When a collective profession becomes corrupt

Friends, I want to introduce you to an entire profession that has collectively, by the evidence of its own analysis of itself, become corrupt.  This is not to say that certain individuals, and even particular organizations, within that profession are not corrupt.  It's simply saying that in terms of the 'big picture', the overall view, that profession as a collective is guilty.

According to the New York Times:

Across the country, education reformers and their allies in both parties have revamped the way teachers are graded, abandoning methods under which nearly everyone was deemed satisfactory, even when students were falling behind.

. . .

And here are some of the early results:

In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”

In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.

Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.

“It is too soon to say that we’re where we started and it’s all been for nothing,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. “But there are some alarm bells going off.”

. . .

“We have changed proficiency standards 21 times in the last six years,” Jackie Pons, the schools superintendent for Leon County, Fla., said. In the county, 100 percent of the teachers were rated “highly effective” or “effective.”

“How can you evaluate someone in a system when you change your levels all the time?” Mr. Pons asked.

. . .

Education reformers insist they help to identify and remove ineffective teachers, while offering more feedback for teachers to improve their practice.

But teachers’ unions have fought to make sure evaluations do not rely too heavily on testing data, contending that the data are prone to errors.

. . .

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that even though the data from these systems “was not ready for prime time,” it proved what she had long argued: That the majority of teachers are very good.

“Maybe this information will debunk the myth about bad teachers,” she said.

There's more at the link.  Go read the whole article.  It's really important, particularly if you have kids or grandchildren at school.

There you are.  A profession is demonstrating how deeply corrupt it's become, simply by publishing its own rankings of its members.  Ms. Weingarten is either deluded, or lying in her teeth.  I won't speculate which is the case.  You see, according to normal distribution statistical theory (sometimes referred to as the 'bell curve'), you'll always have some people falling at the lower end of expectations, a bunch of them in the middle of the curve, and some others at the high end of expectations.  It's simply unimaginable in any normal distribution for 90%+ of those measured or assessed to be clustered at the 'high end'.  It's statistically impossible.

If this distribution is claimed, as teachers' organizations are doing, that can only mean one (or both) of two things:

• The measurement results have been blatantly falsified:  and/or -
• The measurement standards are so lax, so open to abuse and 'fiddling', that they're essentially meaningless.

Why wonder or pontificate about why we have a crisis in education when the educators themselves have just collectively and incontrovertibly demonstrated, to anyone who knows even a little about measurement, statistics and analysis, that the professional standards against which they measure their own performance are completely untrustworthy?





Peter