Earlier this week Alan brought our attention to a new Public Agenda survey of teachers. In one sense, the survey may tell us more about who our teachers are and how they think than to give any great guidance for education reformers. To what extent do we accept the opinions of those surveyed as a beacon for reform strategies, and to what extent do we re-assess policy strategies that determine the composition of the teaching workforce?
Let’s take a closer look. The fact that three-fourths of teachers view test scores as a less important measure of student achievement fits well with class size reductions being rated by two-thirds of respondents as a “very effective” strategy to improve teacher effectiveness. Because you would have to find some other way in an academic research study to measurably demonstrate class size reductions are effective.
Then again, there is some thoughtful nuance, too: Two-thirds don’t like “eliminating teacher tenure” as a good strategy, but three-fourths believe “making it easier to terminate ineffective teachers” will work. State policy makers of all political stripes ought to step up and take notice of that last one.
There are a few items the survey left off, however, that would be very interesting to see:
- What percentage of Hawaii teachers see time spent in front of students as an obstacle to career fulfillment (H/T Jay Greene)
- How many teachers think that the unions representing them do silly things — like AFT president Randi Weingarten sending a cease-and-desist letter to a group that uses the acronym AFT all over its website … or maybe any question about unions altogether
- More seriously, though, I really would have loved to see a question that asked teachers to rank what they see as the primary goals and purposes of public education, and compare the results side-by-side with the identical question asked of the non-teaching general public, then cross-tab the results by the teachers’ experience and background … perhaps we’d gain some more insights that would narrow some of the more challenging school reform debates of our time
What about solutions for some of the dissatisfaction expressed by teachers in this survey? Maybe the Friedman Foundation report comparing public school and private school teacher satisfaction and the new Education Sector report “Improving Teacher Quality through School Design” can shed light on the debate.
Popularity: 9% [?]
I think your last bullet point gets pretty close to the mark. What, in fact, are we all doing here?
Our comprehensive failure to answer that question lies at the heart of the reform problem. In my experience, no two people will give the same answer and absent any compelling national vision, district policy or even a social contract, it’s no small wonder that we can’t get everyone pulling in the same direction. It’s also no small wonder that so many teachers end up “disheartened” after years of being pulled in many different and changing directions.
Since you suggested a survey, I’ll start – I believe public schools exist to prepare students not only to deal with but to thrive in adult life. That means they need to be ready not only for work but for voting, for taking in and processing news and information, for making decisions about what to purchase, for interacting with people, for managing their finances, and on, and on. They need to have a sense of agency with regard to the problems they encounter and ideally, a willingness to engage in rather than avoid or obstruct solving them.
We have a hard time measuring these things either because they’re in a future we don’t have the attention span to wait for or because they’re “subjective”, a category the social sciences turned their collective back on when they decided to act like the “hard” sciences.
So then to test scores, something we do have the attention span for. It has always struck me as ironic that the central assumption of standards based accountability (that test scores tell us something important about educational outcomes) goes largely unexamined. Another common assumption is that anyone who challenges the first assumption is probably lazy and wants to avoid accountability.
Since research findings are the currency of the realm today, please point me to a study that correlates higher test scores with benefits to any of the commonly expressed aspirations of education like, deep understanding and an ability to apply it to novel situations, satisfaction with life, civic engagement, a well integrated schema of the world around us and our place in it, a satisfying job (which could mean high paying for some and something else for others).
I have not consumed much research in the past 18 months so maybe the studies are out there. I seriously am asking for references to them. Do test scores predict remediation rates in college? If so, do they also predict graduation from college? Do they predict employment, income, voting, or any other adult behaviors schools should be preparing students for?