So are we trapped in a not-so-civil policy war, with no possibility of reconciliation? As Clay Rise recently noted, “….education policy isn’t the problem, its education politics that needs to change.” Perhaps, we need to look hard at ourselves and question, “Do we really want a teaching profession in this country led by our best teachers – not administrators or policy wonks from inside-the-Beltway.

An alternative view and vision — e.g., Teacher Leaders Network — could plow “and/both” thinking and a 3rd way to doing the business of meaningful reform that honors the profession that makes all other possible. Are you ready? Can you stop the blame game?

I really didn’t mean for my post to be taken as a criticism of union action on this matter. The editor at Britannica blog initially added this bit after the colon to my title “How teachers can get more respect, part 1: the role and responsibility of the unions.” (that’s still the file name at Britannica.) I removed the after-the-colon part because I don’t see it as the responsibility of the unions. I think it’s up to teachers.

The conversation here (and elsewhere) is focusing on the difficulty of making accurate decisions, whether test-driven (which I have said elsewhere is a terrible idea) or made by administrators (which I see as a somewhat less terrible idea.) All are valid points, although if you set as your goal firing really egregious teachers, I would guess that validity improves. But I return to my original point, which was addressed to teachers: something is in the air. The President is talking about getting rid of poor teachers. It appears likely that something is going to be done, so you may as well try to take control of the situation so it’s something you are doing, rather than something that is done to you.

So the question is, why do they think that? Do they have evidence to refute Medley & Coker’s (1987) famous warning that classroom observations by principals “are only slightly more accurate than they would be if they were based on pure chance,” or Kenneth Peterson’s claim that “‎seventy years of research on principal ratings ‎of teachers shows that they do not work well”?

You are right. I didn’t tackle that issue because the comment was already too long.

But you know what’s weird? Why do we need a reminder of the definition of data? What you wrote should just be assumed.

I definitely appreciate your clarification of my oversight.

They most certainly DO want to use data. They just don’t agree with you about what data to use. They think that classroom observations provide the best data. They think that scores on standardized tests do not provide a good measure of teacher quality.

Obviously, each form of data has its problems. I would suggest, however, that the former is more flexible, and the latter is almost entirely out of the hands of the decision-maker in this case. That is, the principal or other supervisor does not control the test, so who is to say that its goal align with his/hers? On the other hand, classroom oberservation provides multiple opportunities to gather data about teacher performance, and to address improving it far before the standardized test.

This should be a basic lesson of schooling, understanding the nature of evidence (data), and the idea that there are different forms of evidence that might be more or less useful, more or less acceptable to different people.

Good point. But I was actually refering to the dynamic of two cultures separated by a common language. (And all this fight is over the distinction between data-informed vs. data-driven evaluations and the mixed messages that are being sent by “reformers.”) Our job as jurors allowed us unlimited time to parse the judge’s words. The legal professionals lived in the world described by Tom Wolfe where the “grub” is pushed non-stop through the overworked system. I wouldn’t repeal the Bill of Rights, but I would want a system that’s not so overwhelmed. And since they were all getting paid $100+ per hour, they were relatively more competent than our equally overwhelmed schools.

Teacher identifiers, without strong protections, are a loaded gun. Getting back to your point about drafting laws, we are willing to negotiate but when the true believers won’t consider “trigger locks” it pushes us into an impossible situation. When it comes to writing laws, union leadership has to bring along the members. No profession would allow a nationwide data warehouse, to borrow Diane Ravitch’s characteriztion, without protections. We don’t even want such a system for fighting foreign terrorists without protections.

Fortunately, we still have due process laws that would enventually kill data-DRIVEN accountability, but it would do so at the costs of millions in lawyer fees. But there’s another cost that you are especially qualified to expand on. If the DFER plan became law, think of the increase in strokes, heart attacks, and other stress related diseases among teachers. My understanding is that the worst stress in terms of health is when the person has little or no control over their environment.

I’m still confused by the “ineffective choice” that unions are making. I’ve seen national and local offices investing a great deal of money and political capital in advocating the Toledo Plan. I’m not privy to the inner circle that’s lobbying Duncan, but in my experience union leaders are sincere in pushing for a more rational system. Do you have a different experience?

And one last point on why the legal system was overwhelmed. Data-driven tactics in the war on drugs swamped the system filling prisons with non-violent criminals, removing huge numbers of parents from poor communities, and increased racial conflict and gang ethos, and all of which further damaged our schools. As the originator of data driven law enforcement said, data-driven accountability is like chemo-therapy. Keep it up too long and it becomes poison. I was writing a book on the subject in the late 80s, and virtually everyone in the legal system knew that Congress had unknowlingly set us on a path where institutional pressures would fill the prisons with Black and Brown people, but the outside reformers didn’t know what they didn’t know about the Street. The same applies today, I’d argue, about education “reformers” who know more about math than the realities inside schools.

When the AFT American Educator published your work, don’t you bother to read the rest of the journal? How can you miss the AFT’s efforts to push the Toledo Plan? Results have been consistent over two decades with around 8% of new teachers being removed every year. In my experience, the problem has been the inability of administrators to share control that prevents agreement.

As for past practices by unions, I also see that differently. Again in my experience, unions seek to solve the worst but the most solvable problems. If an incompetent teacher – or administrator – is also protected by federal law, for instance, they just transfer them to a spot where less harm will be done. The problem comes when the “dance of the lemons” gets out of control as it does in the toughest schools. But if you think its hard to staff high poverty schools today, just think of how much worse it would be if incomepent value-added models were implemented in a primitive way.

As Randi Weingarten told the NYT, it often takes only five minutes to identify a failing teacher, and the same often applies to identifying failing schools. Perhaps its confirmation bias, but I continually hear people from all types of urban districts that 1/3rd of principals are incompetent. I don’t think the problem is nearly that large. I just think principals seem incompetent when they have no choice but to play their role in an incompetent system and keep their true feelings to themselves. Regardless, I wouldn’t trust principals judgements if they weren’t SUPPORTED by evidence. Under the Toledo Plan pushed by the AFT, mentor teachers tend to be much tougher on weak teachers than principals. But again, we seek supporting evidence.

I don’t think its hard to sort out a better system. We need data-informed, but not data-driven accountability. We need something much much more efficient than the legal system, but we should borrow its basic model. We negotiate process for terminating (or sanctioning or rewarding) teachers yet we also need a type of bill of rights. For instance, “data mining” would be banned. The “first cut” in identifying ineffective teachers should be based on observations of behavior, with evidence complementing or supplementing or disproving the judgments.

Which gets me back to the way unions and schools got painted into this corner. Often, the union wants to see a bad teacher fired. We have legal obligations to defend members, even the guilty, but we don’t want to win. And when due process is violated we have no choice but to hold our noses and object to the misbehavior by the administrator in question. Think about it for a second and you’ll probably conclude that both of you would do the same. We can’t accept an awful precedent, for instance, even though we are tempted.

This reminds me of the last time I was on jury duty. We all thought the accused was guilty. I was the last holdout. The second-to-last holdout kept cross-examining me based on the judge’s instructions until long after I knew I would have to vote to acquit a person who I knew was guilty. Afterwards when we were allowed to ask questions, both attorneys and the judge were surprised by the verdict. They knew something we didn’t know, however. The prosecuter had just picked up the case and quickly read it as he went from one trial to another. Schools are like that, in that we are all so overwhelmed that we can’t even win the easiest cases.