Lecture 5: "Barriers to Effective Education II"
Lack of Teacher Accountability
Preview Question
Can you think of any disadvantages to having accountability in education?
Today we want to talk about accountability as a barrier to effective education. Currently we lack accountability. Today all teachers are promoted one step on the salary schedule every year. If you are an excellent teacher your reward is you go up one notch on the salary scale. If you are a lousy teacher, what is your penalty? None. You go up one notch on the salary scale each year. What kind of nonsense is it when good teachers and bad teachers both go up one notch on the salary scale every year? What kind of incentive is there for people to do a really outstanding job if they know that the results are the same, whatever good or bad job they do, so long as they don't get fired. And the only way you get fired is to commit rape in the public square at high noon. Teaching is one of the most stable professions around. And in that stable profession there is little accountability and I resent that. I think that is wrong.
Let's look at testing. Typically we have post-hoc documentation. That is a fancy way of saying that we don't find out if people were successful or fail until after everything is done. You get the best evidence of how well you the kids do after the final examination and they are no longer there. I know what you learned and what you didn't learn, but you're no longer here, so I can't teach you the things you didn't learn. Isn't that a dumb system? I would rather have a final examination that would come about 3 weeks before the end of the term. Find out then what you haven't learned, and have another shot at teaching you the things that you haven't learned. I think that'd be a better system. Post hoc documentation of failure is not so good.
There is a confusion of test scores and standards. The score you get on the test isn't necessarily reflective of the standard of your education. There may be a whole lot of reasons why you get a low test score that are irrelevant. In the same way, when a student gets a high score because they cheated, that's not a very high standard either. So you have a lot of reasons why test scores do not necessarily reflect standards in education. You want students to feel responsible for their education
Students should decide what kind of grades they want to get - what's important for them. There was this one women that I worked with for a whole year to make sure that she got a B instead of an A and was still comfortable with that. And after a whole year of doing the best I could, the "worst" I could get out of her was a B+. She was so compulsive about getting A's that it just didn't feel right unless she was doing destructive, compulsive kinds of things. And to get her to loosen up was almost impossible. Let me tell you about a student I knew at Stanford University - a women who every quarter was sure she was failing everything - and then at the end of the semester she would get all A's. You'd think that the next quarter she'd know that she was doing well, but no, she was still as frantic:
"I'm failing everything,” and then she'd get A's. Now that just sounds slightly amusing until you realize that after she graduated from Stanford University with Phi Beta Kappa honors, she never made her life work. Why? Because she never had confidence to know when she had won. She was Phi Beta Kappa, but her life didn't work. She never could estimate how well she was really doing. Now is that a high standard? That's lousy. That's stupid. So let's not confuse test scores or grades with high standards. It would be a higher standard for Nancy to get a whole pot full of B's and have a successful life. You need to know how hard to you need to work to get the result you want or need to get. And if you consistently get results that surprise you, something is wrong. Either something is wrong from the teacher's side - not telling you what the expectation is - or something is wrong from the student's perspective - not knowing how hard to work or what's been learned.
That's bad stuff-not to know when you've learned what you need to learn. Teachers need to spend more time helping students become comfortable to know what they need to know.
In this class I try to do that by giving you sample quizzes, interactive questions, a detailed syllabus and clear requirements - to give you feedback in terms of knowing what you know. It's a very important thing. This is not just one of those little sidebars; it's very very important. Let's not confuse test scores with standards.
Let's also not confuse test frequency with standards. Right now, we live in a time where everybody is testing everybody all the time. Testing. Testing. Testing. As if giving more tests is a higher standard. Baloney. The fewer tests I give the better, so long as those tests give me feedback to know how well my students are doing and give students feedback to know how well they're doing. More testing is a waste of time. You want to have a minimum number of tests with maximum of feedback.
Grades are predictors of future performance not measures of achievement. That is a powerful idea because teachers really get confused thinking that they are giving grades because this is what the kid's achieved rather than giving grades because this is the predictor of future success. It's a really big, big confusion so you really have to find ways to understand how grades are used as predictors.
Let me give a good example: SAT scores which are a bane to a lot of people, SAT scores and other kinds of tests, standardized tests-what percentage of the total performance of the student do they predict? Well it turns out that the correlation statistically, and they've done a lot of statistics on this, turns out to be about 0.65. Now 0.65 is about 40% of what is going on. So if you give an SAT test and you use that as a predictor about future success, the SAT test will predict 40% of what will happen. That means that 60% of what is likely to happen, it doesn't predict. 40% it predicts, 60% it doesn't predict. Now let's take grade point averages. How much future success, do you think a grade point average would predict? What percentage of future success will grades predict if the best standardized test predicts about 40% of what's going on?
Discussion:
Student: The same
DWA: You’re right, they predict about 40%. Now here's the big question. Let's say you add together the test scores and the grades, how much do they predict together? 40% FOR the test scores alone, 40% the grades alone, put them together what would they predict? Guess? Go ahead.
Student: 50%
Student 20%
DWA: 20%! You put them together and they predict less? That would be possible. It turns out that it is not less, and it's not more; it's 40%. You add in interview data, it is another 40%, you add in service kinds of things--40%. In other words, no college admissions formula has ever been able to do much better than a 40% predictor. That's the prediction. The correlation between grades and performance.
Remediation and Accountability
The current schedule does not give the teacher time or resources to provide remediation even when the need is known. Secondary teachers have a class full of students to deal with, an hour a day, five days a week for a semester. If our instructional patterns were more flexible, remedial time could be provided for additional work with individuals and groups of students when the need is first identified.
Providing remediation is part of accountability. If we are going to be really accountable as professionals, when someone displays a weakness in what they learn we should have remediation available. We should have some way for people to get out of the box if they are not doing well. They should be able to have some way to get beyond their problems.
At present remediation patterns are woefully inadequate. A student typically fails an entire semester or year and then has to repeat the whole thing. The second time around she gets an A in the first marking period (remembering things from the first time), a B or C in the second marking period - maybe even worse and often fails again or barely passes.
Even worse, we often know in advance that we are "promoting" students to levels where they will not do well. This is particularly true in language. If a student gets an A or B in first year language, we can predict success in the second year. If a student gets a C in the first year, we can predict that he will do poorly. Generally C level performance has too many "holes" in the knowledge to support successful study the next year. Wouldn't it be better to provide remediation until a student achieves at least a B level of performance in the first year curriculum and then have him go on to the second year?
Our current pattern of remediation - all or none - isn't working. And "the educational system" does not accept responsibility - accountability. We blame the student for not learning properly. The issue is not the grade - the issue is the prediction of success or failure. It isn't accountable to put a student into an educational experience for which we don't predict success. It isn't accountable to put teachers and students into class schedules that we know won't produce satisfactory learning for all.
I often talk about communities not having the right to a bad education. There are communities that deliberately have bad special education programs so as to discourage parents with special education kids from coming to those schools. There are retirement communities that have bad schools so that they will have very few students come to their community to live. And there are those who just want to have lower taxes. I would argue that no community has the right to a bad education, they don't only suffer the consequences themselves, but they inflict that consequence on all the school districts where their kids move, and families and kids move a lot. A student may move to a community as a junior in high school - then when she graduates from that high school, that community is either praised or blamed for the performance of that student when that community only educated that student for 2 out of 12 years. Mobility is also one of the biggest reasons why no community has a right to bad education. We'll talk about that more when we talk about mobility as one of the barriers to effective education.
The final thing that I want to talk about in accountability is the confusion of efficiency and effectiveness. Because I think this fouls up accountability. These are not independent concepts. There are people who really believe that you can be efficient without being
effective.
Wrong.
You have to be effective first before you can be efficient. Referring to the diagram, efficiency is the smaller circle and effectiveness becomes the big circle. We can say that efficiency is a subset within effectiveness. In other words you can be effective without being efficient but if you are efficient you already have been effective. This is the relationship between the two. Some people get confused and think for example that large group instruction is efficient but is not effective. Well, large group instruction is efficient at teaching in large groups, and it's also effective at teaching in large groups. Large group instruction may not be effective in terms of what people learn, but then it is not efficient in what they learn either. The confusion comes from a change in reference points. You say it's efficient on one dimension and not effective on another, that's just a confusion.
To really understand the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness, you have to understand that to be effective is the prerequisite to being efficient. That you cannot be efficient without being effective first. This is a very important concept to understand, because as a teacher, I would argue that you want kids to be efficient in their learning as well as effective. You want them to learn as easily as possible. I think accountability should be for efficiency as well as for effectiveness. This is one of the problems of current educational systems.
I would argue that you want kids to be efficient, this is where I come with wanting kids to study the least amount. I want kids to get an A if they can do so reasonably and it makes sense to them and they feel empowered by it. Otherwise let them get a B and let the B stand as both the effective level that they want and then they figure out how efficiently they must study in order to get the results that they want. To be efficient you must first be effective at the same goal and efficiency is a proper goal only after effectiveness is achieved. So this is the take on efficiency and effectiveness. We've covered an awful lot of territory today. And I wanted to go back and kind of review some of the major concepts. Now the major concepts are professionalism in terms of grading practices, professionalism in terms of decision-making, excepting responsibility for the grades that you give and the procedures you come up with. And I just can't underline that enough that professional accountability is what is needed and what is lacking.
I want you to try and empower the students that you are working with so that they feel in charge of their lives, like my own children. I try to empower them, so they can be in charge of their lives. And that is much more important than the kind of grade point average they get, because if students feel empowered then they use the learning they've had much more effectively. If they don't feel empowered, then however much they've learned ultimately it will be useless, because they'll have to wait for somebody else to tell them what to do with it. That 's one of the real strengths of the American school system that however much we may slouch through things and however much we may not have some of the rigorous standards that other systems have. One way or another the American
school system does create people who are creative. The Japanese system creates people who are imitators and they don't know how to be creative. That's the reason that Americans win more Nobel Prizes disproportionately to our population than any other nation in the world. Japan is I think has had only two Nobel Prizes in history and yet there population is half as much as ours and they are an industrial country. Why do they have so few Nobel Prizes because their emphasis is on this repetitive behavior that does not encourage people to take responsibility for their own lives or be creative. So you see we're talking about objectives that are pretty substantial. We're talking about objectives that in many ways are paradoxical; we are achieving them at the same time that we don't value them. We still are valuing that straight A average. Even though we find that our strength as a society comes from the kind of empowerment that isn't necessarily associated with that straight A average. So it's kind of a paradoxical and interesting situation that our success ultimately has come from the result of not being able to achieve what we say we want to achieve, but we organize ourselves more creatively and differently. I mean, parents really want their kids to spend time as children in childhood, in China, why parents force their kids to spend all of their time studying. I mean the kids have virtually no time for play at all. All right, and American parents want their kids to have time playing but we'd like to have the kind of rigor that the Chinese produce in terms of their schooling But we aren't willing to pay that price-thank goodness we are not willing to pay that price. Because if we were willing to pay that price we wouldn't get the result that we are getting even though we are getting it now for the wrong reason. And I just feel that we're all better off if we can analyze things a little bit more straight forwardly and help people understand exactly what they are working four and toward and why.
So accountability and the lack of accountability is one of the real barriers to American education. We related the accountability today to classroom management and classroom management practices, and remember some of the stories that I told and how that fits it.
Kurt came in to my geography class a few weeks late, but he was always hanging around school and you know coming into my room at noontime and after school and everything. When it came time for him to do the six-week term test, he failed but I thought he's just been coming around and trying and he arrived late and everything and I think that I will just give him some encouragement so I gave him a C-. Even though his grade should have been an F. Okay. 'Cause I was wanting to encourage him. The next six weeks he didn't come around, he didn't do anything, he still failed his tests and I thought this kid thought he found himself a patsy and it would be an easy grader and so I self righteously gave him an F. The next six weeks, why he still didn't come around, he still did failing work and in our school we had this quaint custom of what were called progress reports, otherwise known as pink slips and on there it says check ABCDF. But you only sent it for F; the other things on the pink slip were just smoke screens. One time, this is another funny story, I decided to send progress reports on all of my students, all 150 of them. The guidance went crazy because you don't understand all that we have to do every time we get a progress report and 150 progress reports that Æ s more than we have for the whole school. We just can't process that many. I said wait a minute, you know nobody ever told me you can't send progress reports for a kid who is getting an A. I mean if that's your policy then you ought to let us know. Oh, the counselors were all just terribly upset. I just thought it was kind of a cool thing to give every parent, and I thought I was doing something nice, but I found out that progress reports are really code things for failing. Well anyway, so I had to send Kurt this progress report and another part of this quaint procedure in the school was the kids have to sign there own death sentence so before you send the progress report home, you have to put under the kids nose and say sign here that you acknowledge that your failing. So I called Kurt up and made him sign his death warrant here for getting an F for geography for the semester. And he said can I see you after class and I said sure. And after class he told me that at the end of the first six weeks an Æ d this is the point of what's going on at home, the end of that six weeks, why his mother and father separated and the court gave custody, temporary custody he stayed with his mother during the week and his father on the weekends. And during the week, well his mother told him what a terrible person his father was and on weekends told him what a terrible person his mother was and he was just being ripped apart, limb from limb and so I mean he was very confused, very upset total distracted unable to do any work and no one at school knew anything about that. And what were we doing, here I was self righteously thinking that this kid has just decided that someone is an easy grader without ever checking with the kid to ask him "Kurt, why aren't you coming in anymore?" See how simple that would have been? Real simple. And I didn't do it, because in my own head I had such confidence in my answer that I never bothered to check. I felt really like a worm and immediately tore up the progress report and wrote notes to all of his other teachers saying hay this kid is having real problems and we need to and I mean the last thing we need to do is pile on and create problems at school and let's figure out some way to help this kid get through this semester so that he can go on with his life. You see what I mean; it's foolish when grades become something that is just about an average. Now ultimately, you're not helping Kurt or anybody else to pass him if he didn't pass. Because he hasn't learned the stuff, but to negotiate with it and provide propping up and give him a little room and ultimately that case give him an incomplete and then when he was able to do the next semester of geography reasonably well-Cs. I then went back and removed the incomplete and gave him a C for the first semester. Now see these things are about judgment they're not about arithmetic. And so don't get trapped by your own arithmetic. So don't get trapped by the statistical nicety of you have to average everything together and divide by 3 or whatever it is to get the grade-don't get trapped by that. Leave yourself the room for professional judgment. Testing should be to confirm professional judgment, not to bypass it.