Expectations and Responsibility

I am a regular Facebook user, I must confess – not that using social media is a sin, but like any other avocation, it can be abused or over-used. It’s a way I can keep up to date with my children – either texting or Facebook is their medium of choice. It is also a great way to stay in touch with old friends who I do not get to see very often.

As you would expect, being a retired public-school administrator, many of those Facebook friends are educators. Recently, one of them posted an analogy in an attempt to trivialize the new mandate that student test scores be part of every teacher’s evaluation. Is a dentist responsible for the patient who comes to him or her with a mouthful of cavities? Well, of course not, but he certainly is held accountable for when that same person leaves his office – either with several expensive fillings or a new set of teeth. Either way, the cavities should be gone!

Many of those who oppose using test scores claim that they cannot be held responsible for students who arrive at the schoolhouse door with all kind of degrees of academic exposure and carrying varying levels of emotional baggage. This is the argument that really bothers me, because if one does not accept responsibility for educating all the students sitting in class, then we have given ourselves permission to fail with some of them. Alan Blankenstein and Pedro Noguera call this “the ‘normalization of failure, in which there is a belief that the problem is that ‘our’ students simply can’t achieve.”

In my assessment classes, I have my students discuss the expectation issues at Frankford Elementary School in Delaware, before Sharon Brittingham became principal, where the excuse du jour was that “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”  There is no wonder it was a low-performing school; you get what you expect! When Brittingham retired after eight years at the school, 100 percent of the students met state reading standards and 95 percent met the math standards.

As a neophyte high school principal, I had a building level planning team (BLPT) that took on the task of gathering data to create a school improvement plan. Because our school population was very heterogeneous, we decided to aggregate our teacher’s grades by gender. What we found was that boys in English were being graded significantly lower than girls. Very similar to the rationale for using test scores to evaluate teachers, the English department reacted with anger and accused the committee of using grades to evaluate them. They responded to the data by claiming they were not responsible for boys being poor readers and writers. The BLPT just wanted to start a discussion!

According to a recent study that looked at the value added (VA) of a teacher, or the impact a specific teacher had on test scores, the effect was significant. Good teachers produced higher test scores and over the long term, even had an impact on future earning potential. Yet even despite these findings, the authors of the study cautioned readers in its use as a rationale for teacher evaluation - that it may lead to “teaching to the test” or even worse, cheating.

A “big idea” of my assessment course is that no educational decision should be made on the basis of one test and neither should teacher evaluation. My vision of a fair evaluation would be one that uses value added assessment as a percentage, with student and parent surveys, as well as administrative observations based on a proven model. Eventually, assessment will be embedded in every classroom, computerized so students test out as they master material rather than wait until the “dreaded” two-hour testing day for a one-shot summative assessment.

But please don’t use the argument that we are not responsible for what comes through the classroom door. Let us control what we can and that’s the value a good teacher can add to achievement. You can’t control how the students come to you, but you can control how they leave! We can make chicken salad out of chicken shit!