Are we talking about the right issues?

My first year of teaching is over. It's actually been over for about a month already, but it took a while to truly disengage myself from "teacher mode". This summer, I am a faculty adviser for the Teach For America summer school program hosted by my school district-- the exact program I went through as a corps member last summer. My experience in this position so far is enough for an entire post, so I'll leave that alone for now, but I mention it because I spend a lot of time sitting in a classroom each day, which gives me plenty of time to think about teaching and reflect on the past year. It's particularly interesting to reflect given the current context-- watching new teachers encounter the same struggles I fought with only months before. But ultimately, what I am most interested in exploring in relation to the past school year is student learning. "Are students really learning?"-- this is perhaps the most important question in education today, but to me it really seems like the elephant in the room, in that we are reluctant to face realities about the unfair way we assess students. Instead, we prefer to focus on (inadequate) proxies like teacher accountability and the common core. Not that these topics aren't important, but rather they are a red herring allowing politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits alike to talk tough and act tough on education reform without addressing the fundamental issues-- the issues that require tough conversations and painful sacrifices.

Take the issue of teacher tenure, where a California judge recently ruled that the practice was unconstitutional, stating in his decision that, "Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience."

The judge references previous rulings on racial segregation of schools, funding disparities, and term length disparities, describing them as issues of a lack of equality of education; whereas teacher tenure presents an issue relating to the quality of the educational experience. Of particular interest to me is the judge's statement regarding the legal positions of his decision:

"[This court] is not unmindful of the current intense political debate over issues of education. However, its duty and function as dictated by the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the State of California and the Common law, is to avoid considering the political aspects of the case and focus only on the legal ones. That this Court's decision will and should result in political discourse is beyond question but such consequence cannot and does not detract from its obligation to consider only the evidence and law in making its decision."

Ostensibly, this seems like a very reasonable (and necessary!) thing-- to consider only the evidence and law in making the decision. However, the very nature of "evidence" changes dramatically as we move from issues of equality of education to quality of the educational experience. Furthermore, the judge's choice to consider certain types of information as "evidence" is an inherently political action. The primary evidence cited in the judge's decision was the expert testimony of Harvard professors (economists) Raj Chetty and Thomas Kane. Chetty's testimony, based on his 2011 paper attempting to quantify the long-term impact of teacher effectiveness on students' adult income, was that a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings. Kane, based on his own study, testified that students in the LA Unified School District taught by a grossly incompetent teacher lost 9.54 months of learning in a single year compared to students with average teachers. Wow! Such impressive and clear data! It's no wonder the judge was moved enough to comment that it "shocks the conscience". But when we look behind the economic models we find an ominous motif: teacher effectiveness and student achievement that is almost exclusively measured through state-mandated standardized tests. And so we return to the judge's original claim: that decisions are made based on evidence and the law, no politics involved. By regarding the aforementioned studies as evidence (attributing them as objective truths), the judge is effectively making a quite controversial: that the current standardized testing regime provides accurate data about student learning. So much for the absence of politics.

My argument here is not that there is zero value in standardized test scores or value-added models of teacher effectiveness; it is not that laws protecting incompetent teachers are harmful to students. Rather, my worry is that our continued focus on these issues crowds out more important (and potentially more fruitful) issues: de facto school segregation, poverty, privatization of education, to name a few. Why are our priorities so misaligned? Maybe we should ask for expert testimony of our teachers (in contrast to that of the Harvard economists, who have never spent a single day in front of 35 screaming 7th graders), rather than trying to continue playing this ridiculous blame game that devalues those tasked with cultivating our nation's most valuable resource, it's children.