The Educator Roundtable Challenge, Part 1.

In a comment to this post from yesterday, Philip Kovacs challenged me to read the comments posted by teachers to their petition and by implication, the materials linked in the petition. Mr. Kovacs also challenged me to a debate on TV or radio on this subject.

To Mr. Kovacs, I will readily accept your challenge to debate, at any time and place. Since I advocate for education reform in my spare time and on my own dime, I ask simply the courtesy of some decent advance notice.

Now onto the challenge. Specifically, I thought I would take a look at the assertions in the petition and the material linked thereto. So let us begin at the beginning, with assertion #1. The Educator Roundtable asserts that NCLB

Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

The links provided with this assertion take you to a number of reports and studies. This one makes more unfounded assertions and dire statements about the quality of education:

In a few short years Congress has transformed many schools into the educational equivalent of fast food restaurants and factories, robbing millions of children of their educational birthright and moving them along an educational assembly line like widgets.

Yet the article provides no substantiation that the education system prior to NCLB did anything different. Links 2 and 3 take you to reports on two studies that claim that pre-birth issues and low birth weight affect IQ, motor skills, and negatively impact later life cognitive abilities. Link 4 takes us to a pretty good article written by a practicing teacher who questions the efficacy of NCLB, and questions legislation that doesn't require parents to be a part of the educational process. Link 5 is unfortunately broken, so it is impossible to determine what was said there. Finally, link 6 takes to a piece by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute which describes additional reforms, in addition to school reform, that can help close the achievement gap.

I have no ground to dispute the findings of medical studies, and given the rigor with which most such studies are conducted, I will stipulate to their accuracy. Likewise, I will stipulate that school reform is not the only route to closing the achievement gap, other actions to reduce childhood poverty, poor health care and single parent households also may play a part in reducing the achievement gap.

Having spent sometime looking at the actual law under discussion, I find no reference to teachers and students being solely to blame or even partly to blame for anything. The law does ignore the common excuses offered up for the achievement gap and this one is the most common--that because teachers don't have control over the "inputs" they should not be held responsible for the "outcomes." However, such a mindset automatically creates biases, whether intentional or not, that allows for students to slip through the cracks, because that child is too poor, too disadvantaged to be worth helping.

However, when it comes to education, the Educator Roundtable insists that it knows best. But you cannot have your elitism without the noblese oblige that the elitism carries. If the teacher is to play such a dominant role in formulating education policy (a position I ardently oppose), then that teachers must accept the lion's share of the responsibility for the children in their charge. But the very nature of "public education" and the general proposition that all children regardless of innate ability have a right to a quality eduction, teachers will still have to accept the child as they are, whatever their shortcomings and undertake your ethical and moral obligation to teach each child, doing all you can to reach the goal of proficiency.

Now, of course the Roundtable will claim, not without merit, that the 100% proficiency mandate of NCLB is unattainable. Of course because we are dealing with human beings, this is true, and a mandate for perfection by 2014 may be unrealistic, but just because the mandate seems unrealistic does not mean that the expectation is unreasonable. Does it hold teachers to a standard that by being unattainable can be ignored? Simply put, is the mandate unfair? Yes it is unfair, but as I tell my five year old daughter all the time, life is unfair and life is not all about you. Education is about the kids and their parents, is it not unfair to them to claim that because the child had a low birth weight, or the mother suffered from poor pre-natal care that that child is not worth the extra effort? Who will decide a child is not worth the effort? Is not every child worth the effort, after all every teacher who has ever written anything about education wraps themselves in the cloak of superior concern for the innate value of each child?

Since we are talking about diagnoses, let us make a analogy that may be useful. Let us take an fictional elementary school with 400 students. Let us assume that, tragically, all 400 kids were involved in a bus accident that left all of them injured to some extent. There is but one hospital in the area and all students are taken there for treatment.

Under the ethical, moral and, yes, legal obligations, the doctors and nurses at that hospital have a duty to provide all the care at their disposal to help each and every child get better. The expectation for these medical professionals is 100% recovery. They, and we, know that such perfection may not be possible, but that does not deter them from their duty. The doctors and nurses know that if they fail in their duty to provide the best care available to give, they can be held accountable, via civil suits (malpractice claims), disciplinary actions by their professional colleagues (suspension or loss of their license) and even criminal sanctions, such as fines or even jail, if their actions are egregious enough (criminal negligence).

The doctors and nurses must accept their patients as they come in the door, complete with all the child's medical and personal history, the advantages and disadvantages the child may have. The "inputs" into their system are completely beyond their control, yet remember the expectation is the same for each child, 100% recovery. When the mob of 400 children reaches their doors, the medical professionals perform a triage. They collect as much data as possible, information like pulse, respiration, blood pressure, type and nature of injuries, medical history if possible; in short they gather as much information. That information is then synthesized to determine which children need immediate care, how much care, and in what order children will be treated. The doctors don't guess without having as much information as possible.

In educational terms, the testing regime of NCLB is designed to provide data, systematic, reliable and objective data about students. Instead of looking at the data as a burden, perhaps educators would do well to look at test results in terms of a diagnosis and triage, looking for those students who need the most and immediate help, devote resources to those cases and work your way down the list to the students with the least need. That is the purpose behind NCLB, admittedly a purpose unfulfilled and unenforced, but the purpose nonetheless.

In this respect, as a diagnostic tool, I think NCLB to be succeeding in its goal. For the first time in decades, we are looking hard at what the problems are and looking with empirical data, not simply anecdotal evidence. No longer are educators the only ones with access to data that can be compared, broken down by groups and based on a common standard. Thus, it is no longer simply the educator who can make an informed decision as to the quality of education.

No one can rationally argue that teachers in public schools have little control over the nature of the children that enter their classroom. But then neither do the doctors in our hypothetical mass casualty example. But where doctors and nurses have seconds, or may be the luxury of minutes or may be an hour, to make decisions with the definite possibility of not being able to correct errors later, teachers, on the other hand, have a time buffer. Teachers have the luxury of time when making a decision about how to proceed with a student. If it turns out that the path chosen is not working, a correction can be applied tomorrow, next week, or next month. Teachers have the luxury of having time to investigate the root causes of a child's poor performance.

Is NCLB the best or only "treatment" option to close the achievement gap? Clearly not, particularly in light of evidence of other root casuses of the achievement gap. But when you are talking about educationaly outcomes, the place to start is in the schools.