN COHN JULY 26, 2010
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
Last week, D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee announced that she had fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received low ratings under the District’s new teacher evaluation system, called IMPACT. As I wrote on Friday, the firings represent a big step for education reform. Teacher evaluations across the country are badly constructed and executed, as are the processes used to remove bad teachers. D.C. is leading the way in improving both.
But this story runs deeper. Rhee is at the heart of D.C.’s heated mayoral race, between incumbent Adrian Fenty and City Council Chairman Vincent Gray. Fenty, who hired Rhee, remains her most vocal supporter. Gray has not indicated what he would do with Rhee if he won, in an apparent attempt to please both those who love Rhee and those who love to hate her. (A Washington Post poll from January showed that 44 percent of D.C. residents disapprove of the job she’s doing; among black residents, disapproval hit 62 percent.) Not surprisingly, Rhee recently hinted in two interviews, including one with the Post, that she’d leave her job if Gray ousts Fenty.
So how did the two candidates react when Rhee announced the firings last week? Fenty stood by Rhee, yet again: “As Mayor, I will not sit still, and I will not be satisfied until a highly effective teacher is in every classroom. Today's action puts us one step closer to that goal.” Gray, perhaps just as predictably, waffled: According to the Post, he said he "wanted to look further at the basis for the dismissals" and noted that there is "still controversy" surrounding IMPACT. (That last part is certainly true: A recent poll by the Washington Teachers’ Union found that 52 percent of 1,000 respondents—there are about 4,000 teachers in D.C. Public Schools—said they don’t understand what is required of them to do well according to new system.)
What, then, is Gray’s position on how to assess and improve teacher quality? To find out, I revisited his platform, which he released a few weeks ago. Gray says he supports “remov[ing] low-performing teachers from the system.” But he hasn’t endorsed IMPACT. Rather, he says he would “[m]ove swiftly to implement the independent evaluation of the current IMPACT evaluation system” and “[e]nsure that we have a fair and research-based evaluation system that holds our teachers accountable but also provides multiple strategies for assessing student growth (e.g., teacher portfolios) and teacher effectiveness.”
In other words, Gray hasn’t taken a firm position on IMPACT, just as he hasn’t taken a firm position on Rhee or her firings. If he wins, Gray could keep the evaluation system and Rhee. Or he could get rid of both. Surely D.C. voters deserve a more definitive answer.
1 comments
So, it is not permissible to voice anything other than a full-throated unquestioning endorsement of the latest incarnation of the latest notions in education reform, so long as it takes the form of firing teachers based mostly on test results. Of course, anyone who declines to recite the orthodoxy is merely offering a sop to the teachers' unions. This is suffocating, especially at a blog where one is accustomed to something more than a mere cataloguing of the political ups and downs of a favored policy with the fervid advocacy of an avtivist, but a discussion of the merits of the policies themselves. For example, D.C. only tests math and reading. There are a few other subjects, which fall under the heading of "knowledge," which apparently is no longer a focus of public education in D.C. and many other places -- a move strongly encouraged by federal policy. There are "content standards" in D.C., of course, but I couldn't find them on the web, and if they're typical, they're vague and weak and, in any case, not the subject of standardized testing and form only a small part of teachers' evaulations. (If you're doing something -- anything -- within the content standards on observation day, you're good.) This seems like a recipe for using the classroom for test prep. Another issue: There will always be "worst performing teachers." IMPACT grades strictly on a curve. Yes, it "attempts to control" for a few student characteristiscs -- although query whether it can do this very well -- but it's ultimately based on average improvement for a group of kids ostensibly like the kids in the classroom of the evaluated teacher, and the teachers' scores are based on how well they outperform each other. There will always be an argument for firing the bottom, say, seven percent, or 15 percent, or third, or half, or whatever you arbitrarily decide. Now, I don't know what went into this particular decision to fire these particular teachers, and we don't know how poor their IMPACT scores were, and we don't know what impact firing these relatively few teachers will have on achievement, and perhaps these teachers are in fact negligent or incompetent and should be fired, but I don't just blindly assume that whatever Michelle Rhee does is right because, with God on her side, she's a warrior against teachers, who are assumed to act in bad faith, nor do I demand that my political leaders or candidates pledge their fealty to the narrow Rhee-Duncan-Gates-Darby-GOP school of school reform.
- JakeH
July 27, 2010 at 1:33pm