Simple solutions to Complex Issues

A couple of recent book reviews have shown a lot more insight than the book they reviewed.
I mentioned one Monday - Dana Goldstein's review of Steven Brill's “Class Warfare.” Today, I'd like to note Sara Mosle's piece from Sunday's New York Times.

Mosle is particularly critical of Brill's belief that "unions are the primary cause of failing public schools" in spite of the almost total lack of evidence to support that claim.

Let me repeat that. There is almost no evidence to support the belief that unions are the primary obstacle to education reform. Yet a lot of people believe just that, largely because unions are an easy, simplistic scapegoat that conveniently absolves everyone else of responsibility.

Human beings have an understandable affinity for simple answers to complex problems. The particular challenge of education reform is that it is tempting, and fairly easy, to make a simplistic argument about this particularly complicated issue; developing a coherent counter-argument is far more challenging and time consuming.

Brill bases much of his argument about unions on the success of the non-union KIPP charter schools in Harlem, which nearly everyone admires. But even a KIPP founder concedes that the program "relies on superhuman talent that cannot be duplicated in large numbers" - and cites examples of educators who unexpectedly quit, citing burnout and unsustainable workloads. KIPP does great work, but it's not a universal model for reform.

Mosle also makes a point that was emphasized by Goldstein: while teacher quality is the most important variable within schools, "mountains of data, going back decades, demonstrates that most of the variation in student performance is explained by non-school factors: not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime­-related stress and the like."

The achievements of the Harlem Children's Zone - another oft-cited success story – are due to the fact that they specifically and deliberately attempt to address those issues.

Does this mean that exceptional teachers cannot make a real difference in the lives of these students, or that teachers shouldn't be held accountable?  No, what it means is that it's going to be extraordinarily difficult to design an accountability system - particularly one that depends primarily on test scores - that accurately takes into account all those non-school factors. And that's precisely what the simplistic reformers are proposing.

Any experienced teacher will tell you that even in a relatively homogeneous district such as ours, one year's class can be completely different from the next year's. How does one account for that?

I particularly like argument Mosle make towards the end: "Brill likens the battle over the nation’s schools to “warfare,” but the better analogy may be to the war on cancer. For years, scientists hoped a magic pill would cure this ravaging disease. But increasingly, doctors have recognized that they will have to fight a multi-fronted war, as cancers (like failing schools) aren’t all alike."