Previously,
this space discussed fractures within the education reform movement in
Louisiana, mentioning its opponents only in passing. To illuminate their place
in the debate, one needs only to focus
on one recent incident to understand why they encapsulate everything that
made the state’s educational system a laughingstock for so long.
Interestingly, it was one of
their own, Bernard Taylor, the superintendent of the East Baton Rouge Parish
School District, who stirred the bats in the belfry. As a motivational tool, he
rewarded by publishing in newsprint the names of over 1,000 district teachers
who rated in the highest category of the state’s new, somewhat
improved, teacher evaluation instrument known as COMPASS.
This disturbed one Carnell Washington,
president of the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers, who in the past with these
kinds of arguments treated policy-makers to a display of crepuscular
intellect. He claimed this broke the law because evaluation
results “are confidential, do not constitute a public record, and shall not be
released or shown to any person” outside of personnel actions internal to a
district or as part of a court case.
Taylor, who supports reform
insofar as it occurs within the government monopoly model of delivery, recognized
the sin against his faith and expiated with the statement “To the extent anyone
felt slighted in any way, we sincerely apologize,” but maintained the legality
of the action. He said the law permitted districts to such a thing in the name
of recognition and reward.
That Taylor felt anything required
to deliver close to an apology that 64
percent of East Baton Rouge teachers didn’t get their names in lights and
therefore this becomes a mark of Cain on them speaks volumes as to the
mentality that plagued Louisiana education in the past. Why on earth does
somebody need to receive an apology for the revelation that they have been revealed
not to be the best last year? If they felt slighted, they should look at themselves
and use this to motivate themselves to achieve the very best in the future.
This is akin to schools apologizing to kids for not making the honor roll out
of fear of damaging their delicate psyches, and this attitude
does nothing but hold back excellence in provision of education.
But if this isn’t idiotic enough,
Washington then takes it several levels up. In response, he dons judicial robes
to give what he thinks is within the law as a means of recognition, a reception
inviting the high-ranking teachers, as opposed to the unacceptable printing of
names in a newspaper ad because that’s, in some sense, “too public.” How these actions
differ would baffle any lawyer, judge, or lawmaker: Taylor’s method puts names
disconnected from people out there where the public might see that, while
Washington method gathers identifiable faces with their names where they are
publicly seen. Either any official public recognition or no official public
recognition is permitted; there’s no “not far enough” or “too far” as to
whether something is made public because it is or isn’t. (One hope with this
kind of fuzzy thinking this guy never actually taught in a classroom.)
Then he whines about hearing complaints
from administrators and teachers about Taylor’s List with the presumed
persecution that occurs by failure of inclusion on it, as, according to
Washington’s distillation of their testimony, teacher is set against teacher. No
doubt this snake in Eden will discourage schools from being places where the
primary emphasis is on teachers holding hands and singing Kumbaya for harmony’s
sake in favor of attaining better student learning outcomes from higher achievers
among teachers feeling rewarded and trying to keep it up and lower achievers
wanting to emulate them and perhaps even asking the recognized to help them
improve.
Washington might reply that salutary
impact of the recognition cannot exist because the instrument itself does not
measure it; the official position of union hacks statewide has been COMPASS is
too flawed to work as intended. Of course, the evidence contradicts this
wishful thinking, with COMPASS having both face validity (that it appears in
theory to do what it’s supposed to) and construct validity (that it is related
to an instrument that is demonstrated to measure the concept in question).
While it is a stripped-down version of a more complicated instrument that its
creator does not think makes it as sensitive, she
thought it could work. And
its results aligned reasonably closely to the results of student testing; districts
that had better performing students also had higher proportions of teachers in
the better categories even though only some of the COMPASS scoring had any
direct relation to student outcomes.
However, the biggest howler comes
when Washington evinces fear that as a result of this naming of names parents would
have the audacity to demand that their children get taught only by those teachers
of the highest rating. The horror! Heaven forbid that parents seek excellence from
teachers, have access to diagnostic information, and make education decisions
accordingly! Much better, no doubt he thinks, is to have families sit by
passively while they take their chances with their children’s education, with
fortune the major determinant of whether they get an incompetent teacher that
under the old evaluation system would never have been revealed as such and
would have continued poorly-educating students possibly for decades.
It is exactly this attitude that
seeks to serve special interests first, such as those of unions that never
educated a child, low-performing and lazy teachers, administrators who seek
paths of least resistance, and politicians with ideological axes to grind using
children’s education as their stone, rather than making children’s interests primary
that made Louisiana education so deplorable. But a genuine chance to change
this for the better has arrived, and this threatens those interests that have
prospered under the old deficient system.
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