The Two Root Causes of America’s Education Crisis
Spoiler Alert: School Boards and School Administrators
The following is excerpted from my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Aspects of Expressive Writing: The International Lectures, and specifically from the new commentary I am writing for each of the eight lectures. This excerpt is from Lecture 4, “Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Creative Writer,” delivered remotely as the principal seminar lecture to the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2024, hosted by the Department of English and arranged by Dr. Amina Ghazanfar.
This excerpt is being published simultaneously at Twelve Winters Miscellany.
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I retired from full-time teaching (high school) in 2021, and an unstated consensus remained that technology, in all its forms, made schools better, made students smarter—minus any evidence, and really for decades minus any serious effort to determine if it’s true. The tech industry sold this snake oil to society, and society gulped it down. I have already drifted far afield from the lecture’s topic, psychoanalytic criticism, but while I’m here I must drift a bit further. The sad state of affairs in the U.S. (with Trump and the GOP taking a wrecking-ball to the Constitution as well as common decency, meanwhile promoting the rise of every kind of vile hate one can imagine) leads many to point a finger at our education system. How could it have produced a citizenry that would be so easily duped by Fox News and nitwits like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? How could it embrace a well-documented liar, conman, sexual predator, and all-around sleazebag like Donald Trump?
What can we do as a nation to improve our schools and prevent such miscarriages of democracy in the future?
Well, here’s something: Put teaching in the hands of teachers. No improvements in the effectiveness of education are going to take place unless some fundamental and systemic changes take place. The two biggest problems in education are school boards and administrators. Public schools are run omnipotently by a group of non-educators elected from the community. Sometimes they may be retired educators or educators not connected to the school, but almost always they are people who have no training and no experience in teaching. They may be well meaning, but oftentimes people run for school boards with specific agendas and axes to grind. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all members of school boards have nefarious intentions. I am saying that it is ridiculous to put a group of people elected from the community in charge of schools when they have no qualifications whatsoever to make educationally sound decisions.
Educating children—especially nowadays—is one of the most complex and challenging professions someone can undertake. Yet well-trained and experienced educators have practically no agency when it comes to making decisions within their school. The board of untrained and inexperienced community members (car salesmen, bank managers, farmers, insurance agents, bar owners, handymen, homemakers, bakers, tinkers, tailors, and candlestick makers) have total control over every decision: whom to hire, whom to fire; what curriculum to approve, which textbooks to buy; what technology to purchase, how it should be implemented; how each penny should be allocated, which contractors should be hired for this or that project. Every decision ends up in the hands of these untrained school board members.
Well o.k., you say, but they’re not operating in the dark. They’re making decisions based on recommendations that are provided to them by the administration, i.e., the superintendent (perhaps assistant superintendents, of curriculum, of transportation, of facilities) and the building administrators (principal, vice principal, vocational director, athletic director, possibly special education director, et al.). True enough, but one might assume that the cream rises to the top, and the best-of-the-best teachers become administrators; therefore, the most qualified, most experienced educators assume the mantle of administration. Sometimes, of course, really gifted teachers become administrators, but based on my nearly four decades of experience this metamorphosis is the exception. For one thing, really gifted teachers are gifted with a love of teaching. They truly enjoy being with their students and facilitating and nurturing their skills and intellect. They have no desire to leave the classroom and with it the thrill of exercising a skillset they have mastered—a mastery that requires melding science and art and empathy. Just as Yoyo Ma has no desire to give up the cello, nor Spielberg filmmaking. A teacher who flourishes in the classroom will unlikely flourish in the role of administrator, a job of pandering to pushy parents, of milling paperwork (budgets, formal requests, mandated reports, assessment criteria, legislative updates), of disciplining unruly students, of kowtowing to higherups (especially those untrained school board members).
It’s true that sometimes, sometimes really talented teachers are lured from the classroom to the administrative office, mainly because the discrepancy in pay is so profound. Figures vary widely from state to state, and even within a state, like my home state of Illinois, the numbers can vary significantly, between, say, a well-heeled Chicago suburb and a small town in the sparsely populated southern part of the state. According to recent data, however, the average teacher salary is about $76,000 annually, while the average principal’s is at least double that, ranging from around $145,000 to $165,000. For assistant principal (usually a school’s chief disciplinarian) the average is around $127,000. Meanwhile, the top dog, the superintendent, pulls in between $142,000 and $250,000 (according to the Illinois Report Card, 2024-25).
Granted, school administrators are generally on an 11-month or full-year contract, whereas classroom teacher pay is based on a 9-month (180-day) contract. Yet the statement “Teachers have the summer off” is a fiction on its face. Teachers aren’t getting paid, but they’re still developing curriculum, taking courses, advancing in their degrees, increasing their content knowledge through reading and travel, making materials for their classrooms, attending conferences and professional assemblies, and myriad other teaching-related activities. They’re not getting paid, but they’re still being teachers, even in the allegedly lazy days of summer.
So, if really talented teachers, by and large, aren’t becoming administrators, who is? In the upper grades the clear majority is men, and often these men are former coaches. Hard data is difficult to come by, but it seems to be a universal phenomenon, the tendency for school administrators to come up through the coaching ranks, which also means they tend to hail from nonacademic fields of education—physical education of course, drivers education, vocational ed., perhaps business and accounting. There are several factors that likely contribute to the phenomenon. For one, the lower rungs of the administrative ladder are tailormade for coaching types. In larger school districts, “athletic director” is an administrative post; in really large districts one may have an “assistant superintendent of athletics” (alongside an assistant superintendent of finance, an assistant superintendent of transportation, an assistant superintendent of facilities, etc.).
In more modest-size school districts, the A.D. position is commonly combined with the job of a high school’s vice or assistant principal, who is the school’s chief disciplinarian (the dude who is supposed to intimidate unruly students back into line and physically break up fights when necessary). It makes sense, then, that you would hire a coach, who understands the intricacies of an athletic program (hiring coaches, ordering uniforms and equipment, organizing schedules, arranging transportation, building budgets, and so on—the responsibilities are many and intricate). Moreover, it makes sense that you would want your chief disciplinarian (the person scaring kids straight and breaking up fights) to be a big guy, maybe a former football or basketball player, turned football or basketball coach. Thus, a lot of coaches are ushered into the administrative ranks because they have the background and the physical presence for these lower-order positions.
But these athletic directors and vice principals almost always have their sights set on grander things, like becoming building principals and perhaps even, one day, superintendents. When there are openings, internally or at other school districts, these large men (hired mainly for their girth and their ability to move a blocking-sled several yards) now have experience as administrators, and so their applications move to the head of the line, placed before those other teachers with administrative credentials but no administrative experience (perhaps too small or too athletically inexperienced to have been hired as vice principals and A.D.s). Before long, many of those ex-coaches do become principals; meanwhile, they acquire their superintendency endorsement, and, lo and behold!, superintendent jobs become available, and the applicants with experience as building principals are those ex-coaches.
To be fair, these coach-types who achieve the upper echelons as school administrators may possess qualities that make them effective leaders. They have a tendency to exude confidence, which can be motivating for a staff of teachers. They may have top-flight organizational skills, and they may be very good with budgets and the many mundanities that are part and parcel of running a school or a whole district. Unfortunately their responsibilities encompass other things, in fact, essentially every other thing: curriculum development and delivery, purchasing priorities, teacher trainings, teacher hirings and firings, teacher evaluations, teacher contracts, as well as dealing with the public and with those seven noneducators who are, ultimately, in charge of everything, the school board, a.k.a. the board of education.
The common-coach-to-administrator path results in administrations that are quite adept at organizing and nurturing athletic programs but largely clueless when it comes to nurturing the academic side of the school equation. My experience has been that these ex-coaches aren’t especially critically minded when it comes to decision-making. Thus, they tend to take at face value much of the snake oil pitches lobbed their way, which leads to their forcing into the curriculum and the classroom methods and materials that are ineffective or actually counterproductive. And one can imagine how frustrating it is for the experts in charge of delivering instruction when they can see so clearly and so obviously why this or that method or material is wrongheaded in so many ways. Yet they are forced to employ them with their students. They are forced, in essence, to commit pedagogical malpractice, again and again and again.
There has been a well-documented mass exodus of teachers from the classroom. Learning Policy Institute published a report March 17, 2026, that said 7% to 8% of teachers in the U.S. leave the profession annually (i.e., approximately 600,000 teachers); and as many as half of new teachers quit within five years. There are myraid reasons why teachers—new, mid-career, and veteran—may walk out of the classroom never to return. People will cite low pay, which is true; people will cite exponentially mounting responsibilities, which is true; people will cite increasingly unmanageable children and parents, which is true; and people will cite lack of respect, which is true—and it is this last one that I believe is the main reason dedicated teachers give up on teaching. But it’s not society’s general disrespect, per se, a kind of external disrespect. Rather, it’s the internal disrespect, the disrespect within each teacher’s specific educational environment. No matter how much classroom experience a teacher acquires, no matter how much advanced education in their field and degrees they obtain, no matter how professionally they conduct themselves and their careers, their agency within the school system remains the impotent agency of a first-year teacher; that is, practically nil. They forever have to answer to those ex-coach administrators and those untrained school board members. They forever have to follow their asinine directives, enforce their dipshit policies, and embrace their farcical educational philosophies. Time and again, they are mandated to do things that run counter to their knowledge and experience—then, time and again, they are blamed for the failings of their students, for the failings of their school . . . and ultimately for the failings of their society.
Schoolteachers are routinely faced with the outright aggressive behavior of parents and students (and administrators at times), but almost daily their lack of professional agency is illustrated. Decisions are made and actions are taken by “superiors” who are not qualified to teach their subject matter, and who, eventually, have a fraction of their experience in the classroom (most administrators exit the classroom after only a few years of teaching). Here is one concrete illustration, from one of my last years of teaching high school. It was not part of my normal teaching schedule, but I was assigned a low-ability sophomore English class. Several of the students had Individualized Education Programs (I.E.P.s). I don’t recall the exact assignment (something based on one of our readings), but it was a writing assignment. The school was really into Chromebook labs, these rolling racks of laptops that could be moved from room to room, and they were connected to the school’s network for internet access, etc. My students spent a class period writing a draft of their paper on the Chromebooks; at the end I instructed them to print their drafts so that we could work on editing and revising them. Alas, the Chromebooks were not connected to the printer in the old-fangled stationary lab across the hall (a lab that was designated for use by others, which is why I had to request a mobile lab in the first place). A minor hiccup. I put in a tech request with our I.T. guys to work their magic and connect the Chromebook lab to the printer via the network, the sort of thing they did all the time, connecting this tech to that tech along the ever-expanding yet invisible tentacles of the network.
I would have my students print their drafts the next day. No problem. Writers and teachers of writing know that people are able to edit text more effectively when it’s on paper, much more effectively in fact. Study after study has demonstrated it. Reading on paper leads to deeper comprehension, while reading on the screen is more superficial, rendering errors and other issues more easily missed. And these were students who had some cognitive processing issues. I was trying to facilitate their success with this specific assignment, but I was also hoping to establish a pattern whereby they would always print their drafts for editing and revising.
Well, the building principal (a former business teacher and athletic coach) had to approve all tech requests (something I didn’t know), and he wouldn’t approve mine. He wouldn’t let the I.T. guys connect the Chromebook lab to the printer across the hall because “it was going backward” (they told me). So, this administrator, who wasn’t a writer, beyond writing emails and filling out bureaucratic forms, believed that editing a draft on paper was passé, and that all editing and revising should be done on the screen, even for struggling students. He didn’t even bother to consult with me before rejecting the request.
These are the kinds of microaggressions that schoolteachers have to deal with day in and day out. They spend years accumulating knowledge and experience, earning advanced degrees in their subject matter, and yet their expertise is ignored by the untrained, unqualified, inexperienced few at the top of the pedagogical pyramid.
The evaluation system for teachers is especially emblematic of this lack of agency and respect. In most school districts, teachers are evaluated throughout their careers as if they were nontenured newbies, and the process includes observations of the teacher in the act of teaching their students. Setting aside the artificiality of the whole enterprise due to the Hawthorne effect (i.e., the observer effect)—the artificiality and the likely inaccuracy—teachers eventually reach a point where the person doing the observing and assessing and judgment-passing is inappropriately unqualified to do so. Depending on the hierarchy of the school, which depends on its size and administrative complexity, various people will be involved in the evaluating and observing of classroom teachers. For simplicity’s sake, let’s think of the building principal as the evaluator (which is common). It’s reasonable that they observe, offer advice, and assign some level of proficiency to newer, less experienced teachers (generally nontenured teachers). Meanwhile, though, if the teacher continues in the profession, they accumulate more and more experience, and more and more expertise in their field (by taking subject-matter courses, acquiring advanced degrees, attending conferences, presenting at conferences, perhaps writing and publishing in their field . . . not to mention the expertise that comes with having taught a subject for a number of years).
All of which leads to the situation where a principal is responsible for evaluating someone who is more experienced and more qualified than they are. In a junior high or high school setting the subject areas are quite diverse (English, math, biology, chemistry, history, business, health, et al.), and yet the principal was probably only certified to teach in one of those areas (health, let’s say); and because they became an administrator early in their career (became an athletic director or vice principal), they had only a few years as a classroom teacher. Therefore, a former health teacher, with less than a decade of classroom experience, is in the elevated position of observing, assessing and passing judgment on a teacher with twenty or thirty years of classroom experience and a master’s or even a Ph.D. in their subject area (English or calculus or chemistry).
Clear-headed administrators will realize they have nothing of value to offer the highly qualified classroom teacher, so the process becomes a rubber-stamping formality that must be ritualistically performed every other year. Unfortunately there are wrongheaded, egotistical and axe-grinding administrators who freely offer advice on the teaching of a subject they themselves are neither qualified nor certified to teach. They will nitpick for any rationale to give a lower-order evaluation to a teacher they don’t like on a personal level, or just because they don’t want to be seen as a pushover who gives “excellent” marks to everyone. Some people (educational consultants, school board members) believe that there should be a spread of evaluation marks, statistically. That is, not all teachers can be excellent; some, surely, must be satisfactory, and some, surely, must be unsatisfactory.
Yes, of course, some educators excel more so than others, but they may all be excellent in their field.
Let me use a sports metaphor; golf, say. Yes, one golfer wins the Masters, others get second place or third place, top 10, top 25, etc.; and yes, some golfers miss the cut after 36 holes and leave Augusta National early. But every golfer who qualified to play in the Masters in the first place is excellent at golf. You wouldn’t say the players who finished in the top 10 are excellent, and the rest of the field who made the cut are satisfactory at golf, and the half of the field that missed the cut are unsatisfactory at golf. Therefore, it’s more than reasonable—it’s expected—that every teacher who accumulates years of classroom experience and works at advancing in their subject expertise is excellent at teaching. Some may win the Masters, some may miss the cut after 36 holes—but they’re all excellent at teaching. Why, then, would you give them less-than-excellent ratings just to satisfy some unqualified person’s misguided notions about the evaluation process and the way data ought to align on a graph?
I’ve gone much further afield here than intended, but I so frequently here experts weigh in regarding the education crisis and the exodus of teachers from the classroom, and not once have I heard one even mention the root cause of both issues: the wrong people are in charge of the system. Majority-elected noneducators wield all the power, based on the advice of the least-experienced, least-qualified “educators” who wear the mantle of “administrator” and reside at the top of the hierarchy. To fix education—and produce a citizenry that can tell valid information from villainous propaganda—schoolteachers must be put in charge of schools; and the most-qualified, highest-achieving among them should ascend to positions of authority in each school setting. A system that does that—lets the best and brightest rise to the top (instead of the largest and loudest)—could assume any number of forms, but it’s vital that the administrative educators (who perform the equivalent functions of “principal,” “vice principal,” and so on) must continue to teach part of the time. The world changes so rapidly, technology changes so rapidly, kids change so rapidly—educators who leave the classroom rapidly become out-of-touch with the types of students they’re tasked with teaching.
As things stand now, an administrator who hasn’t taught in a decade may as well have taught Depression-era tykes who walked to school after milking Bessie and giving a ladle of unpasteurized milk to each of their little brothers and sisters, raggedly dressed in homespun hand-me-downs. In 2026, the students of 2016 were a different breed of cat altogether. Imagine how clueless the principal or superintendent is who hasn’t taught in twenty or thirty years. Yet they are the ones making the recommendations to the board of the even-more-clueless whose yea or nay controls everything. Madness.
It’s no wonder that nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is functionally illiterate, and half read below a sixth-grade level— making them easy prey for propagandists and unprincipled politicians. And making the rest of us the victims of their ignorance and barely-breathing critical-thinking skills.
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Ted Morrissey is the publisher of Twelve Winters Press and its various entities, including Twelve Winters Journal, Twelve Winters Miscellany, and the podcast A Lesson before Writing, which he co-hosts with Brady Harrison and Grant Tracey. His most recent book is Aspiring Child: A Biography of Mary W. Shelley in Sonnets. He is on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, YouTube, and elsewhere.
Danielson Framework criticized by Charlotte Danielson
I’ve been writing about the Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation for a couple of years, and in fact my “Fatal Flaws of the Danielson Framework” has been my most read and most commented on post, with over 5,000 hits to date. I’ve also been outspoken about how administrators have been misusing the Framework, resulting in demoralized teachers and unimproved (if not diminished) performance in the classroom. (See in particular “Principals unwitting soldiers in Campbell Brown’s army” and “Lowered teacher evaluations require special training.”) At present, teachers are preparing — at great time and expense — to embark on the final leg of the revamped teacher evaluation method with the addition of student performance into the mix (see ISBE’s “Implementing the Student Growth Component in Teacher and Principal Evaluation”). I’ve also written about this wrongheaded development: “The fallacy of testing in education.”
Imagine my surprise when I discovered an unlikely ally in my criticism of Charlotte Danielson’s much lauded approach: Charlotte Danielson herself. The founder of the Danielson Framework published an article in Education Week (April 18 online) that called for the “Rethinking of Teacher Evaluation,” and I found myself agreeing with almost all of it — or, more accurately and more egocentrically, I found Charlotte Danielson agreeing with me, for she is the one who has changed her tune.
My sense is that Ms. Danielson is reacting to widespread dissatisfaction among teachers and principals with the evaluation process that has been put in place which is based on her Danielson Framework. Her article appeared concurrently with a report from The Network for Public Education based on a survey of nearly 3,000 educators in 48 states which is highly critical of changes in teacher evaluation and cites said changes as a primary reason for teachers exiting the profession in droves and for young people choosing not to go into education in the first place. For example, the report states, “Evaluations based on frameworks and rubrics, such as those created by Danielson and Marzano, have resulted in wasting far too much time. This is damaging the very work that evaluation is supposed to improve . . .” (p. 2).
Ms. Danielson does not, however, place blame in her Framework, at least not directly. She does state what practically all experienced teachers have known all along when she writes, “I’m deeply troubled by the transformation of teaching from a complex profession requiring nuanced judgment to the performance of certain behaviors that can be ticked off a checklist.” Her opinion is a change from earlier comments when she said that good teaching could be easily defined and identified. In a 2012 interview, Ms. Danielson said that her assessment techniques are “not like rocket science,” whereas “[t]eaching is rocket science. Teaching is really hard work. But doing that [describing what teaching “looks like in words”] isn’t that big a deal. Honestly, it’s not. But nobody had done it.”
Instead of her Framework, then, Ms. Danielson places the lion’s share of the blame with state legislators who oversimplified her techniques via their adoptions, and — especially — with administrators who are not capable of using the Framework as it was intended. She writes, “[F]ew jurisdictions require their evaluators to actually demonstrate skill in making accurate judgments. But since evaluators must assign a score, teaching is distilled to numbers, ratings, and rankings, conveying a reductive nature to educators’ worth and undermining their overall confidence in the system.”
Amen, Sister Charlotte! Testify, girlfriend!
Ms. Danielson’s critique of administrators is a valid one, especially considering that evaluators were programmed, during their Danielson training, to view virtually every teacher as less than excellent, which put even the best-intentioned evaluators in a nitpicking mode, looking for any reason, no matter how immaterial to effective teaching, to find a teacher lacking and score them “proficient” instead of “excellent.” In her criticism of administrators Ms. Danielson has touched upon what is, in fact, a major shortcoming of our education system: The road to becoming an administrator is not an especially rigorous one — especially when it comes to academic rigor — and once someone has achieved administrative status, there tends to be no apparatus in place to evaluate their performance, including (as Ms. Danielson points out) their performance in evaluating their teachers.
Provided that administrators can keep their immediate superior (if any) content, as well as the seven members of the school board (who are almost never educators themselves), they can appear to be effective. That is, as long as administrators do not violate the terms of the contract, and as long as they are not engaging in some form of obvious harassment, teachers have no way of lodging a complaint or even offering constructive criticism. Therefore, if administrators are using the Danielson Framework as a way of punishing teachers — giving them undeservedly reduced evaluations and thus exposing them to the harms that can befall them, including losing their job regardless of seniority — there is no way for teachers to protect themselves. They cannot appeal an evaluation. They can write a letter to be placed alongside the evaluation explaining why the evaluation is unfair or invalid, but their complaint does not trigger a review of the evaluation. The evaluator’s word is final.
According to the law of averages, not all administrators are excellent; and not all administrators use the evaluation instrument (Danielson or otherwise) excellently. Some administrators are average; some are poor. Some use the evaluation instrument in a mediocre way; some use it poorly. Hence you can quite easily have an entire staff of teachers whose value to the profession is completely distorted by a principal who is, to put it bluntly, bad at evaluating. And there’s not a thing anyone can do about it.
Another crucial point that Charlotte Danielson makes in her Education Week article is that experienced teachers should not be evaluated via the same method as teachers new to the field: “An evaluation policy must be differentiated according to whether teachers are new to the profession or the district, or teach under a continuing contract. . . . Once teachers acquire this status [i.e. tenure], they are full members of the professional community, and their principal professional work consists of ongoing professional learning.” In other words, experienced teachers, with advanced degrees in their content area and a long list of professional accomplishments, shouldn’t be subjected to the same evaluation procedure as someone who is only beginning their career and has much to learn.
In fact, using the same evaluation procedure creates a very odd dynamic: You oftentimes have an administrator who has had only a limited amount of classroom experience (frequently fewer than ten years, and perhaps only two or three) and whose only advanced degree is the one that allows them to be an administrator (whereby they mainly study things like school law and school finance), sitting in judgment of a teacher who has spent twenty or thirty years honing their teaching skills and who has an advanced degree in their subject area. What can the evaluator possibly say in their critique that is meaningful and appropriate? It is commonplace to find this sort of situation: A principal who was a physical education or drivers education teacher, for perhaps five years, is now sitting in an Advanced Placement Chemistry classroom evaluating a twenty-year veteran with a masters degree or perhaps even a Ph.D. in chemistry. The principal feels compelled to find something critical to say, so all they can do is nitpick. They can’t speak to anything of substance.
What merit can there be in a system that makes evaluators omnipotent judges of teachers in subject areas that the evaluators themselves literally are not qualified to teach? It isn’t that veteran teachers don’t have anything to learn. Far from it. Teaching is a highly dynamic, highly challenging occupation; and the successful teacher is constantly learning, growing, self-reflecting, and networking with professional peers. The successful principal makes space for the teacher to teach and for the student to learn, and they protect that space from encroachment by anyone whose design is to impede that critical exchange.
Ms. Danielson offers this alternative to the current approach to evaluation: “An essential step in the system should be the movement from probationary to continuing status. This is the most important contribution of evaluation to the quality of teaching. Beyond that, the emphasis should be on professional learning, within a culture of trust and inquiry. . . . Experienced teachers in good standing should be eligible to apply for teacher-leadership positions, such as mentor, instructional coach, or team leader.”
Ironically, what Ms. Danielson is advocating is a return to evaluation as most teachers knew it prior to adoption of the Danielson Framework.
(Grammar alert: I have opted to use the gender-neutral pronouns they and their etc. even when they don’t agree in number with their antecedents.)
The fallacy of testing in education
For the last several years education reformers have been preaching the religion of testing as the lynchpin to improving education (meanwhile offering no meaningful evidence that education is failing in the first place). Last year, the PARCC test (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) made its maiden voyage in Illinois. Now teachers and school districts are scrambling to implement phase II of the overhaul of the teacher evaluation system begun two years before by incorporating student testing results into the assessment of teachers’ effectiveness (see the Guidebook on Student Learning Objectives for Type III Assessments). Essentially, school districts have to develop tests, kindergarten through twelfth grade, that will provide data which will be used as a significant part of a teacher’s evaluation (possibly constituting up to 50 percent of the overall rating).
To the public at large — that is, to non-educators — this emphasis on results may seem reasonable. Teachers are paid to teach kids, so what’s wrong with seeing if taxpayers are getting their money’s worth by administering a series of tests at every grade level? Moreover, if these tests reveal that a teacher isn’t teaching effectively, then what’s wrong with using recently weakened tenure and seniority laws to remove “bad teachers” from the classroom?
Again, on the surface, it all sounds reasonable.
But here’s the rub: The data generated by PARCC — and every other assessment — is all but pointless. To begin with, the public at large makes certain tacit assumptions: (1) The tests are valid assessments of the skills and knowledge they claim to measure; (2) the testing circumstances are ideal; and (3) students always take the tests seriously and try to do their best.
But none of these assumptions are true most of the time — and I would go so far as to say that all of them being true for every student, for every test practically never happens. In other words, when an assessment is given either the assessment itself is invalid, and/or the testing circumstances are less than ideal, and/or nothing is at stake for students so they don’t try their best (in fact, it’s not unusual for students to deliberately sabotage their results).
For simplicity’s sake, let’s look at the PARCC test (primarily) in terms of these three assumptions; and let’s restrict our discussion to validity (mainly). There have been numerous critiques of the test itself that point out its many flaws (see, for example here; or here; or here). But let’s just assume PARCC is beautifully designed and actually measures the things it claims to measure. There are still major problems with its data’s validity. Chief among the problems is the fact that there are too many factors beyond a district’s and — especially — a classroom teacher’s control to render the data meaningful.
For the results of a test — any test — to be meaningful, the test’s administrator must be able to control the testing circumstances to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) factors which could influence and hence skew the results. Think about when you need to have your blood or urine tested — to check things like blood sugar or cholesterol levels — and you’re required to fast for several hours beforehand to help insure accurate results. Even a cup of tea or a glass of orange juice could throw off the process.
That’s an example that most people can relate to. If you’ve had any experience with scientific testing, you know what lengths have to be gone to in hopes of garnering unsullied results, including establishing a control group — that is, a group that isn’t subjected to whatever is being studied, to see how it fares in comparison to the group receiving whatever is being studied. In drug trials, for instance, one group will receive the drug being tested, while the control group receives a placebo.
Educational tests rarely have control groups — a group of children from whom instruction or a type of instruction is withheld to see how they do compared to a group that’s received the instructional practices intended to improve their knowledge and skills. But the lack of a control group is only the beginning of testing’s problems. School is a wild and woolly place filled with human beings who have complicated lives, and countless needs and desires. Stuff happens every day, all the time, that affects learning. Class size affects learning, class make-up (who’s in the class) affects learning, the caprices of technology affect learning, the physical health of the student affects learning, the mental health of the student affects learning, the health of the teacher affects learning (and in upper grades, each child has several teachers), the health and circumstances of the student’s parents and siblings affect learning, weather affects learning (think “snow days” and natural disasters); sports affects learning (athletes can miss a lot of school, and try teaching when the school’s football or basketball team is advancing toward the state championship); ____________ affects learning (feel free to fill in the blank because this is only a very partial list).
And let me say what no one ever seems to want to say: Some kids are just plain brighter than other kids. We would never assume a child whose DNA renders them five-foot-two could be taught to play in the NBA; or one whose DNA makes them six-foot-five and 300 pounds could learn to jockey a horse to the Triple Crown. Those statements are, well, no-brainers. Yet society seems to believe that every child can be taught to write a beautifully crafted research paper, or solve calculus problems, or comprehend the principles of physics, or grasp the metaphors of Shakespeare. And if a child can’t, then it must be the lazy teacher’s fault.
What is more, let’s look at that previous sentence: the lazy teacher’s fault. Therein lies another problem with the reformers’ argument for reform. The idea is that if a student underachieves on an exam, it must be the fault of the one teacher who was teaching that subject matter most recently (i.e., that school year). But learning is a synergistic effect. Every teacher who has taught that child previously has contributed to their learning, as have their parents, presumably, and the other people in their lives, and the media, and on and on. But let’s just stay within the framework of school. What if a teacher receives a crop of students who’d been taught the previous year by a first-year teacher (or a student teacher, or a substitute teacher who was standing in for someone on maternity or extended-illness leave), versus a crop of students who were taught by a master teacher with an advanced degree in their subject area?
Surely — if we accept that teaching experience and education contribute to teacher effectiveness — we would expect the students taught by a master teacher to have a leg up on the students who happened to get a newer, less seasoned, less educated teacher. So, from the teacher’s perspective, students are entering their class more or less adept in the subject depending on the teacher(s) they’ve had before. When I taught in southern Illinois, I was in a high school that received students from thirteen separate, curricularly disconnected districts, some small and rural, some larger and more urban — so the freshman teachers, especially, had an extremely diverse group, in terms of past educational experiences, on their hands.
For several years I’ve been an adjunct lecturer at University of Illinois Springfield, teaching in the first-year writing program. UIS attracts students from all over the state, including from places like Chicago and Peoria, in addition to students from nearby rural schools, and everything in between (plus a significant number of international students, especially from India and China). In the first class session I have students write a little about themselves — just answer a few questions on an index card. Leafing through those cards I can quickly get a sense of the quality of their educational backgrounds. Some students are coming from schools with smaller classes and more rigorous writing instruction, some from schools with larger classes and perhaps no writing instruction. The differences are obvious. Yet the expectation is that I will guide them all to be competent college-level writers by the end of the semester.
The point here, of course, is that when one administers a test, the results can provide a snapshot of the student’s abilities — but it’s providing a snapshot of abilities that were cured by uncountable and largely uncontrollable factors. How, then, does it make sense (or, how, then, is it fair) to hang the results around an individual teacher’s neck — either Olympic-medal like or albatross like, depending?
As I mentioned earlier, validity is only one issue. Others include the circumstances of the test, and the student’s motivation to do well (or their motivation to do poorly, which is sometimes the case). I don’t want to turn this into the War and Peace of blog posts, but I think one can see how the setting of the exam (the time of day, the physical space, the comfort level of the room, the noise around the test-taker, the performance of the technology [if it’s a computer-based exam like the PARCC is supposed to be]) can impact the results. Then toss in the fact that most of the many exams kids are (now) subjected to have no bearing on their lives — and you have a recipe for data that has little to do with how effectively students have been taught.
So, are all assessments completely worthless? Of course not — but their results have to be examined within the complex context they were produced. I give my students assessments all the time (papers, projects, tests, quizzes), but I know how I’ve taught them, and how the assessment was intended to work, and what the circumstances were during the assessment, and to some degree what’s been going on in the lives of the test-takers. I can look at their results within this web of complexities, and draw some working hypotheses about what’s going on in their brains — then adjust my teaching accordingly, from day to day, or semester to semester, or year to year. Some adjustments seem to work fairly well for most students, some not — but everything is within a context. I know to take some results seriously, and I know to disregard some altogether.
Mass testing doesn’t take into account these contexts. Even tests like the ACT and SAT, which have been administered for decades, are only considered as a piece of the whole picture when colleges are evaluating a student’s possible acceptance. Other factors are weighed too, like GPA, class rank, teacher recommendations, portfolios, interviews, and so on.
What does all this mean? One of things that it means is that teachers and administrators are frustrated with having to spend more and more time testing, and more and more time prepping their students for the tests — and less and less time actually teaching. It’s no exaggeration to say that several weeks per year, depending on the grade level and an individual school’s zeal for results, are devoted to assessment.
The goal of assessment is purported to be to improve education, but the true goals are to make school reform big business for exploitative companies like Pearson, and for the consultants who latch onto the movement remora-like, for example, Charlotte Danielson and the Danielson Group; and to implement the self-fulfilling prophecy of school and teacher failure.
(Note that I have sacrificed grammatical correctness in favor of non-gendered pronouns.)
Here’s my beef with PARCC and the Common Core
Beginning this school year students in Illinois will be taking the new assessment known as PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which is also an accountability measure — meaning that it will be used to identify the schools (and therefore teachers) who are doing well and the ones who are not, based on their students’ scores. In this post I will be drawing from a document released this month by the Illinois State Board of Education, “The top 10 things teachers need to know about the new Illinois assessments.” PARCC is intended to align with the Common Core, which around here has been rebranded as the New Illinois Learning Standards Incorporating the Common Core (clearly a Madison Avenue PR firm wasn’t involved in selecting that name — though I’m surprised funds weren’t allocated for it).
This could be a very long post, but I’ll limit myself to my main issues with PARCC and the Common Core. The introduction to “The top 10 things” document raises some of the most fundamental problems with the revised approach. It begins, “Illinois has implemented new, higher standards for student learning in all schools across the state.” Let’s stop right there. I’m dubious that rewording the standards makes them “higher,” and from an English/language arts teacher perspective, the Common Core standards aren’t asking us to do anything different from what we’ve been doing since I started teaching in 1984. There’s an implied indictment in the opening sentence, suggesting that until now, the Common Core era, teachers haven’t been holding students to particularly high standards. I mean, logically, if there was space into which the standards could be raised, then they had to be lower before Common Core. It’s yet another iteration of the war-cry: Teachers, lazy dogs that they are, have been sandbagging all these years, and now they’re going to have to up their game — finally!
Then there’s the phrase “in all schools across the state,” that is, from the wealthiest Chicago suburb to the poorest downstate school district, and this idea gets at one of the biggest problems — if not the biggest — in education: grossly inequitable funding. We know that kids from well-to-do homes attending well-to-do schools do significantly better in school — and on assessments! — than kids who are battling poverty and all of its ill-effects. Teachers associations (aka, unions) have been among the many groups advocating to equalize school funding via changes to the tax code and other laws, but money buys power and powerful interests block funding reform again and again. So until the money being spent on every student’s education is the same, no assessment can hope to provide data that isn’t more about economic circumstances than student ability.
As if this disparity in funding weren’t problematic enough, school districts have been suffering cutbacks in state funding year after year, resulting in growing deficits, teacher layoffs (or non-replacement of retirees), and other direct hits to instruction.
According to the “The top 10 things” document, “[a] large number of Illinois educators have been involved in the development of the assessment.” I have no idea how large a “large number” is, but I know there’s a big difference between involvement and influence. From my experience over the last 31 years, it’s quite common for people to present proposals to school boards and the public clothed in the mantle of “teacher input,” but they fail to mention that the input was diametrically opposed to the proposal.
The very fact that the document says in talking point #1 that a large number of educators (who, by the way, are not necessarily the same as teachers) were involved in PARCC’s development tells us that PARCC was not developed by educators, and particularly not by classroom teachers. In other words, this reform movement was neither initiated nor orchestrated by educators. Some undefined number of undefined “educators” were brought on board, but there’s no guarantee that they had any substantive input into the assessment’s final form, or even endorsed it. I would hope that the teachers who were involved were vocal about the pointlessness of a revised assessment when the core problems (pun intended), like inadequate funding, are not being addressed. At all.
“The top 10 things” introduction ends with “Because teachers are at the center of these changes and directly contribute to student success, the Illinois State Board of Education has compiled a list of the ten most important things for teachers to know about the new tests.” In a better world, the sentence would be Because teachers are at the center of these changes and directly contribute to student success … the Illinois State Board of Education has tasked teachers with determining the best way to assess student performance. Instead, teachers are being given a two-page handout, which is heavy in snazzy graphics, two to three weeks before the start of the school year. In my district, we’ve had several inservices over the past two years regarding Common Core and PARCC, but our presenters had practically no concrete information to share with us because everything was in such a state of flux; as a consequence, we left meeting after meeting no better informed than we were after the previous one. Often the new possible developments revised or even replaced the old possible developments.
The second paragraph of the introduction claims that PARCC will “provide educators with reliable data that will help guide instruction … [more so] than the current tests required by the state.” I’ve already spoken to that so-called reliable data above, but a larger issue is that this statement assumes teachers are able to analyze all that data provided by previous tests in an attempt to guide instruction. It happens, and perhaps it happens in younger grades more so than in junior high and high school, but by and large teachers are so overwhelmed with the day-to-day — minute-to-minute! — demands of the job that there’s hardly time to pore through stacks of data and develop strategies based on what they appear to be saying about each student. Teachers generally have one prep or planning period per day, less than an hour in length. The rest of the time they’re up to their dry-erase boards in kids (25 to 30 or more per class is common). In that meager prep time and whatever time they can manage beyond that, they’re writing lesson plans; grading papers; developing worksheets, activities, tests, etc.; photocopying worksheets, activities, tests, etc.; contacting or responding to parents or administrators; filling out paperwork for students with IEPs or 504s; accommodating students’ individual needs, those with documented needs and those with undocumented ones; entering grades and updating their school websites; supervising hallways, cafeterias and parking lots; coaching, advising, sponsoring, chaperoning. . . .
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a scholar as well as a teacher. I believe in analyzing data. I’d love to have a better handle on what my students’ specific abilities are and how I might best deliver instruction to meet their needs. But the reality is that that isn’t a reasonable expectation given the traditional educational model — and it’s only getting worse in terms of time demands on teachers, with larger class sizes, ever-changing technology, and — now — allegedly higher standards.
Educational reformers are so light on classroom experience they haven’t a clue how demanding a teacher’s job is at its most fundamental level. In this regard I think education suffers from the fact that so many of its practitioners are so masterful at their job that their students and parents and board members and even administrators get the impression that it must be easy. Anyone who is excellent at what she or he does makes it look easy to the uninitiated observer.
I touched on ever-changing technology a moment ago; let me return to it. PARCC is intended to be an online assessment, but, as the document points out, having it online in all schools is unrealistic, and that “goal will take a few more years, as schools continue to update their equipment and infrastructure.” The goal of its being online is highly questionable in the first place. The more complicated one makes the assessment tool, the less cognitive processing space the student has to devote to the given question or task. Remember when you started driving a car? Just keeping the darn thing on the road was more than enough to think about. In those first few hours it was difficult to imagine that driving would become so effortless that one day you’d be able to drive, eat a cheeseburger, sing along with your favorite song, and argue with your cousin in the backseat, all simultaneously. At first, the demands of driving the car dominated your cognitive processing space. When students have to use an unfamiliar online environment to demonstrate their abilities to read, write, calculate and so on, how much will the online environment itself compromise the cognitive space they can devote to the reading, writing and calculating processes?
What is more, PARCC implies that schools, which are already financially strapped and overspending on technology (technology that has never been shown to improve student learning and may very well impede it), must channel dwindling resources — whether local, state or federal — to “update their equipment and infrastructure.” These are resources that could, if allowed, be used to lower class sizes, re-staff libraries and learning centers, and offer more diverse educational experiences to students via the fine arts and other non-core components of the curriculum. While PARCC may not require, per se, schools to spend money they don’t have on technology, it certainly encourages it.
What is even more, the online nature of PARCC introduces all kinds of variables into the testing situation that are greatly minimized by the paper-and-pencil tests it is supplanting. Students will need to take the test in computer labs, classrooms and other environments that may or may not be isolated and insulated from other parts of the school, or off-site setting. Granted, the sites of traditional testing have varied somewhat — you can’t make every setting precisely equal to every other setting — but it’s much, much easier to come much, much closer than when trying to do the test online. Desktop versus laptop computers (in myriad models), proximity to Wi-Fi, speed of connection (which may vary minute from minute), how much physical space can be inserted between test-takers — all of these are issues specific to online assessments, and they all will affect the results of the assessment.
So my beef comes down to this about PARCC and the Common Core: Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent rewording standards and developing a new assessment that won’t actually help improve education. Here’s what would help teachers teach kids:
1. Equalize funding and increase it.
2. Lower class sizes, kindergarten through 12th grade, significantly — maximum fifteen per class, except for subjects that benefit from larger classes, like music courses.
3. Treat teachers better. Stop gunning for their jobs. Stop dismantling their unions. Stop driving them from the profession with onerous evaluation tools, low pay and benefits, underfunded pensions, too many students to teach to do their job well, and ridiculous mandates that make it harder to educate kids. Just stop it.
But these common sense suggestions will never fly because no one will make any money off of them, let alone get filthy rich, and education reform is big business — the test developers, textbook companies, technology companies, and high-priced consultants will make sure the gravy train of “reform” never gets derailed. In fact, the more they can make it look like kids are underachieving and teachers are underperforming, the more secure and more lucrative their scam is.
Thus PARCC and Common Core … let the good times roll.
Lowered teacher evaluations of Danielson Framework require special training
In an earlier post I analyzed the “Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation,” which has become the adopted model in numerous states, including Illinois, and I pointed out some of its many flaws. One of the aspects of Danielson that has been troubling to teachers from the beginning is its insistence that virtually no teacher is excellent (distinguished, outstanding). When the Framework was designed in 1996 it was intended to rate first-year teachers, so it made sense that very, very few would be rated in the top category. The Framework was revised three times (2007, 2011 and 2013) in an effort to be an evaluation tool for all educators and even non-classroom professionals (like librarians and school nurses). Nevertheless, the idea that virtually no teacher is capable of achieving the top echelon (however it may be labeled in a district’s specific evaluation instrument) has clung to the Framework.
In my district, we were told of the Danielson Framework a full two years before it was implemented, and from the start we were informed that it was all but impossible to achieve an “excellent” rating, even for teachers who have consistently been rated at the top level for several evaluation cycles (pre-Danielson era). After a full year of its being used, it seems that administrators’ predictions were true (or made to be true), and almost no one (or literally no one) received an excellent rating. We were encouraged to compile a substantial portfolio of evidence or artifacts to help insure that our assessment would be more comprehensive than the previous evaluation approach. I foolishly (in retrospect) spent approximately six hours pulling together my portfolio and writing a narrative to accompany it. A portfolio, as it turned out, we never discussed and could only have been glanced at given the timing of its being retrieved and the appointed hour of my conference.
As predicted, I was deemed “proficient.” It was a nearly surreal experience to be complimented again and again only to be informed at the end that I didn’t rate as “excellent” because the Danielson Framework makes it exceptionally difficult for a teacher to receive a top rating. There were literally no weaknesses noted — well, there were comments in the “weakness” areas of the domains, but they were phrased as “continue to …” In other words, I should improve by continuing to do what I’ve been doing all along. In fairness, I should note that the evaluator had numerous teachers to evaluate, therefore observations to record, portfolios to read, summative evaluations to write — so I’m certain the pressure of deadlines figured into the process. Nevertheless, it’s the system that’s in place, and my rating stands as a reflection of my merits as a teacher and my value to the district and the profession — there’s no recourse for appeal, nor, I suppose, purpose in it.
I was feeling a lot of things when I left my evaluation conference: angry, humiliated, defeated, underappreciated, naive, deceived (to list a few). And, moreover, I had zero respect for the Danielson Framework and (to be honest) little remained for my evaluator — though it seems that from the very beginning evaluators are trained (programmed) to give “proficient” as the top mark. After a year of pop-in observations in addition to the scheduled observation, the preparation of a portfolio based on the four domains, a conference, and the delivery of my official evaluation, I literally have no idea how to be a better teacher. Apparently, according to the Framework, I’m not excellent, and entering my fourth decade in the classroom I’m clueless how to be excellent in the World According to Charlotte Danielson (who, by the way, has very little classroom experience).
If the psychological strategy at work is that by denying veteran teachers a top rating, they will strive even harder to achieve the top next time around, it’s an inherently flawed concept, especially when there are no concrete directions for doing things differently. As I said in my previous post on Danielson, it would be like teachers telling their students that they should all strive for an “A” and do “A”-quality work — even though in the end the best they can get on their report card is a “B.” Or business owners telling their salespeople to strive for through-the-roof commissions, even though no matter how many sales they make, they’re all going to get the same modest paycheck. In the classroom, students would quickly realize that the person doing slightly above average work and the person doing exceptional work are both going to get a “B” … so there’s no point in doing exceptional work. On the job, salespeople would opt for the easiest path to the same result.
Under Danielson, it will take great personal and professional integrity to resist the common-sense urge to be the teacher that one’s evaluation says one is — to resist being merely proficient if that, in practice, is the best ranking that is available.
My experience regarding the Danielson Framework is not unique in my school, and clearly it’s not unique in Illinois as a whole. Each year administrators must participate in an Administrators Academy workshop, and one workshop being offered by the Sangamon County Regional Office of Education caught my eye in particular: “Communicating with Staff Regarding Performance Assessment,” presented by Dr. Susan Baker and Anita Plautz. The workshop description says,
“My rating has always been “excellent” [sic] and now it’s “basic”. [sic] Why are you doing this to me?” When a subordinate’s performance rating declines from the previous year, how do you prepare to deliver that difficult message? How do you effectively respond to a negative reaction from a staff member when they [sic] receive a lower performance rating? This course takes proven ideas from research and weaves them into practical activities that provide administrators with the tools needed to successfully communicate with others in difficult situations. (Sangamon Schools’ News, 11.3, spring 2014, p. 11; see here to download)
Apparently, then, school administrators are giving so many reduced ratings to teachers that they could benefit from special coaching on how to deliver the bad news so that the teacher doesn’t go postal right there in their office (I was tempted). In other words, the problem isn’t an instrument and an approach that consistently undervalues and humiliates experienced staff members; the problem, rather, is rhetorical — how do you structure the message to make it as palatable as possible?
While I’m at it, I have to point out the fallacious saw of citing “research,” and in this description even “proven ideas,” which is so common in education. The situation that this workshop speaks to, with its myriad dynamics, is unique and only recently a pervasive phenomenon. Therefore, if there have been studies that attempt to replicate the situation created by the Danielson Framework, they must be recent ones and could at best suggest some preliminary findings — they certainly couldn’t prove anything. If the research is older, it must be regarding some other communication situation which the workshop presenters are using to extrapolate strategies regarding the Danielson situation, and they shouldn’t be trying to pass it off as proof. As a literature person, I’m also amused by the word “weaves” in the description as it is often a metaphor for fanciful storytelling — and the contents of the alluded to research must be fanciful indeed. (By the way, I don’t mean to imply that Dr. Baker and Ms. Plautz are trying to deliberately mislead — they no doubt intend to offer a valuable experience to their participants.)
What is more, a lowered evaluation is not just a matter of hurting one’s pride. With recent changes in tenure and seniority laws in Illinois (and likely other states), evaluations could be manipulated to supersede seniority and remove more experienced teachers in favor of less experienced ones — which is why speaking out carries a certain amount of professional risk even for seasoned teachers.
My belief is that the Danielson Framework and the way that it’s being used are part of a calculated effort to cast teachers as expendable cogs in a broken wheel. Education reform is a billions-of-dollars-a-year industry — between textbook publishers, software and hardware developers, testing companies, and high-priced consultants (like Charlotte Danielson) — and how can cash-strapped states justify spending all those tax dollars on reform products if teachers are doing a damn fine job in the first place? It would make no sense.
It would make no sense.
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