GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS

As a doctoral student in a small Education Policy cohort, I attended lots of Friday potluck dinners—cheap wine, the requisite tabouli and Korean mondoo, and hot discussion about which educational research grants are getting funded these days. The usual entertaining stuff.

 

As an older (OK, much older) grad student, with 30 years of K-12 teaching under my belt, discussing the kinds of studies that are politically viable these days always held an element of unreality to me: do we stress the advantages of certain au courant statistical models and massive data sets, or the tenacious quest to find the cheapest and most reliable way to raise test scores? That’s where the money’s aimed, it seems.

I was talking with an excited young colleague about his upcoming trip to Large Urban District in the South, where final data-gathering and analysis for a multi-year project would take place. Preliminary results were encouraging, he said—not only were the numbers good, the teachers were showing a high degree of fidelity. “Fidelity?” I asked. Yeah, he said—you can’t get the statistical bounce out of a whole-school reform model unless you can get the teachers in line and manage their instruction. Unless they were faithful to the script and protocols. If they weren’t, it could mess up your data. He was a nice young man and perfectly serious about these comments. I thought about this when reading “Tyranny of the Test” by Jeremy Miller—an article in Harper’s that was available on the web for about 15 minutes, and is now accessible by subscription only. (Read a summary of the article at Education Notes Online.) Miller’s amusing but troubling story about his stint as a test-prep coach for Kaplan (whose services were purchased by the NYC schools) highlighted the struggle between organic teacher-created lessons —and for-profit coaching for test-taking skills. There’s an awful passage, where Miller muses about Kaplan’s “guaranteed” score rise—and how if that rise does not occur, there is a ready, facile explanation: The teachers must not have not been faithful to Kaplan’s requirements.

I really hate to see a perfectly distinguished word—fidelity—used so shabbily. A person with fidelity is loyal, consistent, committed. When “fidelity coaches” are provided to schools purchasing whole-school reform packages, they’re not urging teachers to be committed to their students. They’re monitoring teachers’ willingness to dependably follow an agenda. Think about the underlying messages: Teachers’ judgment can’t be trusted. Teaching is low-level technical work, requiring continuous scrutiny. Good teachers don’t experiment, take creative risks, innovate or change strategies to adapt to differing student needs. Teaching can be easily mastered by following predictable procedures. Bye-bye, teachable moment.

 

Teachers find themselves scapegoats, positioned somewhere between inept and undeservedly self-governing. If the uniformity of scripted lessons produces a score boost, the reform program takes a bow (and publishes the data). If there’s no improvement in scores, teachers are labeled—and this kills me—“unfaithful.” And in the end, it’s all about marketing language and self-protection, not education.

 

A friend who taught for two years as a Teach for America corps member tells me that TFAers are regularly told that teachers in high-needs schools are incompetent—and that by standardizing and targeting practice toward testing, they can bump up the data and look good in comparison.

It’s a different kind of fidelity, however, that keeps those supposedly “incompetent” veteran teachers coming back to teach the most difficult kids year after year.

 

At this point in the argument, someone generally raises the question of best practice protocols in the sciences: there is, after all, an accepted best way to remove a gall bladder. There may also be a preferred way to teach mathematical regrouping to any particular group of 2^nd graders—and the more teachers get together to examine their practice using data, the better. It is in the gap between standard best practice and situational judgment where teachers’ professionalism lies: if we can’t trust teachers’ judgment in adapting their teaching to meet the needs of their kids, we’re headed toward further de-skilling of teaching. Who benefits from that, in the long term? Certainly not schools, where professional collaboration is enhanced by consistency and capacity-building in the staff.

 

Jeremy Miller, the Kaplan coach, describes training students to succeed on the SAT at once-grand George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan, where ugly metal detectors clash with elegant architectural elements in the faded lobby. Henry Kissinger was an alumnus, leaving one to wonder: where would Henry Kissinger have ended up if he attended GW as it is today?

Comments

[Claus]

Thanks, as always, for a thought-provoking post. In Finland, whose students continually top the international charts, teachers enjoy remarkable control over how they teach a national curriculum. In the U.S., several leading reform strategies strip teachers of instructional autonomy (as you note), sometimes in the absence of clear content standards.

This contrast reveals something important about the relative status of teachers in both countries....

[Melissa B.]

Arghhhhh...Education, Thy True Name is--Trend! We're starting PLT this year, and there are just too many dang Trends in Education to count since I first got into this business. Off to a 4-hour inservice about Whatever, tomorrow--I Can Hardly Wait!

[Bob Heiny]

I don't think you mean this, but this post reads as though you suggest that external learning expectations, standards, and validity indices matter not as long as a teacher can do what a teacher decides to do. Do you mean that?

[Melissa B.]

BTW, drop by tomorrow for another crazy edition of Silly Sunday Sweepstakes. Come Share the Comment Love!

[Nancy Flanagan]

Dear Bob,

I am not certain why you would suggest that I believe that teacher expectations, rigorous content standards or valid measures of learning do not matter. Or that the ultimate goal is complete teacher autonomy, with no regard to outcomes. Quite the opposite. What I am suggesting is that we will not achieve those things--high standards, increased learning--until we understand the underlying complexities of professional teaching.

I suggest you read Jeremy Miller's fascinating, detailed article on what it's like to enter a classroom for a temporary stint as a testing coach. He shares the craven feeling of following a highly scripted training, knowing that he's not reaching his assigned pupils, but bound by contract to just dish out the "protocols."

As I noted in the post, second to last paragraph, there are often "best practices"--the most effective way to teach something in a particular context. What I am concerned with is the urge to take decision-making out of the hands of those who do the actual teaching.