Few would deny that the arrival of 75 million federal dollars on the doorstep of Washington, D.C.’s struggling public school system seems like a very positive development. Here in D.C., where the test score gap in elementary school reading proficiency between black and white students reached 51 percentage points in 2010, any note of further assistance should be cause for celebration. The Hoya’s own editorial board hailed the city’s new funding as an example of change delivered by the Obama administration (“Making the Grade,” Aug. 31, 2010, A2).
The money, which comes from a competitive grant program funded by the 2009 stimulus package, is partly intended to reward states (or districts) that link teacher evaluation and pay to students’ standardized test scores. The idea is that D.C. and other struggling school districts can improve by upping the quality of their teachers, rewarding “effective” instructors and weeding out those who are deemed “ineffective.” Indeed, one of the reasons the city was chosen for the most recent round of grant money is its implementation of a new teacher evaluation system that uses “value-added” statistical modeling method to determine, based on test score data, which teachers have the greatest impact over the course of a year.
The notion that schools can improve by hiring the best teachers and firing bad ones seems maddeningly obvious. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks enthusiastically about “unleashing the power of data” to turn schools around, and it’s true that some form of assessment is needed to judge academic performance and help schools make the best decisions on behalf of their students. It is tempting to reflexively accept terms like “data-driven” and assume that data and numbers can tell most everything we need to know about effective teaching and good education. In practice, however, this vastly oversimplifies the work that teachers do in the classroom and negatively limits the scope of what schools deem to be valuable for student learning and growth.
Advocates for better education in America’s schools should stop and think before fully accepting the idea that teachers can be judged “effective” or “ineffective” based on complex statistical formulas alone. Just last week, a team of the nation’s leading education researchers published a report for the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute suggesting that while teacher evaluation systems do need improvement, “analyses of [value-added modeling] results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers.” Given the current enthusiasm for holding teachers “accountable” for their work based on these methods, and with billions in federal grant money in play, such warnings from education experts should give us pause.
When teachers and struggling schools are held accountable – or given more money – based on standardized testing data, they have an incentive to teach to those tests. But if the test scores go up, should this really be considered a job well done? No one denies the need for real teacher accountability. But test scores need to be a sufficiently small piece of the puzzle that they do not carry an outsize influence over what kids are being taught.
Does the difference between struggling schools in Southeast D.C. and their high-performing counterparts in Northwest really come down to greater test prep in the latter portion of the city? Most people would probably agree this is not the case. Still, the schools in Southeast are expected to get their act together not by offering a more comprehensive education like the schools in Northwest, but by limiting their curriculum to focus on tests and data.
If urban education is actually going to get better, higher test scores can’t be the only goal of schools. Unfortunately, the growing dependence on standardized data to make important educational decisions discourages critical thinking by placing too much blind trust in a metric that provides – at best – an incomplete snapshot of student, teacher and school success. Sadly, until this changes, no amount of money will prevent D.C.’s struggling public schools from remaining in the mire of mediocrity.
