Ravitch and Darling-Hammond March on Washington

While I share the revulsion to the apparent reflex these days to say “fire ‘em if they don’t succeed” the answer is not to decry testing or accountability because that isn’t going away.  If anything teachers should welcome some objective measures of performance because the alternative is far, far worse.  The IMPACT program is just a way of getting rid of teachers based on the arbitrary evaluations of self-described experts on teaching.

Darling-Hammond seems to have taken up Ravitch’s method of cherry-picking and misrepresenting data to “prove” their point by selecting Finland, Singapore, and Canada as poverty free zones.  The Wikipedia entry on world poverty by country is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty

The “Factbook” poverty rates aren’t available for all countries so let’s look at the poverty rates and PISA scores for those that are (Country – Pisa Score – Poverty Rate):

Korea – 539 -15% Poverty
Canada – 524 – 9.4%
Japan – 520 – 15.7%
Netherlands – 508 – 10.5%
Belgium – 506 – 15.2%
Estonia – 501 – 18.7%
Switzerland – 501 – 7.4%
Poland – 500 – 17%
US – 500 – 12%
Germany – 497 – 11%
Ireland – 496 – 5.5%
France – 496 – 6.2%

You can enter this into a spread sheet and run a correlation coefficient but it is equally clear by just eyeballing it that there is no correlation between poverty and PISA scores.

The idea that students in other countries don’t take high stakes standardized tests is a total fabrication – it is just that the high stakes are for the student not the teacher.  See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Japan
See also my description of the Japanese educational system in my post here:
http://toped.svefoundation.org/2011/07/20/out-of-frustration-theyll-march/comment-page-1/#comments

Standardized tests are a fact of life – ask anyone who wants to get into college, med school, law school, or the military.  The teaching credential test in California is a standardized test.  And there is accountability for professionals in terms of job security and salary – ask any lawyer about billable hours, or engineer about job security, or military staff about the jobs available to them based on standardized tests.

The sad fact is that we don’t really know what makes a good teacher so we can’t really evaluate whether what a teacher is doing effective or not except by the results from testing.   The value-added method that the LA Times showcased demonstrated that even the most dedicated teachers were not very effective and they were doing everything they could and taking all the advanced certification classes available.  It also showed teacher effectiveness was not related to student family income.  High poverty areas had great teachers and low-poverty areas had not-so-great ones.  What is really needed is determine what makes a good teacher and the highlight on teaching accountability is FINALLY getting ed schools and foundations to actually try to figure that out.  Until the ed schools stop awarding tenure based on useless theoretical papers and put their resources to figuring out what actually WORKS in the classroom, no teacher should be fired for anything other than gross dereliction of duty – as is the case now.

I am starting to think of demagogues like Ravitch and now Darling-Hammond as leading a “rhetoric-based community” much like the “faith-based community” that Bush-II used to talk about.  Those of us stuck in the real world have to confront data, not just cherry-picked talking points.