“Today’s message is that process trumps substance.”
That was the glum assessment of a long-time Denver education reformer yesterday as we walked together out of the love-fest that was the state’s Race to the Top application submission press conference. And indeed, that seems to be the growing consensus among at least a narrow swath of wonks and analysts, both local and national. See Nancy Mitchell’s story and today’s Denver Post editorial for a taste of the analysis.
Gov. Bill Ritter and Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien focused their remarks yesterday on the importance of having “key stakeholders” (let’s drive a stake through the heart of the term stakeholders, shall we?) reach agreement on provisions of the R2T application. The practical impact was a lengthy delay in producing a new system for evaluating teachers; a system that would, presumably, use student growth data to help assess which teachers were serving kids well.
Ritter and O’Brien said they didn’t want Colorado to be like those mean states that called special legislative sessions to ram through new laws dealing with evaluation over the objections of teachers’ associations and other interest groups. It’s a calculated risk that the U.S. Department of Education and the R2T judges will value kumbaya over kick-some-butt. Even Ritter and O’Brien seemed more than willing to acknowledge that Colorado might not finish in the money in R2T’s first round.
“The interests of adults won out over the interests of kids,” someone else complained yesterday. Actually, that’s a tired canard used whenever your side doesn’t emerge on top. Still, despite yesterday’s self-congratulation event, the mood in Colorado education circles isn’t exactly upbeat right now.
Popularity: 15% [?]
People seem to think that we can change our whole system of addressing teacher quality with the stroke of a pen (or the drafting of a plan). Even if we could pass a change to our tenure system right now, what would it get us? Not much. Schools have always been able to get rid of poor teachers in their first three years and yet few of these non-probationary teachers are let go. To get to the place where people start getting rid of poor teachers (probationary or non-probationary), principals have to know how to do it and they need to know they have a better replacement in the wings. To make this whole thing systematic, we need to define quality teaching and create a…dare I say it… process for identifying good (and bad) teachers. This is going to scale with a complete change in how our teacher quality system works. The bottom line is there are multiple issues that need to be dealt with:
•highly technical issues (defining and identifying quality through student tests and teacher observation—in an industry with multiple products that hard to measure),
•implementation issues (creating new implementation systems in 178 districts and 1,750 schools), and
•cultural issues (going from a system that rewards inputs and process to one that rewards outcomes).
Without a thoughtful process there will be no substance to the outcome of Race to the Top.