The Panoptiblog

Not having started the blog yet, and not having time to comment on what’s current, much less backtrack, I never remarked upon Matt Miller’s Atlantic story about the state of education, particularly, how to fix it after Bush gets out of office. But now that Jim Ryan has taken up almost exactly the same question for Slate, I have an excuse. I’m more interested in Jim Ryan’s offering than Miller’s–honestly, he just seems to have a much better understanding of how education works, coupled with a correlative understanding of the bureaucracy. But Miller’s is worth reading as well. If you haven’t done so already, I’ll give you a moment to brush up on both. And what the heck, here’s Ezra Klein’s considered response to Ryan, and here’s Matt Yglesias for good measure. Go read. I’m going to read this explanation of the lawyer joke from which Matt Miller took his article’s title.

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Done? Okay. A few thoughts:

Teacher Pay, Prestige, and Preparation. I think Klein and Yglesias are right about the difficulties of using Teach for America as a model for teacher education at large. But Klein’s suggestion that we have a separate track (the “Urban Teaching Corps”) is intriguing, and has some chance of doing the job. Teaching will not be competitive until you have some of the best minds and most motivated workers, and we won’t have that until, as Ryan notes, we pay teachers. But the political will to pay teachers more, and not just incrementally more, but enough to attract those who otherwise would head into other fields, won’t be there until the public perception of teaching is not (as the father of a former student of mine recently said) “something you go into when you don’t know what you want to do.” Our attitudes are too entrenched.

A key difference between Ryan’s proposal and Klein’s, is that people don’t seem to get into Teach for America to start careers; it’s closer to joining the Peace Corps. Klein’s proposal has the potential to start another career track in teaching, keeping these people in the profession over a longer term. I do wonder, however, what teacher’s unions would have to say about this plan.

Universalizing Standards. The thing that always worries me about universal standards is that standards are much easier to get wrong than right, and once we’ve chiseled them into federal guidelines, they become that much harder to change once implemented. It’s for this reason that I’m always surprised at conservatives who want to throw out local control in favor of national standards. How short of a trip it is from “national standards” to “national curriculum” is unclear. And if Miller thinks that local control has stunted “research and development,” wait until all public school teachers are supposed to be reading off the same script. Miller doesn’t seem to understand that you don’t duplicate the intricacies of the classroom in a lab somewhere and arrive at effective teaching strategies; you try things in real classrooms and see how they work. (Which is why I prefer qualitative research to quantitative; a subject for another time, perhaps.)

On the other hand, Miller is right to bemoan that “There are some 15,000 curriculum departments in this country—one for every district.” Teachers spend, as Jen noted when we discussed this, way too much time writing standards, which is not the best use of the very little professional development time we get in the first place. So where’s the middle ground? State standards?

How Do We Measure Success? Ryan’s proposal that testing become one of a number of factors when judging the success of a school–and, I’m inferring, the success of individual teachers–is a start. In the case of reading, using standardized tests as a tool might tell you something, but it doesn’t tell you nearly enough. Cultural bias is an issue. A whole lot of the resources available to readers in real-life situations aren’t permitted in the testing environment. Motivation is a huge factor. But turning to other methods of judging school performances wouldn’t satisfy those who turn to the the easy-to-quote measures against other countries, and it won’t make those who would prefer privatized education turn away from those measures.

What’s the Goal? Newt Gingrich gave a speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute (transcript here). It’s worth watching. I’ll save my general comments for another post, but there were a couple of proposals that I would welcome into our national conversation, and one of those was on education. He is for, essentially, more incentives for adolescents to enter the workplace as soon as possible (letting them work tax-free from 14 to 16, thereby letting them keep more of what they earn), and to offer to help students pay for college if they can leave high school early. This might incentivize doing well in school, if you were rewarded with leaving early and having some of your college tuition paid. He left a lot of questions unanswered: How much money? Where’s that money going to come from? How will that affect our test scores, if the cream of the crop leaves school early? What outcomes, exactly, do we hope to achieve? Whose behavior are we trying to change?

While I think it’s an interesting idea, he fails to acknowledge that this would be unlikely to change the behavior of those who current have trouble in school. Those who don’t expect to go to college won’t likely be persuaded to work harder at something they don’t like and can’t do well. The proposal seems aimed at those middle students who could, perhaps, do better. But going into the workforce tax-free for a couple of years in their adolescence isn’t going to stop someone from becoming a drug dealer or a prostitute, which seems to be the message he wants to send.

I bring this up because I think what we’re missing in this national conversation about teacher quality, national standards, and so on, is what we want our schools to produce. When we compare teaching as a profession to law or medicine, we need to remember that the educator’s goal is much harder to meaningfully quantify. In law, the rules and the goal are pretty clear. Ditto med school. But what’s the real, actual goal of school? From the perspective of the high school student, that answer is different when you intend to work at the family restaurant than it is when you want to go into the navy, than it is when you want to work for Intel, than it is when you want to be a dentist, and so on. If we want more students to go into the high-tech fields that will keep us competitive with the emerging economic superpowers, that’s a different conversation than asking how we can close the socioeconomic achievement gap.