The Echo

From : http://www.workingamerica.org/blog/2011/03/08/education-deform/

Education Deform


Meet one of the worst teachers in New York (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07winerip.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=us&src=me
according to the testing formula by which she’s measured. Stacy Isaacson is at work in the school building from 7am to 5:30pm. According to her students:

“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”

And

“I really liked how she’d incorporate what we were doing in history with what we did in English,” Marya said. “It was much easier to learn” — which, of course, is what great teachers strive for.

The test scores that landed her in the bottom 10% of teachers:

Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools. 

Because of the complicated formula used to calculate her performance, Isaacson can’t exactly understand what the issue is.

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.

As a result, she won’t get tenure and could even be in line to be laid off. And mind you, this is because of something that’s supposed to identify and reward the best teachers.

So that’s one way the education “reformers’” passion for learning is playing out in our schools. Meanwhile, budget cuts across the country mean increased class sizes.

Over the past two years, California, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Utah and Wisconsin have loosened legal restrictions on class size. And Idaho and Texas are debating whether to fit more students in classrooms.

Los Angeles has increased the average size of its ninth-grade English and math classes to 34 from 20. Eleventh- and 12th-grade classes in those two subjects have risen, on average, to 43 students.

What difference does that make?

In the 1980s, Ms. Bain persuaded Tennessee lawmakers to finance a study comparing classes of 13 to 17 students in kindergarten through third grade with classes of 22 to 25 students. The smaller classes significantly outscored the larger classes on achievement tests.

In the decades since, researchers, including the Princeton economist Alan Krueger, have conducted studies that they say confirm and strengthen the validity of the Tennessee findings.

But hey, the Secretary of Education disagrees. He says what matters is good teachers, even if the classes are big. Which brings us back to Stacy Isaacson and the question of what exactly we mean by “good teachers.”

It sure is comforting to know we have this empirically-minded education “reform” movement, isn’t it? How else would we know that we should ignore both numerous studies on the effects of class size and what experienced teachers say about the difficulties of teaching big classes, and replace bad teachers like Stacy Isaacson with good ones who could effortlessly handle class sizes that rise every time budgets are cut?