Failing Students: Who is to Blame?
I’m not a teacher, but I was really shocked by the recent problems in Rhode Island. A struggling high school there has fired every teacher, principal, assistant principal, and administrator because of poor student performance. In total 93 staffers lost their jobs.
Only 50 percent of the students there graduate, and 7 percent are proficient in math. Seventy-seven teachers were fired, plus the principal, three assistant principals and other administrators – for a total of 93. The firings came after the district and teachers union failed to agree on a plan for teachers to increase their time with students in order to improve test scores.
The school district seems to blame the teachers–and only the teachers–for the poor performance of the students. To boost performance, the teachers were being asked to spend more time with students outside of school and agree to a longer school day–which the teachers then asked to be compensated for. Enter the stalemate.
Certainly there were poor teachers in that group that deserved to be fired, but ALL of the teachers and administrators? That sounds reactionary and drastic. And sad.
Many people believe the system itself is a big part of the problem. An author and education historian, Dr. Diane Ravitch was the Asst. Secretary of Education under the first President Bush. She was at the forefront of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiatives, and she has written a piece on why she has now changed her mind about school reform.
NCLB received overwhelming bipartisan support when it was signed into law by President Bush in 2002. The law requires that schools test all students every year in grades three through eight, and report their scores separately by race, ethnicity, low-income status, disability status and limited-English proficiency. NCLB mandated that 100% of students would reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014, as measured by tests given in each state.
Although this target was generally recognized as utopian, schools faced draconian penalties–eventually including closure or privatization–if every group in the school did not make adequate yearly progress. By 2008, 35% of the nation’s public schools were labeled “failing schools,” and that number seems sure to grow each year as the deadline nears.
I’m all for pushing students, administrators, and teachers to work smarter. But, at what expense? It seems this strategy doesn’t work for everyone across the board.
Because the law demanded progress only in reading and math, schools were incentivized to show gains only on those subjects. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in test-preparation materials. Meanwhile, there was no incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages or physical education.
Way to encourage well-rounded kids, federal government! Ravitch said this teaching method led colleges to complain about the poor preparation of entering students. If all you’ve been pushed with is reading and math, then why would any student care about anything else?
And, what about our role as parents? Based on the Rhode Island case, Bill Maher wrote a piece on Huffington Post called, New Rule: Let’s Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don’t Learn–Let’s Fire the Parents. If you didn’t catch this live on his HBO show, give it a read.
From Maher’s post:
According to all the studies, it doesn’t matter what teachers do. Although everyone appreciates foreplay. What matters is what parents do. The number one predictor of a child’s academic success is parental involvement. It doesn’t even matter if your kid goes to private or public school. So save the twenty grand a year and treat yourself to a nice vacation away from the little bastards.
I don’t know what his science is on the parental involvement claim, but it makes sense to me. We’ve all heard the studies on the benefits of eating a family dinner with your kids throughout the week. Wouldn’t it make sense to translate this family dinner idea to study time?
In her article, Ravitch said:
The current emphasis on accountability has created a punitive atmosphere in the schools. The Obama administration seems to think that schools will improve if we fire teachers and close schools. They do not recognize that schools are often the anchor of their communities, representing values, traditions and ideals that have persevered across decades. They also fail to recognize that the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty–not bad teachers.
Teachers make a pittance of what they should and most of them work incredibly hard to make our kids better people. Yet, we continue to set them up as the fall guys. A friend of mine who is a speech pathologist in the public schools said, “There are many more factors to consider as to why these students are failing: learning disabilities, parent responsibilities of making sure homework is done and kids are on time and in school EVERY day, a stable home environment etc.” In other words, it’s not always the teacher’s fault.
Colin Summers Said,
March 15, 2010 @ 11:26 am
The only reason you have to fire everyone is that the union represented everyone. Unions resist the targeting of teachers who are performing badly and make it difficult to remove “career teachers.”
When NCLB came into effect I heard little from the teacher’s union at my sons’ public school. Well, actually, I heard *nothing.* From them OR the school itself. I heard from them all the time about how they needed more money. They seemed to spend considerable time and effort on that topic, communicating it to the parents. So, in effect, I paid taxes to support an institution which lobbied for higher taxes.
I don’t know what the schools in Rhode Island were trying with NCLB. If they were as proactive as the teachers and administration at my neighborhood public school… they deserved to be fired. If not for the union, I would fire the administrators first, then select teachers. But, of course, the union makes that impossible, so you have to fire everyone.
There’s a downside to collective bargaining. I bet there were a few *great* teachers at that school who just got tossed out on their asses because they had to join the union.
I’ve moved my children to public school because the idea of federally mandated performance with locally-funded schools is an impossible problem to solve.
April Said,
March 15, 2010 @ 11:49 am
I’m sorry to hear that Bill Maher has joined the blame game, which isn’t helping anyone. There are parents trying hard, and there are teachers trying hard, and frankly, all of us could use more support.
Jim Said,
March 15, 2010 @ 12:13 pm
Children from well-funded schools in affluent areas consistently score at the top of the tests. Children from poor areas don’t.
“This suggests that the problem is not bad teaching, nor is the solution ‘raising standards.’ The problem is poverty and the solution is dealing with the factors associated with poverty. These include hunger, nutrition, environmental toxins, and the availability of books, all of which have been shown to powerfully impact academic performance.”
–Dr. Stephen Krashen
Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit.
http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.
Thanks,
Jim
Darlene Said,
March 15, 2010 @ 1:11 pm
If I recall, the teachers at this school were making an average of $73,000, while the income of the town was around $25,000. So the teachers were making a very high salary, certainly not a pittance.
Also, they were asked to eat lunch with the students and supervise recess-on a rotating basis. And provide tutoring after school. The union agreed to tutoring for an extra $90 an hour, the school offered half that and was turned down.
The school is planning to hire back about 50% of those fired, only now the union isn’t an issue preventing any reasonable discussion.
Rev Matt Said,
March 15, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
I’ve taken an interest in education policy and research since high school, and I’m now on the Pilot Advisory Board of my daughter’s school. The testing is just absurd. The teachers are frustrated because they spend their entire coursework time teaching the kids how to take the standardized tests instead of actually learning the coursework.
But the national standards aren’t the only problem. State testing is a huge imposition as well. Combine the federal and state testing regimens and you’re looking at 65-75% of class time being spent on test prep or test taking. None of which actually contributes to the students actually learning anything. A side issue in our case is that the mandated curriculum doesn’t track the mandated test schedule so they are being evaluated in the fall on things they won’t even start learning until spring.
Julie Said,
March 16, 2010 @ 6:55 am
Jodi, I don’t know if I ever really went over what I do for a living.
I’m the standardized test giver at the school where I work. Yep, I’m the person responsible for doling out those evil tests!
Except I work in adult education, not K-12. So we’re only testing students over 16 who are not also enrolled in a high school. We test them in reading and math, and a huge chunk of our funding comes out of showing improvements in those areas. It’s sort of like NCLB, except adult ed isn’t compulsory, so if a school closes, adults can just go somewhere else.
Anyway, although there are so many problems with standardized testing, working on this side of it, and analyzing the data all day, for years and years, I can tell you that the tests are incredibly telling. Some teachers consistently produce better results than others. And they are not the teachers who teach to the test. They’re the teachers who are the most interested in teaching, so their classes are compelling. They’re always prepared. They love what they do.
The tests align with the courses we teach already, so there should not be any extra work necessary just to prepare students for them. There are a few areas where the tests and the coursework don’t completely overlap, and teachers have learned to compensate and bolster their own lessons.
Whenever I hear that K-12 teachers do nothing but prepare for these tests, I have to wonder if their situation is actually similar. Are they really complaining that they have to work hard and prepare lessons? And I wonder if the people like me, who analyze the data, can tell you that there are some teachers who raise reading scores and do it without complaining.
The testing should be used to evaluate instruction, target teachers who are struggling, help them as much as possible, and ultimately get rid of them if they can’t do their jobs.
Evaluating performance is part of most workplaces, but not education. We haven’t axed any of our adult ed teachers, either, but when it comes to that (and it will, because of the severe budget cuts), I’ll be here with the data, even though my hours just got cut, too.
This year the budget cuts were so incredibly huge that everyone started looking to the funding I provide even more than in previous years. That meant I had to put huge amounts of pressure on the teachers I work with. And that meant lots and lots of complaints and letters and moaning and whining from the teachers. It was impossible, universally, to do better. They all said it. And in every single case, once the teachers stopped complaining and started doing their jobs, the test scores went up!
Jodi Said,
March 23, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
@Julie, I didn’t know that was your job. Interesting perspective, and I’m sure there are teachers out there who DO perform better knowing their scores mean their jobs.
As a follow up, I coincidentally found this great blog post by a teacher on BoingBoing:
http://lilysblackboard.org/2010/03/nclb-science-of-making-up-stuff/
She basically argues that NCLB has caused schools and teachers to make stuff up.
“There is a lucrative science that undergirds No Child Left known in academic circles as: Making Things Up. It makes up that a standardized test is actually designed to measure ‘proficiency’ or whether a school is actually failing or succeeding in making ‘adequate progress’.
America’s most dedicated educators have been praying mightily for an end to the hell of false labels and the testing tail wagging the dog-and-pony show that now passes as teaching and learning in schools where administrators are forced to bundle toxic testing strategies worthy of Lehman Brothers in their efforts to be accountable–not to the kids, but to hitting their numbers.”
I do believe everyone should be accountable for his or her job, regardless of union membership. Just because you pay dues to a larger organization doesn’t mean you should be exempt from evaluation and consequences. But, are these test the right way to do it?
It’s an interesting topic, and one that I’m clearly not the most qualified to be writing about as I’m just an outside observer.
Analyst Said,
March 23, 2010 @ 10:21 pm
I strongly suspect that this is really an effort to reduce teacher pay at this school. If we find that the teachers are hired back at lower wages that will confirm it.
Julie Said,
March 29, 2010 @ 1:47 pm
Interesting link. It’s true that testing by itself isn’t enough. Testing, training, monitoring, making sure tests are accurate–that all ought to do something. And it still won’t be perfect, but it is a pretty decent way to evaluate performance. It’s very true that data needs to be analyzed to change programs so that testing helps education to change for the better. That should be the point.
Amanda Said,
April 19, 2010 @ 12:20 pm
“I don’t know what his science is on the parental involvement claim, but it makes sense to me.”
If you’re interested in learning more about what research Maher is mentioning, check out the book “Policy and Evidence in a Partisan Age: The Great Disconnect” by Paul Gary Wyckoff. There’s a fantastic chapter in there that describes the actual research behind student performance. Schools certainly need the resources and support to help their students, but Maher is citing valuable research when he mentions the great importance of parental involvement.
“Sutton and Soderstrom (1999) report that demographic factors explain three times as much of the variance in test scores as school policy variables. Caroline Hoxby uses the same multivariate statistical procedure and finds that family variables explain 11 to 14 times as much as school inputs and neighborhood variables combined. Hoxby concludes, ‘there is substantial evidence that his or her family is the most important determinant of a student’s outcomes.’”
-Hoxby, Caroline M. 2000. “Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?” American Economic Review 90(5): 1209-38
-Sutton, Alice, and Irina Soderstrom. 1999. “Predicting Elementary and Secondary School Achievement with School-Related and Demographic Factors.” Journal of Educational Research 92(6):330-38.
This was just a small quote from the book with the two sources he referenced, but if you’re interested in the actual studies behind Maher’s claim, I think this book has several notable research studies.
However, with that said, I personally think that although parents are the strongest factor in a child’s academic achievement, you can’t blame parents by assuming poor test scores mean that they are lazy or uninvolved. It’s all about equipping schools AND parents with the tools to be actively and effectively engaged in their child’s education.(i.e. poverty is a strong mediating household factor that plays into parents involvement with their children’s education. After all, if a parent is struggling to make end’s meet, then how can we blame them for their child’s academic achievement? Basic needs need to be met before we can even start to blame one party or another.)