All Things Considered’s recent segment on class size perhaps indicates that the issue has leaped from the local interest pages to the national media stage. However, the bigger the stage, it may be that the more depersonalized, the more test-scorey the analysis tends to be. The local pages often frame the issue as local parents being concerned their kids will get ignored or local teachers will be overwhelmed. As described in my last post, K-12 education remains an immanent experience not necessarily reducible to its results on later life.
Jeremy Finn could have done a better job in the interview of not sticking merely to K-3 evidence of class size reduction’s value, avoiding the “youngest kids only” frame. After all, the story was introduced with the anecdote of a high school class with 43 students, which he called “Too big, period.” But Finn did do a great job avoiding the “just the test scores ma’am” frame.
There’s just a point at which teachers can’t really get to know the individual students, can’t teach the materials. Students split off into splinter groups and withdraw from the classroom interactions, and 43 is well into that range.
As a counterargument, Madeleine Brand references a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell:
He writes: “You have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the 85th percentile.” So in essence, he’s saying that teacher competency is better and more important to student achievement than class size.
I looked up the reference and found that it’s an echo of the usual suspect Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Same-old-same-old teacher quality vs. class size. In my book I argue that class size reduction would help attract and retain better teachers while at the same time making the not-as-good teachers more effective.
After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers.
Matters for what? For raising the average in the abstract for the purposes of symbolic progress? For American power? Or for for equity and child rearing? (Again, see my last post.) In general, teacher quality folks lie when they claim there isn’t a focus on teacher quality in this country. Teacher ed programs focus on it, administrative interviews and evaluations focus on it, ongoing professional development focuses on it. What they are fabricating is a Lake Wobegon fantasy of above averageness in teachers and innocuously calling it a focus on teacher quality. It’s pure and simple teacher bashing because it implies they–we–are hopeless raw material. You know you’re doomed when you start here: “If we simply found an elite group of saviors…”
But when I read the rest of the article, a more complex picture emerged that isn’t at all focused on test scores like Hanushek: It’s focused on interpersonal interaction, making students feel listened to and feel that adult attention is available, i.e., what my book is about. Examples:
Among [key teacher skills] is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom.
“Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity,” Hamre said.
It was a key moment. Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success. Not only did the teacher catch the “Me!” amid the wiggling and tumult; she addressed it directly. [puctuation fixed]
“Mind you, that’s not great feedback,” Hamre said. “High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding.”
The preschool teacher with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students’ needs and knew how to let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or she were getting his personal attention. But these aren’t cognitive skills.
But Gladwell discusses these as skills in a way that assumes some got ‘em and some don’t and probably won’t ever or won’t get ‘em fast enough. Aren’t these also functions of class size? Doesn’t this analysis amount to stating that the key teacher skill is the ability to make a large class feel like a small class? To make teaching feel more like tutoring?
And isn’t Gladwell’s logic analogous to Hanushek’s but with more ethical criteria? Both basically argue, “Let’s assume we won’t get smaller classes. That means we need teachers (seen as a static set of skills) with more inborn skills to make education improve.” Neither acknowledges that smaller classes would logically make it more likely that those who lack key skills initially would acquire them in the first couple years. Made not born. Not only because the classroom disorder stakes are lower and teachers are less likely to resort to counterproductive control strategies, but also that they’re simply less likely to leave the profession before they get good.
This poor logic suffers from the problem of ignoring the passage of time, ignoring the fact that teachers usually start weak and end strong. It sees things synchronically rather than diachronically. Those getting the worst test scores are often taught by those with the least experience. So we’re not in the easier-to-solve situation where some students are simply stuck with a teacher who will never be good, but that teachers who are (or have become) good have the bargaining power to switch to schools (or assignments within the same school) where the students are easier to teach anyway. Plus those students are generally whiter and richer, more like the average teacher culturally. Good teachers do not magically escape the classism and White Supremacy that permeate our society.
Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile.
This artificial setup suggests a false problem in education: that poor teaching is doing a disservice to otherwise similar, interchangeable kids, doing the average kid wrong. This is a reiteration of the assertion that the average is too low, that raising the average will get us something that isn’t merely symbolic. It is not focused on equity or child rearing (the goals I argue for in my previous post).
This is the tyranny of the average, the fantasy encapsulated by Garrison Keilor’s refrain about his fictitious hometown of Lake Wobegon, “where all the children are above average.” Hanushek is at least honest about thinking in terms of percentiles and averages. He wants to raise the average quality of teachers by measuring them against a standard and kicking out those below the average.
It’s criterion-referenced testing (versus norm-referenced) that is dishonest about subscribing to the Lake Wobegon fantasy. How are we to imagine the criterion of a high-stakes test or “grade-level proficiency” are arrived at? A criterion is clearly constructed rather than given by divine revelation. And who will disagree that it isn’t ultimately based on the average of what current students can do that’s easily and cheaply measured en masse? A criterion is the average we wish everyone could be above. It is usually set a bit below the average, of course, so that the fantasy of having everyone meet it is a tad less farcical.
The desire to raise the average by setting a magical criterion might be an acceptable and useful fantasy if it didn’t usually include the desire for infinite progress. Behind every argument that our current standards are not good enough, or are falling, is always the belief that stasis is retrogression, that only progress is non-retrogression. This thinking clearly underlies NCLB. It is the logic of scarcity I referred to in the last post.
Gladwell’s solution is the same as Hanushek’s despite replacing test scores with attentive, compassionate teaching: weed.
we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.
This is the good point he quickly betrays by simply creating a fierce division between what students need and what teachers need–students need attentive help and teachers need surveillance. (I worked in a school with this same fierce division. Those who left before me were characterized as having subordinating student needs to their own, of not caring enough about the students, of preferring richer and whiter students. I assume that’s how my departure was also understood.)
Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.
Hanushek’s means at least resembles his ends: Standardize the teachers by picking the ones best at standardizing children. With Gladwell, the teaching of teachers would in no way resemble the unstandardized teaching we’re looking for in those teachers.
Gladwell wants tenure to be harder to get and he wants merit pay, because “the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.” Thus he wants cutthroat teachers focused on external rewards for themselves but who are also somehow simultaneously and extra-ordinarily focused on (appearing to be?) sincerely giving interpersonal feedback to unique kids in the here-and-now of the classroom, to instilling in kids the intrinsic joys of learning and that school is not high-risk and cutthroat in the way that very teacher’s job is.
Gladwell thinks we need “an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.” In other words, we don’t need an apprenticeship system because it will better impart skills like giving rich feedback–by giving those teachers-to-be richer feedback, incidentally–but because it will submit them to better surveillance to determine more definitively whether they were born with the right skills–or acquire those skills quickly enough not to require good teaching themselves.
In yet other words, you as a potential teacher have to be born with the ability to show students that they are teachable no matter what they’re born with, but these skill can’t be taught to you–because you are a teacher now, not a student, something completely different. That is the fierce division. Gladwell would clearly fire a teacher of children if they operated on the philosophy of teaching he is asking teachers/bosses of teachers to operate on.
But there is a positive flipside to what Gladwell is arguing here: If you slice off the surveillance and rejection tenor of what Gladwell wants in teacher training, he’s suggesting that we move teacher education in the direction of practice rather than preparation, as do the many who argue that we move it toward an apprenticeship model. He is arguing that there is a certain folly to the philosophy that education as preparation offers any real guarantees for life after education. He’s arguing that teachers learn how to teach (and that they’d better learn quick!) in the practice of teaching, not in the teacher-ed classroom.
This also necessariliy suggests something about education by those teachers: that we move it from preparation to practice, to making schooling a cultural activity worth doing in its own right. Gladwell unintentionally suggests that we consider K-12 education as a form a childrearing, not a preparation for the supposedly real form of living, i.e., adulthood.
This is what I was getting at in my last post with the idea of the 13 years of schooling as an experience that has inherent value, not only value via its results. Dewey said as much 100 years ago: Education as preparation devalues itself into a 13-year prison.
