Rhee has been described at various times as "abrasive," "mean-spirited," "confrontational," and many other words that can't be reprinted on a PG-13 blog. But these are just distractions--deliberate ones--from the real issues at play. Rhee clearly believes that a not-insignificant number of teachers currently employed by DCPS aren't doing a good enough job and should be replaced by better teachers. Most of those current teachers, I'm guessing, see things differently. They're well-organized and represented (at the national level, at least), and so these divergences of opinion and interest are going to get fought out in the realms of politics and public opinion. That's as it should be. But let's not fool ourselves by thinking that this is an argument about manner and style.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Points for Style?
Nick Kristoff's recent column about Michelle Rhee brings up a common trope in school reform controversies: "leadership style," with Kristoff averring that "Ms. Rhee’s weakness is her bedside manner." Per Eduwonk--really? Is that all? Read Dana Goldstein's informative new TAP article about UFT President Randi Weingarten, Rhee's chief antagonist, who "speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist," who is "known as a guns-blazing New York power broker," who "came up as a New York City labor lawyer" and "ended the political career of City Councilmember Eva Moskowitz." Does she sound like the kind of person who's going to be swayed one way or another by bedside manner? Of course not--frankly, it's an insult to Weingarten more than anyone to suggest otherwise.
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Kevin,
Its not about style or even about confrontation - until the confrontation crosses the line where it is contrary to our traditions of constitutional democracy and loyal opposition. Rhee has forgotten that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If Rhee had taken the time to read Robert Rothman, for instance on the proper and improper use of value-added models, Rhee wouldn’t be a disaster.
But I just finished the June 2011 issue of New Yorker with its account of the Scopes trial of the 21st century, and it says it best. I wish I could hyperlink to it, but here’s my summary.
The expert witness testimony was interminable, except for the comic relief of debating Zeno’s Paradox. The dueling algorithms reached a climax with the testimony: “within Y years (which, as we see here, is really Y + unknown # of years) according to the following formula:
Projected Score = MY + b1(X1 – M1) + b2(X2 – M2) + ... = MY + xiT b (2)
The point became clear during the closing argument, “Intelligent men and women of the jury, how much of the math testimony did you understand? Think of the gap between your world and the world of the expert witnesses who devised these value-added models. Now think of the gap between the culture of the statisticians and of inner city schools. How can we be confident that the eminent scholars who devised these models had enough concrete understandings of the variety of real world differences in our state’s schools?
Closing arguments also summarized the testimony of Robert Rothman of the Carnegie foundation who said, “any accountability test, the measures may be subject to statistical error or distortion. As a result, some researchers and educators say, it could be unfair to use value-added measures to make important decisions about teachers”
Also quoted was Dan Goldhaber who said the not-ready-for-prime-time value added models were used for evaluation purposes because “The alternative measures of determining tenure and determining pay look every bit as inaccurate as value-added [measures], if not more.”
“If you haven’t adjusted for the right things, it’s possible that someone appears to be a good teacher, but maybe that was because she was assigned good learners,” he says. “Her kids would get better test scores no matter what.”
Expert witness Douglas Staiger had “suggested that teachers should have been involved in selecting control factors and notes that he has asked medical practitioners to develop a list of control factors. Other problems were, “some of the most important factors are not measurable, making measures of teacher effectiveness inexact, notes Daniel F. McCaffery, a senior statistician at the Rand Corporation. “We don’t know how many kids have parents who value education, how many have books in the home, how many are in a community that is backing the school.”
“One way to account for at least some complicating factors would have been to assign students randomly to teachers. That way, extraneous factors will be randomly distributed, rather than concentrated among particular teachers. But such assignments are rarely feasible,” testified Douglas N. Harris, an assistant professor in the school of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Principals like to match students with teachers—for instance, if one teacher is particularly good at working with behaviorally challenged learners, a principal may assign more such students to her class. As a result, Harris says, statisticians are unlikely to come up with a value-added measure that is free of selection bias. “We know we can’t do that by any means perfectly,” he says.
Finally, expert witness William Sanders was cut off as he said, “However, the objective (of value-added models) was “to give the current school credit (under NCLB) not to hold the current educators’ evaluation hostage ...”
Joel Klein showed a little known humorous side, observing that there is a silver lining in the ongoing NYC teachers strike over the evaluation in that it kept him from being a defendant in the costly lawsuit.
Arne Duncan said it best though, observing that the devil is always in the details but who would have thought that the minor difference between data-DRIVEN accountability and data-informed accountability would drain his $5 billion Race to the Top fund
A not-so-contrite former superintendent Michelle Rhee said that the district’s lawyers should be held accountable for the fiasco. They should have never allowed this issue to be fought out in the reality-based paradigm of a court of law, but in the court of righteous indignation.
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