In my view, the "Race to the Top" epitomizes everything that is wrong with the current wave of mandated "education reform." Now, please don't misunderstand me -- I am passionate about continuous improvement, and convinced that we can make all of our schools wonderful places of excellence and growth for our students. But I think there are two fundamental things wrong with current legislation relating to education -- the goals, and the methods for reaching those goals.
With respect to the goals, in a previous post I noted that many of the nations whose students test better in international testing comparisons are working to reform their systems of education to be more like ours, and that we may be going backwards in emphasizing solely test results. Education is broader than test performance -- I believe that we should care about the development of caring, thoughtful, intelligent citizens, who have a broad background of understanding, know how to use their minds well, appreciate the arts, and have engaged in thoughtful and critical thinking about current issues. In addition, productive citizens in the 21st century will need to know how to learn independently, work cooperatively with others, problem-solve effectively, and be creative in developing solutions to new and unexpected problems. Focusing instead on the very narrow goal of improving performance on standardized tests could very well destroy the innovation, creativity, and thoughtfulness that are now characteristics of American learners.
Another excellent question is how these goals were decided upon. In a recent book by Stanford professor Nell Noddings, When School Reform Goes Wrong, Noddings points out the discrepancies that exist between available evidence of a problem and the sweeping, one-size-fits-all, solution:
"We might also ask why if the problem to be solved lies mainly in schools attended by poor children, the solution promoted by NCLB has been laid on all schools. Why are we not concentrating on the identification and analysis of problems in the schools where the problematic situations exist? Policymakers respond to this reasonable question by admitting that the achievement gap is not their only worry. 'Our schools are failing,' they say. All of them? What is the evidence for this charge?"As I noted in a previous post, Massachusetts scored first in the nation on the most recent NAEP testing, and was up with the top in the world on the 2007 TIMSS testing. Schools like Southborough's test in the top 10% of Massachusetts schools, so I do wonder what the problem is that we are trying to fix. One thing I have learned in my years in leadership and management, both in business and in education, is the importance of first accurately identifying and carefully analyzing the problem before trying to develop a solution. Without that step, there is a very real danger that implementing a new "solution" may simply be a step backward. In this case, I don't think the problem has been accurately identified or analyzed, and the "solution" has the potential to destroy our system of public education. Having lived through many years of increasing regulation and tightening of controls on schools, and fighting to try to maintain quality education in the face of these restrictions, I can tell you that with each new regulation it becomes more and more difficult to spend time on what matters most in making schools good places of learning for kids.
The so-called "Race to the Top" federal regulations have many problems, too many to extensively describe here. Two of the major problems, though, are the requirement that states allow unlimited charter school development and the requirement that teachers' compensation be dependent on student test performance. On the surface, these appear to many people to be good ideas. But both have significant problems and the potential for a serious detrimental impact on public schools.
Briefly, charter schools would be no problem if (1) funding for them were not taken from local public schools, (2) they did not "push out" students who have behavioral or learning issues, (3) they enrolled all comers rather than being able to limit the size of their student bodies, (4) they enrolled the same cross-section of students as the public schools, including students who are English language learners, students who have special needs (including the most severe special needs), and students whose families are not capable of dealing with applying to charter schools. See the Massachusetts Department of Education website for statistics and compare charter school enrollments with local public school enrollments. (http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/selectedpopulations.aspx) For example, this report lists AMSA, a local charter school, as having 0.0% students who are English language learners and 3.3% students with special needs, while other local school districts have substantially higher percentages (Southborough - 2.8% & 13.4%; Northborough - 3.5% and 15.0%; and Marlborough - 11.4% & 21.6%, respectively). The problem with charter schools, as they are now structured, is they foster a "two-tier" educational system and undermine public education in surrounding schools. Substantial reform is needed in order for charter schools to be a positive innovation.
On the second requirement, tying teacher compensation to student test performance has multiple problems and the potential to create many more issues. As I noted, to many people, this appears to be a good idea -- if salesmen sell more cars when they're working on commission, why shouldn't we have teachers paid differently depending on how their students do on tests? But let's do a more thoughtful analysis than that. Aside from all the logistical problems with measurement (which teachers should be responsible for which students' results, how to deal with teachers who teach subjects for which there are no tests, which teachers should be assigned students with learning difficulties, etc.), how valid is the theory behind this proposal? Is tying teacher compensation to student test performance an effective method for increasing student test performance? In order to conclude that it is, you have to make one of two assumptions: either (1) teachers are not working hard, need to work harder, and contingent compensation will give them an incentive to do so, or (2) teachers are not teaching effectively because they either do not know effective methods of teaching or are not applying what they know, and contingent compensation will cause them to learn new methods and/or to apply what they know. There is no evidence for either of these assumptions. In my own experience (admittedly limited to high-achieving suburban school systems), neither of these is true -- most teachers are working very hard, and most are taking courses and workshops and spending vacation time refining and improving their instruction. So -- if neither of these assumptions is true, tying compensation to student test performance will not accomplish anything other than further demoralizing teachers and setting up some perverse incentives for unethical behavior by some (cheating, angling to avoid assignments teaching students with learning difficulties, not sharing ideas with colleagues, and the like). A recent study on contingent compensation for teachers found either no effect or a negative effect on student performance, and some thoughtful papers have suggested that developing a good system would be complex and would need to be tailored to each particular district's needs -- so why this is being mandated by law -- as a solution to an ill-defined problem -- is difficult to understand.
Given the lack of accurate identification of the problem, the questionable nature of the goal, and the invalidity of the proposed "solutions", my question about all this is, "Race to where?" I don't think it will be to the top. We need to demand a complete, well-defined analysis of the problem, and well thought out, well-defined solutions before going off on a tangent that will be damaging to public education.
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An excellent analysis!
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