This week Los Angeles Superior Court
Judge Rolf Treu handed the education reform movement a stunning legal
victory, when he struck down California’s teacher tenure laws for
discriminating against poor and minority students. The statutes made it
so onerous to fire bad teachers, he wrote, that they all but guaranteed
needy kids would be stuck in classrooms with incompetent
instructors—rendering the laws unconstitutional.
As evidence, Treu cited a statistic that sounded damning: According
to a state witness, between 1 and 3 percent of California’s teachers
could be considered “grossly ineffective.” Here was the passage:
There is also no dispute that there are a significant number
of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California
classrooms. Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants,
testified that 1 to 3% of teachers in California are grossly
ineffective. Given that that the evidence showed roughly 275,000 active
teachers in this state, the extrapolated number of grossly ineffective
teachers ranges from 2,750 to 8,250. Considering the effect of grossly
ineffective teachers on students … it therefore cannot be gainsaid that
the number of grossly ineffective teachers has a direct, real,
appreciable, and negative impact on a significant number of California
students, now and well into the future for as long as said teachers hold
their positions.
This seemed like a fairly important piece of the decision—if you’re
going to argue in court that a state law is dooming children to
second-rate educations, you ought to be able to quantify the problem.
Politically, it also seemed liked a pretty awful indictment of the state
government if officials knew for certain that so many useless teachers
were lounging around California’s classrooms. But where did this number
come from?
Nowhere, it turns out. It’s made up. Or a “guesstimate,” as David
Berliner, the expert witness Treu quoted, explained to me when I called
him on Wednesday. It’s not based on any specific data, or any rigorous
research about California schools in particular. “I pulled that out of
the air,” says Berliner, an emeritus professor of education
at Arizona State University. “There’s no data on that. That’s just a
ballpark estimate, based on my visiting lots and lots of classrooms.” He
also never used the words “grossly ineffective.”
The phrase appears to have been Treu’s shorthand to describe teachers
whose students consistently perform poorly on standardized tests. But
Berliner is a well-known critic
of using student test scores—or “value-added models,” in the parlance
of education experts—to measure teaching skills. In part, that’s because
research suggests that teachers don’t really control much of how their
pupils perform on exams; according to the American Statistical Association, they influence anywhere between 1 percent and 14 percent of the variation in students’ scores. As result, teachers often don’t deliver the same results year after year.
Still, if you look at enough data, there are always a few teachers
who consistently underperform on test results. “There’s an occasional
teacher who shows up really good a few years in a row,” Berliner said.
“There are a few who show up really bad.” And that’s where the
now-infamous statistic comes in. During a deposition, Berliner told me,
the plaintiffs’ lawyers asked how many teachers deliver low test scores
year after year. He didn’t have a hard number, so he said 1 percent to 3
percent, which he thought sounded suitably small. That led to the
following exchange with a plaintiffs’ lawyer during cross-examination.
(Berliner emailed me part of the transcript.)
Lawyer: Dr. Berliner, over four years value-added models should be able to identify the very good teachers, right?
Berliner: They should.
Lawyer: And over four years value-added models should be able to identify the very bad teachers, right?
Berliner: They should.
Lawyer: That is because there is a small percentage of
teachers who consistently have strong negative effects on student
outcomes no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal
with, right?
Berliner: That appears to be the case.
Lawyer: And it would be reasonable to estimate that 1 to 3 percent of teachers fall in that category, right?
Berliner: Correct.
Berliner seems to have let something important get lost in
translation on the stand. Because, as he said to me, he doesn’t
necessarily believe that low test scores qualify somebody as a bad
teacher. They might do other things well in the classroom that don’t
show up on an exam, like teach social skills, or inspire their students
to love reading or math. And while he has observed teachers he didn’t
particularly like, or thought could use more training, he’s never
encountered one he would consider “grossly ineffective.”
“In hundreds of classrooms, I have never seen a ‘grossly ineffective’
teacher,” he told me. “I don’t know anybody who knows what that means.”
I asked Stuart Biegel, a law professor and education expert at UCLA,
whether he thought that the odd origins of the 1–3 percent figure might
undermine Treu’s decision on appeal. Biegel, who represented the
winning plaintiffs in one of the key cases Treu cited, said it might.
But he thought that the decision’s “poor legal reasoning” and “shaky
policy analysis” would be bigger problems. “If 97 to 99 percent of
California teachers are effective, you don’t take away basic, hard-won
rights from everybody. You focus on strengthening the process for
addressing the teachers who are not effective, through strong
professional development programs, and, if necessary, a procedure that
makes it easier to let go of ineffective teachers,” he wrote to me in an
email.
To me, the tale of this particular statistic is a good example of why
the education reform battle doesn’t really belong in the courts, at
least not yet. We haven’t come to an accord on what makes a “good” or
“bad” teacher, or how many of either are out there—even if one judge is
convinced we have.
Atico export is a educational scientific laboratory equipment manufacturer and exporters since 1954 here in Ambala, India with a vast range of laboratory click more
1 comment:
Atico export is a educational scientific laboratory equipment manufacturer and exporters since 1954 here in Ambala, India with a vast range of laboratory click more
Post a Comment