The Great Debate: Steve Brill v Teaching Matters

AUG 21, 2011 19:37 EDT

Steven Brill

The school reform deniers

EDUCATION | SCHOOL REFORM | TEACHERS

By Steven Brill All opinions expressed are his own.

Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter forThe American Lawyer – the magazine I founded and edited –who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.

In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, “Who says?” When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn’t won them.

The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides’ views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn’t. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon’s records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.

I have thought about the lawyer who didn’t win the medals a lot in the two years since I parachuted into a giant story that I started out knowing little about: the battle raging across the country over education reform. After I had seen a reference to them in the New York Post, I showed up one morning in June 2009 at one of New York City’s “Rubber Rooms.” These were the places that housed hundreds of New York City teachers whom the Department of Education had accused of misconduct or incompetence, but who were protected by union tenure rules and, therefore, remained on the payroll for years pending the outcome of endless arbitration hearings, which typically resulted in them being returned to class by arbitrators whose $1,400-a-day contracts had to be approved every year by the teachers’ union.

The minute I saw these people sleeping, playing board games, chatting, or — in the case of a cheerful, $85,000 a year former middle school teacher — lounging in a beach chair she had brought from home, the story seemed obvious. As schools chancellor Joel Klein and his staff had argued, the Rubber Room was a symbol of a system gone haywire.

However, there seemed to be another side. The union had maintained that the Rubber Room teachers were victims, and New York’s public radio station, WNYC, had broadcast a report in which several of these Rubber Room teachers were interviewed complaining about how they were being persecuted for having complained about Klein’s misdeeds or misconduct.

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AUG 29, 2011

2:38 PM EDT

John Thompson On Steve Brill's New Book

We all are going to hear alot about Steve Brill's book in the future, and all views are important. Just dont buy the book.

Betsy Combier

Guest Post: The Facts Not Included in Steve Brill's Tell All

By John Thompson

Steve Brill’s Class Warfare is full of breathless accounts of the rich and powerful that are reminiscent of the biographies of Kitty Kelly. Ironically, the most valuable part of his Class Warfaremay be his accounts of dramatic decisions to undertake risky and revolutionary "reforms" based on minimal evidence and some strange assumptions.

According to Brill, "Identifying Effective Teaching Using Performance on the Job" by Tom Kane, Robert Gordon, and Douglas Staiger was used to convince Bill Gates and President Obama that "teacher quality," measured by standardized tests, must be the focus of reform. According to Brill, they argued that tests showed, "remarkable consistency among teachers," and that "obviously" this suggested that the person in front of the classroom was the key to closing the achievement gap. Gates was supposedly told that the "surprising" lack of volatility in the test scores of one district meant we could trust algorithms to drive the firing of teachers. If we believe Brill, because of the stability in the charts that Kane and Gordon presented to Gates, we should presume that 25% of teachers with the lowest test score growth should be fired.

Perhaps I should make no assumptions, and use my 90% low-income district to explain Urban Education 101 for reformers. In our six magnet and charter high schools, the attendance rates never drop below 95%, while our seven neighborhood schools struggle to reach an attendance rate of 80%. When you add in the far lower enrollment rates and the far higher suspension rates in the neighborhood schools, their students attend class at a rate that is 1/4th to 1/3rd less than their peers in selective schools (and far less than their previous three years in middle school.) It would take a superhuman effort for neighborhood school teachers, with kids who are five to six years behind grade level in reading, to meet growth targets that were not controlled for school selectivity.

By the way, those patterns are all stable. Should we thus assume that the teachers in the magnet schools are better than the teachers in neighborhood schools with deplorable scores?

Neither would anyone with firsthand knowledge of actual classrooms assume that a relative lack of test score volatility within schools justifies the "reformers’" extraordinary conclusions. I would assume that Kane, at least, would know that even when student assignment policies are stable, students are assigned differently to tested and non-tested classes. I wonder how he would address a stable pattern in my district where middle school "Science" classes are taught to the names, dates, facts, and figures of the benchmark tests, producing pass rates ranging from 70 to 73%. Then freshmen Biology students have a pass rate that fluctuates from 30% to 51% to 41% on tests designed to measure scientific thinking. Since the Biology teachers’ growth targets would be based on middle school tests, would Kane support the mass firing of those teachers for failure to meet targets generated from the results of different tests?

Recognizing that districts differ, let us take some more obvious examples of stable patterns from my school system. As 5th graders, the kids of Zip Code 73120 attend schools with poverty rates ranging from 23%, 50%, 69%, and 76%, with the special education populations ranging from 5.5% to 14%. The number of suspensions are 0, 14, 33, and 86. The pass rates for 5th grade Reading range from 81% to 95%.

Between 5th and 6th grade, the district's student population drops by nearly 1/5th as the numbers of special education and ELL students increase. In 73120, the decline is more remarkable as the majority of their students move to magnet, enterprise, and charter schools, including four that have gained national recognition. So, the 6th graders arrive at a school with 2,020 disciplinary actions, which lost its middle class students after the campus policeman was hospitalized in a riot, and where 1/4th of their class are on IEPs. Should the 6th grade teachers to be blamed for a Reading pass rate of 44%? Is it reasonable to expect those teachers to meet test score targets based on the three previous years of performance in very different types of classrooms, with incomparably different peer effects?

Similarly, a non-educator might be unaware that the challenges facing an Algebra II class are radically different to those of an Algebra I class next door. The demographic differences between the two math classes, however, are just as stark as the unbelievable differences between our 5th and 6th graders. My school was the lowest-ranked secondary school in Oklahoma, but the percentages of poor and at-risk juniors in Algebra II were not dramatically different to the percentages in many suburban schools. After all, 1/3rd or more of the freshmen Algebra I students drop out before reaching their 11th grade year. (By the way, 9^th grade is the year when the enrollment rate reaches rock bottom, with the average freshmen being in school for less than 2/3rds of a year, and when the truancy and suspension rates explode. Should we fire most, if not all inner city Algebra I teachers for not raising the performance of students who do not attend class?)

Worst of all, the Gates shop has given no indication that they have become aware of the difference between a student with a math or a reading disability, as opposed to a conduct disorder or serious emotional disturbances. Neither have they dealt with the effect of federal policies on how schools are allowed to handle those students, and the implication for schools where 35 to 40% of their students are on Individual Education Plans.

In other words, they do not have the background knowledge to comprehend the scenario described by Paul Tough where an inner city class of thirty kids, because it has 8 to 10 kids who have been traumatized to the point where their brain circuitry has been altered, degenerates into a culture of hitting and fighting. Otherwise, how could Kane and Gates assume that teachers with those sorts of classes would have a chance of hitting their growth targets?

Unless these theorists assumed that Seriously Emotionally Disturbed students are distributed evenly throughout our diverse nation's classrooms, they betrayed a basic misunderstanding of peer effects in urban schools. A class where a third of the students are well- behaved kids with cognitive differences, can not be compared to a class with a critical mass of children who have been victimized to the point where they can not control their behavior. And if the theorists have that level of ignorance, perhaps they also are unaware that schools facing an impossible load of the most difficult-to-educate students tend to turn certain classes into dumping grounds.

Brill’s Class Warfare included 19 pages of sources and endnotes, but there is no indication that he read any of the immense body of social science on teaching, learning, and schooling. According to Brill, Gates gave the go-ahead for his Measuring Effective Teaching effort after two hours of discussion. There was no indication that Gates was exposed to scholarship that contradicted the hypothesis that teacher quality must drive reform.

Had Gates been briefed on the way schools are organized, and the need for early education, a concentration on reading comprehension and socio-emotional skills before 3rd grade, the need for high-quality curriculum, and the promise of community schools that turn education into a team effort, I doubt this smart man would have assumed that there was only one way to fix urban schools.

If Gates, or for that matter, if President Obama (who later adopted the Gates agenda) had been provided a full and fair briefing by educators as well as economists, it would be no skin off Brill's nose. There are still plenty of Kitty Kelly-type books out there begging to be written by a person with Brill's confidence that he obviously knows all of the answers.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs atthisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.