Gates, reprised

Catching up on my EdWeekly reading over the holidays...

A series of articles intheir Nov. 6th issue spends time reexamining the impact of Gates Foundation funding on education research.  For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts: 

1)  I continue to believe that Bill Gates is trying to do the right thing. Some of the criticism his work receives (most notably by Diane Ravitch - someone with whom I’m in general agreement) strikes me as more reactive than thoughtful.  This was illustrated in one story highlighting the efforts of the Foundation to include 'teacher voice' in the development of education policy. (Quelle idea!)  The criticism that many teachers receive from their colleagues for accepting ‘Gates money' to do this work, to me, clearly misses the bigger picture.                

2)  While I agree with Gates' central premise that addressing 'teacher effectiveness' is an essential component of education reform, I would suggest that this framing fails to directly address several related and equally important issues, in particular: the quality and quantity of support that teachers receive from school administrators in terms of training and professional development. For example, does the school environment support meaningful collaboration among teachers - and does it provide the time to do it?  Perhaps this is just wordsmithing, but I would suggest we should be looking at 'teaching effectiveness' instead. The entire school community impacts a student’s classroom experience, and the various roles are highly interdependent. 

3)  But what I found most interesting - and somewhat alarming - was that in all these studies, the measure of 'teacher effectiveness' always seems to come back to standardized student test scores.  It's not testing, per se, that troubles me - you need some way to measure what you're trying to do - it's the total lack of discussion about the actual tests. Which tests are being used? What do these tests measure? What do we want them to measure? And how well do they measure what we want them to measure?

These are not trivial questions. In Pennsylvania, we're full-steam ahead on the implementation of the Keystone exams, which I believe will do an excellent job of measuring our ability to deliver a quality mid-20th century education. We need to ask if that's how we want to measure teaching effectiveness, because that's the direction Pennsylvania is heading...