Scramble to the Top
Everyone seems to agree that our educational system is not competitive on the global stage. It appears that the problem is more than our failing to keep pace, it seems that we are actually losing ground. Let’s stop for moment and take a look at how the Obama administration and their “experts” intend to turn this situation around by creating a “Race to the Top”.
It goes something like this:
1. States will compete with one another for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money. Those that conform to the administration’s criteria will get more than those that don’t.
2. Educators will teach to a set of national standards that set the bar higher than before.
3. The administration will not concern itself with how standards are met. That will be left to local agents.
4. Teachers will be paid for performance. Those that produce students with higher scores will get more money and those who produce students with lesser scores will get less money.
5. When a teacher’s performance does not measure up to prescribed standards, the teacher will get the sack.
6. Schools that do not measure up will be able to either fire all of their teachers in an effort to reshuffle the deck or the school may, alternatively, be shut down.
Obama has promised that a wide variety of performance measures will be used to determine which states, districts, schools, and teachers receive financial rewards or punishments, Examples of these include.
1. Student test scores on higher-bar standardized tests.
2. Graduation rates.
3. College acceptance rates.
4. Attendance rates.
5. Learning “climate”. (whatever that means!)
(It is likely that this list is longer and will continue to grow over time, but let’s start with the short list just to keep things manageable.)
Now put yourself in the place of a state bureaucrat, or a district administrator, or school principal, or teacher, and from that point of view, consider what’s at stake — your level of earning and your job. You know that working in the field of education was never a ticket to status or riches. As the saying goes, “Them that can’t, teach”. Now you are faced with a struggle to survive in which your pay-for-performance might go up or might go down — so don’t get sucked into a mortgage — and you might even get canned if you have a run of bad outcomes, for whatever reason.
Up until now, you are being told, you have not be doing your best but things have changed. Under the new regime you will be motivated to do your best to make more money, or at the very least, to keep your job.
So what are you going to do?
You are going to do what any scared and underpaid person would do. You will look at the list of measures and figure out how to maximize those measures to get paid more and keep your job.
If you think about it, there are lots of ways to maximize measures, and if the stakes are high enough, people will find ways. Better you than them. As our recent experience with Wall Street has demonstrated, the more you raise the stakes, the more “creative” people will become, even if their best efforts result in the destruction of the system.
(To take the Wall Street analogy a bit further, you might want to think of students as the customers who got sold sub-prime mortgages and credit card debt at exorbitant rates — come to think of it, that exactly who they are!)
You should have no doubt that Obama’s “Race to the top” will reliably produce results in the form of a wide variety of very “creative” techniques for obtaining state funding or earning merit pay or not getting fired, but is that what we are really after when our aim is to create an educational system that can meet the global challenges that confront our nation? Or is it more likely that Obama’s race will produce the cleverest teachers and administrators in the world and the most uneducated generation of Americans ever?
What is missing from Obama’s competitive race is any idea of HOW people learn and methods for making that happen. This omission can only result in people doing whatever it takes to win.
We need to step back an remind ourselves of what our standards really mean. Our standards are not the sum total of the outcomes we desire. They represent what we believe to be useful summary indicators of educational outcomes. As we all know, any test can be a measure of our mastery of a subject OR it can be a measure or our mastery of the test. If we drive our educational system based on standards alone, we commit the classic error of putting the cart before the horse. To turn things around, we must address what it means to become educated and how people learn — both of which are conspicuously absent from Obama’s “Race to the Top”.
The fundamental problem runs quite deep in our society. We have become thoroughly immersed in the idea that human behavior is driven by economic concerns. Although our economic competitive position as a nation is profoundly affected by the educational achievement of our people, the process of learning and educating is not a process of competitive economics. Learning is a creative process that takes place in collaborative settings in which fear is minimized and curiosity, even at the risk of “failure”, is rewarded. If we seek to educate our young in a system driven be fear — students, teachers, administrators, etc, in fear of not making the grade —- we will not create a nation of fearlessly curious people, we will create a nation fearful people who act solely in terms of their own economic self-interest.
