How Congress is wasting educators’ time
As states gain more power over education, our state superintendents and education departments have a better chance of improving schools. We should not waste their time, something our elected representatives in Congress have done in a clumsy way.
In 2015, both parties in both houses of Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, now the primary federal statute on schools. It barred the U.S. secretary of education from telling states how to assess teachers. But in the spirit of confusing bipartisanship, the new law also insisted each state define what an ineffective teacher was and make sure there aren’t a disproportionate number of them teaching poor and minority children.
The new law embraced one of the great myths of 21st century education: just identify the bad teachers, improve them or fire them, and all will be well.
Many people have believed versions of that, including me. But the past 10 years have shaken the faithful. Using test scores or even humans to assess teachers is too vulnerable to factors out of teachers’ control, such as poverty, curriculum or happenstance.
The assessments don’t consistently predict classroom success. Often they just drive serious educators crazy.
State governments have been fumbling, and in most cases avoiding, the federal requirement that they come up with a definition of ineffectiveness. In an incisive piece in Education Week, Daarel Burnette II pointed out that only 17 states have so far submitted plans under the law.
When Burnette and the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group, asked Michigan, for instance, about the lack of a definition in its plan, Michigan said, in effect, “Oops, we forgot,” and tried again. States can’t win this game. Any statement on ineffective teachers approved by the committees that do such things is going to be vague, unrealistic and annoying to our best educators. Burnette’s reporting revealed one smart dodge. The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education said it couldn’t produce a definition right away because that might interfere with the autonomy of the charter schools that educate nearly half of the city’s public schoolchildren.
That sounds right to me. Let’s hope the District continues to ignore this useless distraction.
I’m not against teacher evaluation. The successful public schools I have studied want individual teachers to do their best. But they don’t waste time calibrating each staffer’s test score success. They focus instead on building teamwork that makes the whole school better, including the many classes that teach subjects such as science and history that often don’t have annual standardized tests.
State education officials could help with such innovative ventures. Instead they spend their days arguing over how to define an ineffective teacher.
Here is a startling fact: We can’t blame this time-wasting nonsense on President Donald Trump.
The culprits are both parties in Congress, who did the deed before Trump was elected. President Barack Obama signed their bill into law.
This ill-considered act is just one more federal happening the states should do their best to resist.