The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  And we shouldn’t overburden principals with reams of teacher accountability paperwork. As banal as it sounds, paperwork is the major reason that historical attempts to improve teacher evaluation failed. Teacher rating rubrics must get “put on a diet,” The New Teacher Project recommended in 2013. How about focusing on ten effective instructional behaviors each school year instead of sixty?

  RETURN TESTS TO THEIR RIGHTFUL ROLE AS DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS

  Americans have always been fascinated by tests, from the phrenology craze to IQ testing to achievement testing today. While we once used tests to draw conclusions mostly about the capacities of individual students, today we believe they tell us much less about the student than about his or her teacher. Value-added research has added immeasurably to our knowledge about what works in education, by measuring teachers’ impact on students’ test scores in low-stakes settings, in which those scores are used neither to reward nor to punish adults. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that value-added retains its legitimacy in high-stakes settings, when test scores are used to evaluate, pay, and fire teachers and administrators. Leading education researchers like Harvard’s Daniel Koretz, a psychometrician, and John Hattie of the University of Auckland, who conducts meta-analyses of education studies, have demonstrated that the most authentic use of achievement tests is to diagnose what students know and can do so teachers can better target instruction toward them. When testing practices are set up to select teachers to fire, educators are incented to raise test scores at any cost, not to use tests to help children learn.

  This does not mean that there is no use for value-added measurement within K–12 schools. Given what we know about value-added—that it is more stable at the high and low ends of the teacher quality spectrum than in the mushy middle—principals could target teachers with especially low value-added scores for a more intensive set of classroom observations or other investigations into their practice. Similarly, unusually high value-added scores could be used to identify teachers who are potentially able to serve as peer mentors or evaluators; but again, those rewards would not be distributed without classroom observations, consideration of student work other than tests, and interviews with the teacher in question.

  TEACHERS BENEFIT FROM WATCHING EACH OTHER WORK

  The classroom should not be a black box closed to outside scrutiny, especially for novice teachers. Low-stakes value-added research has made it clear that first-year teachers, regardless of how they enter the profession, are learning on the job—and the curve is steep. Ideally, school districts that serve at-risk children would limit their supply of first-year teachers when adequate veterans are available. Another idea would be to change the structure of teachers’ workdays so all effective veterans spend some time watching novice teachers work and coaching them. Beginner teachers, in turn, should have time to observe veterans’ classrooms and to work with colleagues to plan effective, engaging lessons.

  RECRUIT MORE MEN AND PEOPLE OF COLOR

  It is important for children to see some of themselves reflected in their teachers. A half century of research and 150 years of practical experience show teachers of color are more likely to hold high expectations for students of color. Yet only 17 percent of public school teachers are nonwhite, compared to 40 percent of public school students. In terms of gender, the feminization of the American teacher corps, begun by the common school reformers in the 1820s, has proven stubbornly consistent. Today only 24 percent of teachers are male.

  Making the teacher training process more competitive and intellectually coherent, as well as reorganizing how teachers are paid over the course of their careers, could make the job much more attractive to a more diverse group of workers. Men are more likely than women to value higher pay, and teachers of color are more likely than white teachers to have student debt to pay off. Though there is a perception that alternative certification programs inject clueless white teachers into high-poverty schools, in fact, programs like the Teacher Corps, Teach for America, and urban teacher residencies have always been more successful than the school system at large in recruiting large numbers of nonwhite and male teachers. The small size of those programs, however, means that urban districts may still be experiencing a net loss of teachers of color, as school closings and turnarounds lead to layoffs. That means everyone in the teacher preparation pipeline—teachers colleges, master’s programs, and districts—must make teacher diversity a bigger priority than ever before.

  END OUTDATED UNION PROTECTIONS

  Between 2010 and 2012, 2.5 percent of urban public school teachers were laid off due to budget crises. In some districts a policy known as “last in, first out,” or LIFO (pronounced life-o), prevented administrators from using performance criteria in choosing which teachers to shed. In 2011, when The Daily Beast invited twenty “big thinkers” to suggest a single idea to “fix our broken government,” both New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg and Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp named ending LIFO. The term is undeniably powerful, since it conjures up one of the most potent attacks on teachers unions—that they provide incompetents with jobs for life.

  Until very recently, these seniority rules were fairly uncontroversial. They prevented older, more expensive teachers from being discriminated against during lean economic times. Administrators often appreciated the simplicity of LIFO, especially because there was no consensus on how to best evaluate teachers’ performance. Yet LIFO makes little sense as research tells us more about what effective teaching looks like. A sensible layoff policy would use seniority as a tiebreaker between teachers with similar levels of performance on the job. Most school districts are already free to implement such a system if they negotiate it with their unions—there are only twelve states in which the law declares that seniority must be the only factor in teacher layoffs.

  The history of moral panics targeting teachers suggests the profession should remain governed by due process. But tenure cannot mean, in practice, that it is prohibitively expensive for a district to fire a bad teacher. If a teacher is judged using fair measures and is found to be consistently underperforming—and if she receives clear feedback and adequate training, yet does not improve within a year or two—her supervisor should have the right to fire her. If the teacher protests that decision, a peer-review board or neutral arbitrator should hold a hearing and make a ruling within a matter of weeks. The process should be swift and certain. To get there politically, teacher evaluation must be based on genuine measures of student learning, such as rigorous, non-multiple-choice tests and sophisticated, holistic classroom observations.

  LET A THOUSAND POLICY FLOWERS BLOOM

  Teacher accountability policies are not the only levers for improving public education. Just a decade ago the movement to desegregate schools was considered hopelessly outdated; today a growing number of charter school leaders acknowledge the research showing that integration promotes academic achievement and social-emotional growth for all kids. They are opening new schools, like Charles Drew in Atlanta and the Larchmont schools in Los Angeles, that seek to serve diverse student bodies. Even Michelle Rhee, the teacher accountability hawk, noted that in a perfect world, private schools would be illegal.* She actively recruited college-educated parents to enroll their children in D.C. public schools because she knew more socioeconomic integration had the potential to improve education for all the city’s children. In 2014 the Obama administration issued new regulations to allow charter schools that receive federal funds to weight their admissions lotteries in order to achieve racial and socioeconomic diversity.

  Some other great ideas: At Tech Valley High in Albany, New York, the Linked Learning schools in California, and the MET schools in Rhode Island, teenagers learn not only in the classroom, but also as externs in adult workplaces, so they understand how powerful education is in the real world and become more motivated to make it through high school and college. (Surveys of dropouts found many leave school because they believe it is irrelevant to earning money.)
There is also a growing consensus around the cognitive, social, and economic benefits of universal pre-K, another priority of President Obama that has not attracted much Republican support in Washington, but is gaining bipartisan steam at the state and municipal levels. In short, teacher evaluation and tenure reform—whether through value-added, peer review, or other means—are only two elements of any agenda to turn around underperforming schools.

  BE REAL ABOUT THE LIMITATIONS OF OUR SYSTEM

  Sometimes I worry we are engaged in magical thinking about the American education system itself. We hope the federal government can drive reform, and ideas about school improvement are typically introduced at the national level. Yet, in the words of education historian David Labaree, our school system is “radically decentralized” compared to the systems of our peer nations in Europe and Asia. The United States Constitution never mentions education, leaving it as a responsibility of states, cities, and towns. Today only 13 percent of the financial support for local schools comes from Washington, with the rest about evenly divided between municipal property taxes and state funding.

  The federal secretary of education can place conditions on funding in order to encourage favored reforms, like states adopting teacher evaluation systems that encompass student test scores. But he has zero oversight at the level of implementation, where so many well-intentioned social policies—especially education policies—are simply ignored or twisted beyond recognition. This dynamic played out with disappointing results during the Great Society era and again in the Reagan years, after A Nation at Risk inaugurated our contemporary federal school reform movement. President Obama’s Race to the Top agenda faces similar risks. In a number of states, the administration’s policies have already led to the absurd reality of teachers being evaluated based on the test scores of children they have never taught or even met.

  Why do national reform priorities keep getting misinterpreted on the ground? The federal Department of Education has no power over state legislatures or education departments. There are no federal inspectors of local schools to make sure principals, superintendents, and school boards understand how to use complex new tools like value-added measurement of teachers. Unique among Western nations, our national government does not produce or select high-quality tests, textbooks, or reading lists for teachers to use. Lastly—and perhaps most importantly—we consistently expect teachers and schools to close achievement gaps and panic when they fail to do so. But we do not provide families with the full range of social supports children need to thrive academically, including living-wage employment and stable and affordable child care, housing, higher education, and vocational training, in addition to decent nutrition and health care.

  In the absence of these “bridging instruments” between policy and practice, I fear American politics will continue to reflect profound disappointment in teachers, and teachers themselves will continue to feel embattled. But there is hope. If we accept the limitations of our decentralized political system, we can move toward a future in which sustainable and transformative education reforms are seeded from the ground up, not imposed from the top down. They will be built more upon the expertise of the best teachers than on our fears of the worst teachers. This is how we will achieve an end to the teacher wars.

  * * *

  * Rhee borrowed this quip from Warren Buffett.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was born in the spring of 2011 at Columbia University, where I was a Spencer Foundation fellow in education journalism. It was Professor Sam Freedman, a masterful writer and teacher, who first suggested that my inquiry into the politics of public school teaching could become a book, and who encouraged me to take a historical lens to the subject. At Columbia, LynNell Hancock and Nicholas Lemann also provided crucial early guidance.

  For three years, grants from generous donors allowed me to devote the majority of my working days to this project. I am profoundly grateful to have received a Bernard L. Schwartz fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Puffin Foundation writing fellowship at the Nation Institute. At New America, Steve Coll, Andrés Martinez, Lisa Guernsey, and Kevin Carey were early believers in this project, even before I had secured a publisher. Lisa’s research on classroom observation was especially influential on the ideas presented in this book. At the Nation Institute, I was cheered on by Andy Breslau, Taya Kitman, Ruth Baldwin, and Carl Bromley. None of the nonprofit backers of this book exerted an iota of ideological or content pressure over the work itself, nor did they see the work in any form before publication.

  My multitalented agent, Howard Yoon, helped me organize a huge mass of research and reporting about education into a workable book proposal, and held my hand along the way. I am incredibly fortunate to have worked with editor Kristine Puopolo at Doubleday. Her trenchant questions and revisions improved every page of this book. Assistant editor Dan Meyer provided probing comments and helped me format the book’s photo insert and endnotes. Maggie Carr did what can only be described as the world’s smartest copyedit. The Teacher Wars is far more coherent and thoughtful because of her work.

  I am grateful to a number of fellow writers who offered me feedback, most especially the razor-sharp Linda Perlstein, who read the entire manuscript and helped me prepare the first draft. My friend Philissa Cramer has been teaching me to be a better journalist since she was a year ahead of me on the staff of the Brown Daily Herald. Thank goodness she was available to help me weave the book’s major themes throughout its chapters. Greg Toppo, Matt Yglesias, Richard Yeselson, and Adam Serwer were my other trusted and insightful readers.

  Since journalists typically lack university affiliations, it is crucial that we have free access to scholarly resources. This book could not have been written without the writers and scholars program at the Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Much of the work was done in the library’s Wertheim Study, which is managed in style by research librarian Jay Barksdale.

  Many of the ideas in this book first appeared in my journalism, published in magazines such as Slate, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and The American Prospect. I am a writer who loves being edited, and I’ve been lucky to work with some of the very best in the business: Ann Friedman, Betsy Reed, Richard Kim, Emily Douglas, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tina Brown, Tom Watson, Lucas Wittmann, Edward Felsenthal, Torie Bosch, Allison Benedikt, David Plotz, Jess Grose, Kate Julian, and Nicole Allan.

  It is profoundly humbling to tackle history and social science as a journalist. A number of academics lent me their deep expertise on topics covered in this book, including Alice Kessler-Harris, Luis Huerta, Larry Cuban, Luther Spoehr, Jonah Rockoff, Doug Harris, Steven Teles, Jal Mehta, Clarence Taylor, and Richard Ingersoll. My love and respect for the practice and profession of history dates back to my time at Brown University, where I was lucky to study with Professors Mary Gluck, Amy Remensnyder, Ken Sacks, and Carolyn Dean.

  For pep talks on book writing at key moments when my confidence faltered, I’d like to thank Chris Hayes, Rick Perlstein, Dayo Olopade, and Jeffrey Toobin.

  So many friends were unfailingly enthusiastic and supportive as I worked on this book. But I’d be remiss if I did not name two very special people who went above and beyond: Lauren Hinkson and Rebecca Sauer.

  For three decades, my parents, Laura Greene and Steven Goldstein, and my grandparents, Carol and Frank Goldstein, have been throwing an obscene amount of love, enthusiasm, and encouragement in my direction. Thank you. Mark Hesse and Bonnie Marmor, my stepparents, are both educators who have not only supported me personally, but have helped me explore the issues in this book.

  Virginia Woolf said a woman writer needs a room of her own. But at least for me, a loving home was more crucial. The most important person in my life is Andrei Scheinkman, whom I met just as I was finishing the proposal for this book. Andrei listened patiently to all the twists and turns of this long, long project and pushed me forward when I felt like the work would never be good
enough and would never get done. He also made me laugh and reminded me to take vacations. He is now my husband. I am overwhelmed by gratitude and love. Thank you.

  Notes

  In addition to regular library collections and online resources, I consulted several archival sources. The Massachusetts Historical Society houses the Horace Mann Collection. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU house materials from the New York City Teachers Union, including the union’s newspaper (abbreviated as Tamiment). The Chicago History Museum houses the Margaret Haley and Chicago Teachers Federation papers (abbreviated as MH/CTF). I conducted my own oral history interviews and also used online oral history archives maintained by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (abbreviated as SOHP/UNC), the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi (abbreviated as USM), and the Eyes on the Prize Interviews in the Henry Hampton Collection, Film and Media Archive, at Washington University (abbreviated as Eyes/WU). The term “loc” refers to location in an e-book edition of a work.

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Everywhere I traveled as a reporter: See Dana Goldstein, “The Democratic Education Divide,” The American Prospect, August 25, 2008. For 2010 Clinton Global Initiative, see Dana Goldstein, “Is the Intra-Democratic Party Edu Debate a War?” (September 22, 2010), http://​www.​danagoldstein.​net/​dana_​goldstein/​2010/​09/​is-​the-​intra-​democratic-​party-​edu-​policy-​debate-​a-​war.​html. For polling on public perceptions of teachers, see http://​www.​gallup.​com/​poll/​166487/​honesty-​ratings-​police-​clergy-​differ-​party.​aspx.

  2 “sitting around, watching the teacher”: Robert C. Pianta and Bridget K. Hamre, “Conceptualization, Measurement, and Improvement of Classroom Processes: Standardized Observation Can Leverage Capacity,” Educational Researcher 38, no. 2 (2009): 109–19.