Dodge: Numbers don't tell a teacher's story

Published: February 20, 2012 7:40 PM
By ARNOLD DODGE

Photo credit: Illustration by Christopher Serra |

Arnold Dodge, chairman of the Department of Educational Leadership and Administration at LIU Post, and a former teacher, principal and superintendent, moderated the symposium at the Tilles Center.

Last week, 800 educators, parents and concerned citizens gathered at the Tilles Center in Brookville to hear a panel of school principals discuss why they are protesting the new annual professional performance review regulations. The protest has garnered support from 1,300 New York principals and nearly 5,000 other citizens in the state.

The next day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a "deal" with the teachers unions about the details of this new approach to evaluating educators.

Deal or no deal, many of us who have toiled in the education community for years believe that this new approach to evaluation is fundamentally flawed. Far from the victory that the governor declared, this initiative -- spawned from pressure to conform to a federal program -- threatens to sabotage meaningful change in our schools.

Here's a sample of the reasons put forth at the gathering:

The evaluation system is based in part on results from high-stakes tests administered to students, though there has been considerable evidence that test scores are not reliable and stable indicators of a teacher's worth. So many variables go into student achievement on tests that pinning a teacher's effectiveness to any given set of tests in a given class will yield false positives and false negatives.

The new approach yields a number for each teacher each year. While it may be appropriate to ask business people if they have "made their numbers," it is a perversion of everything we know about the complexities of a classroom environment to ask the same question of educators. Teachers insist that students are not a business. As Steve Denning, a columnist and management expert, writes in his criticism of using the factory model to manage education: " 'The system' grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike."

Legions of scholars have taken issue with reducing myriad teacher responsibilities to a solitary number. The governor, so sanguine about brokering this deal, may want to consider H.L. Mencken's reminder that for every complex problem there is a simple answer: neat, plausible and wrong. Forcing teachers to focus on test scores and their own evaluation number is bound, at the very least, to be a distraction from the social process that they were hired to oversee -- educating children.

Michael Fullan, regarded by many as the foremost thinker on change in schools, writes in a recent scholarly paper, "The Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform," that we're on a course that will not bring positive change to schools. One of the "wrong drivers" he cites is a focus on individual quality rather than group quality. Collaboration is key to building a strong learning community.

For schools, this means creating a culture of sharing best practices and joining together to help all children, especially those most in need. A "team" mentality is built this way, and even the most pressing individual problems are adopted by all.

The new evaluation system emphasizes the individual and not the group. In this new world, my fortunes as a teacher rise and fall by my number. Hardly a way to build team spirit.

So what's a good teacher to do? Many of us believe that it is our obligation to fight this ill-conceived plan, which threatens to undermine one of the most important relationships a child will ever have. In our fight, we call on thoughtful people who understand and are sensitive to the developmental needs of children and the complexity of the teaching and learning process to step forward and speak out. This includes parents, teachers, scholars and others who have an authentic interest in assisting in the slow, imprecise, at times agonizing, but at all times astonishing, development of young minds and hearts.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan's often-repeated trope that President George W. Bush's signature education program, No Child Left Behind, has become a train wreck is worth noting for the future. For those of us who believe that teachers and their students are more than a number, there is no choice but to resist the mandates that are derived from another federal educational initiative that looks eerily like the last one.

New federal mandates -- and their accompanying state laws and regulations -- that insist on teacher evaluation systems that don't fit the unique paradigm of schools will be the latest train wreck. Only this time Barack Obama will be driving the train.