Rotherham Watch: Don’t trust those damn teachers!
Andy Rotherham is the head of a think tank called Education Sector. Kevin Carey is his research guy. Andy’s blog is Eduwonk. Kevin does one he must have thought was very cleverly named, The Quick and the Ed.
Kevin wrote a post in response to Congressman George Miller’s NCLB reauthorization speech. I don’t want to go into Miller’s speech here. You can read it yourself.
But Kevin kind of flipped when Miller, responding to the accountability complaints leveled at NCLB, endorsed the idea of multiple measures.
Miller said:
In my bill, we will ask employers and colleges to come together as stakeholders with the states to jointly develop more rigorous standards that meet the demands of both. Many states have already started this process. We seek to build on and complement the leadership of our nation’s governors and provide them incentives to continue.
This requires that assessments be fully aligned with these new state standards and include multiple measures of success.
Kevin was boggled! Using multiple measures:
it’s the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they’re judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can’t be wholly accountable to themselves.
The “great virtue” of NCLB is that the people who do the teaching (let’s call them “the teachers”), who can’t be trusted to assess what their students are learning, are removed from the process and it is handed over to the state and federal government.
Oh, I see. You still don’t get it.
You probably thought that the primary purpose of assessment is to provide information to the teachers to see if the students are getting what we’re teaching and adjust and differentiate instruction when we see a problem.
You probably are thinking to yourself: In that context, what would be the reason for me to cook the books?
Kevin says:
The people here at Education Sector who handle accounting, for example, are scrupulously honest. Nonetheless, we’re required to have our books audited by an outside accounting firm every year. Nobody disputes the necessity of this, just like nobody disagrees with having line judges call serves in an out at Wimbledon. When the stakes are high–as with money, championship tennis, and the educational lives of the nation’s schoolchildren–measurement must be independent.
To Kevin we teachers are like bookkeepers and tennis players. If you don’t have outside auditors checking on us, we’ll cheat. Cheat about what? About how well our students do on the assessment. Why wouldn’t we want to know how well are students understand what we are teaching? Because, uh, well…
Because the assessment isn’t for the purpose of doing a better job at matching instruction to student needs and interests. It’s to cheat check on whether our instruction is matching national standards. And for that we need to be audited.
Kevin and I live in different worlds. Mine is in the classroom with students. What world does he live in?
And what does this have to do with Andy?
Well, as Kevin’s boss he is telling Kevin to calm down. Not to worry:
… some of the ideas floating around would make state testing systems unreliable. But at the end of the day, I think the sort of measures that will be included will be things like IB and AP, in other words measures that are uniform and are tied to rigor.
In other words, when NCLB is reauthorized it will still make sure that assessment is done in a way that is far removed from the teacher student relationship. Just the way Andy and Kevin like it.
