The Washington Teacher Purges

Teachers are unpopular enough these days that many, especially on the right, are cheering the recent firing of 241 teachers by Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC, for being "ineffective."

I am not. It is a scam. The whole push to "reform" the Washington system is in lieu of introducing school vouchers. It is not a bold initiative to improve the education system, but a rearguard effort to preserve the status quo.

Out of the 241 given pink slips, 76 were fired for "lack of teaching credentials."

In other words, for not being part of the union. What does it mean to be a "qualified teacher"? Are we justified in paying extra for schools to ensure that our children are taught by one?

As previously noted in this space, students who take "education" degrees score lower than any other college major, with the possible exception of "public administration," on the SAT or GRE. So if there is selection or weeding out going on here, it is weeding out of the best and the brightest.

But that is only half the story. Once they get to Ed School, is it rigorous? Is there any weeding out at that level?

Apparently not, according to a study by George K. Cunningham for the Pope Centre ("University of North Carolina Education Schools: Helping or Hindering Potential Teachers?" January, 2008).

Page 16 features a chart of average GPAs nationally, in the US, for different academic disciplines. The lower the score, obviously, the tougher it is to get good marks in that field. Average GPA for engineering: 2.67. Average GPA for math: 2.68. Social science: 2.96. Humanities: 3.06 (I suspect it would have been lower before the humanities went ideological). Education: 3.41. You gotta do something seriously wrong to get a B. Pile this on top of the fact that ed students are the weakest students to begin with, and it is hard to conceive of anyone managing to flunk out of an education program, on academic grounds.

And that seems to be the case. Page 19 shows a table of pass rates for all the Ed Schools in the state of Vermont. Range, average, mean, it's all the same: 100% Every single student in the state graduates.

All this means not just that our "qualified teachers" are not qualified; it means that anyone at all bright going into the field has to be consciously cynical, has to deliberately sell out. What do they learn in Ed Schools? Mostly, I suspect, to hew to an ideological line, key to which is the political solidarity of the teaching profession. It's all kind of like joining Hell's Angels, or the Mafia.

Are these the people we want in charge of our children? Perhaps not...

Those worst served by this form of teacher qualification, I suspect, are the brightest students. Teaching has a natural appeal to those with fantasies of power and control; and it is fallen human nature to resent those who are smarter than we are. Accordingly, the sort of folks who go into the field are liable often to be downright hostile to the gifted; others have remarked on a distinct tendency within the education establishment of anti-intellectualism, indeed of hostility toward any form of merit or meritocracy.

Accordingly, this mass firing has probably weeded out the better, not the worse, teachers.

Never mind; that's only 76 out of 241. That leaves 165 teachers who were fired for actual poor performance in the classroom, right?

Not necessarily. The rest were fired because they were marked poorly on classroom observations, or because their students failed to improve on standardized tests; but the DC administration cannot give figures for each category. This fact is in itself highly suspicious.

This matters. Unfortunately, classroom observations, although widely popular with the educational establishment, are unable to reliably identity good or bad teachers. Repeated studies show they only determine whether the observed teacher conforms to the teaching practices of the person observing; two different observers will commonly give two completely different evaluations. This is necessarily so, because we really do not know what traits produce the best classroom results.

Why, then, are they so popular? Because they too enforce the cartel of the Ed Schools. Given that the person observing will inevitably be himself or herself a product of an Ed School, their mark will simply reflect whether the person teaching has also attended Ed School, and teaches in the currently prescribed manner. The test is valid only if the methods of the Ed Schools can be shown to be valid; and they cannot. Studies consistently show that an Ed School grad gets no better results with a given class than an educated layman.

The only valid criterion mentioned in the story is how the students do on standardized tests. But we have no idea how many teachers, if any, were actually fired for this reason. And, of course, standardized tests too can be jimmied to some extent. Even if they are not, student test scores are a fairly rough measure of teacher competence--even over three years teaching the same course, the error rate is arguably as high as 25%.

A more perfect criterion, and a far simpler one, is simply this: let the market decide. Let families (and students) choose the school and teacher for their child, using whatever criteria they see fit. It is this criterion that all the recent sound and fury in Washington has actually been designed to avoid.