The 21st Century Principal

"The idea that education is best served by standardizing method, content, goals, and evaluation procedures leads to another consequence. It tends to convert education into a race." Elliot Eisner, "Reimagining Schools"

The problem with converting education into a "race" it is impossible, without being a fortune teller, where that finish line should be. If we truly want to personalize education, then shouldn't be looking for ways to serve up the same old standards, content, goals, as well as evaluating all students the same way. The idea that one can "personalize" learning should mean focusing on the child and the their finish line, not the finish line that ed gurus, corporations think they should reach. This is why much of the "personalized learning" blather is going to fail like "open education," "multiple-intelligence-based learning," "brain-based learning," and on failed. We fool ourselves when we have the audacity to predict what students need to know 20 years, 30 years into the future. Growing up in a textile town, many of classmates were told they only need to know how to run looms, sewing machines, etc. Thirty years later, well, you know the story.

Educators never learn anything new because they have amnesia, they ignore the past.

Over the years, as the waves of new reform efforts, federal policy initiatives, and latest educational fads have ebbed and flowed, all of them have been met by critics who questioned their efficacy and their logic. I've been one of those critics myself. What has always fascinated me was the defense of these sometimes reform measures. Take value-added measures for example.

When the statistical wizardry of value-added measures emerged, I distinctly remember their being justified as "the best measurement we've got"when their efficacy was questioned. Does anyone else see the error in that justification? Being the "best we've got" doesn't necessary make it the most effective and best means to measure learning and teaching. Rubbing two sticks together to make fire was the "best we had" until someone figured out flint rocks work better. The "best we've got" rationale doesn't necessarily equate with being effective or even right.

The next time someone uses the "best-we've-got" rationale to justify an educational practice of any kind, we should immediately call them out.

My entire career as an educator, all 27 years, has been spent in the perpetual swirl of “reform” that enveloped education when I first set foot into the classroom. It was in the cusp of the “Era of Accountability” that I began teaching, and the clarion calls for site-based management, uniform standards, and testing were just beginning to resound. Soon to follow was the Total Quality Classroom movement, multiple intelligence theory, and right-left brain theory, critical thinking teaching, thinking maps, and whole host of other initiatives. There has been no shortage on theory during my career as an educator that’s for sure, and during my entire career, we’ve been reforming education, then reforming our reform in an unending pursuit of a “magical land” where schools succeed, except that there’s been one major problem: we’ve never arrived.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic in this reflection; in fact, I’m not really that way at all. I am nostalgic in one sense, because there has always been that anticipation of the next great idea that comes around the bend, and the promise that all our educational ills will finally be resolved. Those who’ve promoted this atmosphere of perpetual reform, have, after all, succeeded even if our schools may not really be any better off. It’s those who’ve capitalized on these reforms by promoting products, professional development, computer programs and websites, and new techniques and strategies who have earned a bundle. The promise of their being one single way to resolve the educational puzzle has led many to search high and low, and our market-based approach to these products has not disappointed, at least for those who’ve made the money.

Still, I’ve come to a cold, hard conclusion that is, in fact, very liberating. It is simply this: There is no magical theory out there or discovery that will allow us to suddenly be able educate like we’ve never done before. There is no one best way to teach, and as we already know, there is no one best way to learn. Despite all these infernal emails I get that promise to "raise my students’ ACT scores or SAT scores to exorbitant heights," in the end their promises are more marketing than reality, and in many cases, downright deceptive. Education has become a money making enterprise like everything else, with “experts” arising from all corners of the field with their version of the “final solution to all our education problems.”

My liberating conclusion that all of these are mostly empty promises frees me to view education as the difficult work it is with problems that do not, nor ever will have singular solutions.

Reform has become such a cliche now, every time I hear a politician say the word, I want to flee in panic, or hit him with a rotten tomato. It just won’t happen. Perhaps real “reform” will begin and end with ourselves rather than continuing the fruitless quest for magic. Real reform begins with the liberating thought: “There are no easy answers or solutions to discover about our educational system. There’s only hard work to be done."

"The effects of teaching may not show up until long after students leave school and in ways the teacher never dreamed of." Elliot Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind

How do you measure the true educational impact of a teacher? If you consult psychometricians, they say it is simple. You pre-test, deliver instruction, and you post-test. On this our "educational sciences" are based. But do these tests really measure the teacher's most important impact on students' lives? Is the most important task of a teacher to demonstrate that they can "improve a student's test scores?" And, equally important, no matter what our state and federal education bureaucracy tells us, "Are these state standardized test results really capturing learning that will be meaningful to those students' future lives, or are these results simply better predictors on how students will score on other standardized tests?"

Elliot Eisner's book, The Arts and the Creation of Mind depicts an image of a teacher that is much more complex and complete than that currently promoted by the "education sciences" to which modern education finds itself enslaved. The teacher is much more farsighted than the teacher who can't wait for the latest standardized test scores at the end of the year. Eisner's teacher is an "environmental designer" who "creates" situations and places where students gain "an appetite to learn."

Eisner's teacher is not a technician who uses "test data" to choose "canned scripts" and the latest adopted "scientifically validated methods and curriculum" whose purpose, is not to inspire wonder and imagination, but whose purpose is to make some education administrator or politician feel like they are effectively improving education. The teacher should not be teaching by following recipes; they should be engaging students in a "mind-altering curriculum" that forever changes them into forever learners.

What's wrong with the current grip that so-called "education sciences" have on schools is that they have created an impoverished, assembly-line form of education that students don't have to participate in; they only need to be subjected to it. Our education system still strives to run "smoothly," in a standardized manner and as efficiently as possible, and to get as many students through the credentialing process. It is short-sighted and its vision can't see beyond the "testing extravaganza at the end of the year.

But as Eisner makes clear in his book, if you really want "educational gold" in the classroom, then a "high-degree teaching artistry is needed. You need classrooms of "improvisation and unpredictability," not classrooms constructed according to rigid scientific principles. The teacher, in this innovative and creative classroom, is not a scientist who constantly studies the latest test data and looks at his repertoire of "research-based, scientifically-validated" classroom scripts for the one to apply because the data indicates it is called for. The teacher is what Eisner calls "a midwife to the child's creative nature."

As I look back at my years in elementary school, I see one teacher who I would really say was the midwife to my own creative nature. She didn't make noise about my performances on tests. She genuinely questioned and encouraged me when I showed curiosity in the solar system, astronomy, biology, tadpoles, frogs, and trees. She listened attentively when I read stories I had written aloud in class and encouraged me to write more. She encouraged me to read anything and everything I could get my hands on in our school library, even helping me get permission from the librarian to wander into and check out books from the "junior high section" instead of the elementary section where all six-graders were constrained. I read more books that year than perhaps in any other time of my life because of her. In a word, she designed an environment that helped me grow my curiosity and a massive appetite to learn that is still alive today.

My greatest concern with the Standards-Standardized-Testing-Research-Based-Accountability educational milieu we've created in our schools is the damage it is doing to students far into their futures. Does all this focus and obsession with test scores really matter in the lives of our students? The true impact we have on student lives is an impact that hasn't happened yet, and its an impact that can't be measured by standardized tests. My sixth grade teacher had no idea that the classroom environment she created would mean that I would become a teacher myself. She had no idea that I would become a principal. She also had no idea that my passion for reading, writing, and appetite to learn would stay with me the rest of my life.

Perhaps if we really want to focus on "student outcomes" we need to set our sights beyond test data and create places of imagination, creativity, and innovation where curiosity is treasured, learning is not just measured, but valued. Not everything worthwhile can be reduced to pre-tests and post-tests, and the real impact of our work with students will be measured by the lives they live far beyond the classroom.

"The main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage" Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Besides the fact that there is little really innovative and new about them, the real problem with the heavy-handed reform strategies and tactics imposed from above, like the imposition of the Common Core, Merit Pay, or value-added teacher evaluations, is that their development and implementation failed and continues to fail to be collaborative endeavors. As Isaacson points out, the birth of an innovation is usually a group effort between those who have the vision and the engineers. In each of these examples, the true "teaching and learning engineers" in the individual schools are left out of the innovation loop. Sure, token teachers are often asked to serve on the committees, but there are also "experts," researchers, and politicians too, who often take so much control of the process, that the real engineers are left out.

I want to propose a new idea that follows more closely what Isaacson describes. I want to move innovation from meeting rooms, conference rooms, and think tanks totally outside the school. I want to move innovation back to the level of the school where the visionaries and teaching-learning engineers are. Engage in innovation at the school level, instead of searching for magic snake oil that might or might not exist out there somewhere. Engage staff at the school level in "innovation collaboration" and hackerism.

But I suspect the "experts" won't go away quietly. After all, too often their job is simply to sell their wares, which means marketing and creating a "need" where one did not exist before. In education, there's still this underlying belief that "experts" from the outside can walk into a school or district, conduct some professional development, provide some consulting services, and then collect their hefty professional fees, and "Presto!" innovation happens. They then move on to the next school district, like some medicine man, peddling their wares once again. In the end, this type of "imposition-of-innovation-from-above" (or outside) often leaves schools with mediocre results and a little less professional development money in their pockets. Politicians, school leaders, and teachers are guilty of taking on this medicine man role too, which is very often more about their own ambitions, prestige, and financial wealth than truly helping a school engage in innovation and ultimately help children.

Why do schools continue to engage in this "medicine man" style of professional development and innovation seeking? Besides the fact that is much easier seek innovation from without than try to engage your school or district in becoming innovative, I would also stress that the marketing of these medicine men, educating consultants, professional development experts is often more effective than their products or wares, but that is another blog post entirely.

Instead, if we truly want to innovate, I suggest we approach it the hacker and geek way. Let's involve the engineers a great deal more and the medicine men a little less. Let's engage in innovation at the school level with the teaching and learning "engineers" there. They are the ones who know everything about the "context" of that school. Very seldom will any neatly packaged product or "innovation" being sold by "experts" and educational entrepreneurs will work as advertised anyway. That's why many schools have these piles of educational materials sitting in their book rooms and media centers gathering dust. These all were "bottles of the latest elixir" promised to cure all that ailed that particular school at the time it was purchased.

Experts and professional development consultants can offer "sources of ideas," but their outside status places them in a position of not being able to fully understand that school's issues no matter how much "data" we feed to them. If they do claim to sell "research-based" wares, we should demand that they provide specific, independent, and valid research studies that examined the effectiveness of their product, not some vague or generic studies. If they can't provide them, send them packing. In education, we don't have a federal or state organization approving the effectiveness of these products, methods, or programs, so we have to take that on ourselves. Let's listen a little less to their very often unsubstantiated promises and engage our own teachers in our own schools with the task of solving the problems. Let's create cultures of innovation and hackerism in our schools that can make true and lasting innovation happen.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ken Robinson when he writes:

"Great teachers are the heart of great schools." Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education

Too often there's this undying faith in educational leadership literature that if the right school leader is found, then the problems of the school will be resolved. There's the rhetoric that says, "If that school only had the right principal, then it could be saved." It is this search for a savior and messiah in education that is a misguided and a proverbial "wild goose chase," because in reality, if there are no great teachers, then nothing miraculous will ever happen.

I once had a conversation with the manager of a restaurant that I frequented. This restaurant was known for its long lines snaking all the way into the mall in which it was located. On some days, to eat there, it meant waiting sometimes as long as an hour or two before you could be seated. I asked this manager, "It's obvious your restaurant is a success. What is the secret?" He looked around for just a second, and quickly said, "I keep my cooks happy."

Over the years, this has always been behind my leadership practice. I do not see the teachers in my school as "expendable" and simply interchangeable parts. That managerial philosophy really has no place in education.

The truth is, great teachers aren't interchangeable. They are sometimes hard to come by. If you're lucky, you might be able to coach and build great teachers over time, but as fewer and fewer people enter teaching, this becomes more difficult as well.

Rather than seeing teachers as interchangeable parts, I see them as great "cooks" that we need to treasure and keep happy." This doesn't have anything to do with sacrificing what's good for students either. Too often today, if a school leader talks about keeping teachers happy, he is viewed with suspicion, as if in doing so, he is ignoring what's good for students. Why is this an either or proposition in the first place? Making sure your great teachers are supported and appreciated, and happy, while working with those who have not yet reached the level of greatness is school leadership.

What's important today in school leadership is realizing that school leaders with savior complexes rarely sustain great schools, because in reality, such personalities are more interested in themselves, and their own professional ambitions than they are with the success of anyone, students or teachers. These leaders see everything and everyone around them as interchangeable parts to be discarded if they somehow do not fit into their plans. Sadly, that's why their results often disappear once they moved on to their next "great" ambitious project.

"The core purpose of education is to prepare young people for life after school; helping them to build up the mental, emotional, social, and strategic resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexity." Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education

Every time I hear education reform rhetoric calling for education reforms that "Prepare students for jobs of the 21st century," or reforms that "prepare them for jobs that don't exist yet," I can't help but ask: "What the heck does that look like? How can we prepare students for something we don't even know will come to pass?" These are really shortsighted and, if I may say, stupid ideas.

Education prophets and gurus have been spouting their prophecies and oracles since just before the turn of the century. I won't get into mentioning their names, but many of these have made fortunes peddling their prophecies of economic gloom and doom at education conferences and workshops worldwide, charging exorbitant speaking fees and selling books.

The truth is, "Is any of this blather rather productive? Is it really the role of schools to prepare students by training them for the jobs that currently exist, or will exist in the near future? My answer to that question is a loud and boisterous "NO."

Training students for existing jobs is setting them up for future failure because such jobs disappear according to the changing whims of corporations. Do we train students for jobs that we think are going to become important? My answer again is a resounding "Negative!" It is educational malpractice to be gambling with the lives of kids by teaching them what we think they will be doing 10 years or 20 years or 30 years from now. We aren't seers and haven't reliable crystal balls, so we can't play games with the lives of those we teach.

I agree with Ken Robinson. The core of our job as educators is to prepare them for "Life after school." It's really that simple. They don't need to be narrowly pigeonholed into existing jobs or jobs that "might" exist. They need the "mental, emotional, social and strategic resources" to live in a world that none of us really know about. Instead of rolling the dice with the lives of those we teach, we need to provide an education that allows them to face the unknown.

In 2013, I embarked on a journey. I began working on my EdD degree in educational leadership. There are many reasons why one would take on such a monumental task. Some do so for career advancement, and others do so for career changes. My reasons for doing so have been a bit more complex, often including many of these, but they have actually changed over time. Personally, I have treasured the intellectual challenge it has brought me. Many would perhaps argue that doctoral degrees should have an immediate practical application, but I would disagree; it should disturb us profoundly. I would argue that my experience of doctoral education has forced me to re-examine everything I believed to be true about myself as an educator and human being. It has in many ways placed everything I held to be true about the educational field in question. To me that is the practical application of my doctoral education.I now savor more than ever the intellectual side of our enterprise as public educators. I enjoy questioning myself and the entire discipline of education, and I have had some of my beliefs about education reinforced. I’ve had many of my beliefs placed in doubt, and I have formulated some new beliefs based on all that I’ve learned and read. But even these new beliefs are subject to change as experience, reading, and thought changes. That’s where my disturbance lies: everything for me is tentative.
Ultimately, doctoral education has changed my work. Principals can get into “automatic-pilot-mode” where they simply make decisions and deal with issues, hardly ever taking time to examine deeper issues and problems. Obviously, when crisis decisions arise, there’s little time to analyze and engage in deeper thinking, but those everyday decisions we make, such as how to address a disciplinary issue, or how to make suggested improvements to a colleague, do allow for time to think and analyze rather than following a script. That’s the practical application of much of my reading, writing and intellectual thought fostered by my doctoral work. I practically every day find myself looking to the deeper side of what I do and that makes for some amazing reflection.
Doctoral work is rewarding. It becomes particularly rewarding if it disturbs your own beliefs and thoughts about education and life, as mine has done. I became an English teacher years ago because I treasured the engagement of my own intellect with reading and writing. Literature that is worth its weight does that: it engages the intellect and leaves you disturbed. Just reading and writing inside your comfort zone hardly leads to intellectual growth. I that is one big practical application of my doctoral program studies. I am disturbed (not mentally mind you, though some would perhaps disagree) and will probably remain so for the rest of my life. The disturbance I feel is simply the realization that perhaps I did not have all this figured out after all, nor will I ever. Those who realize this, I contend, are perhaps better educators. There are far too many education reformers, educators, policymakers, politicians, corporate leaders who think they have figured it out. They haven’t.
Knowledge is liberating in many ways, and it can liberate you as well from thinking you know for sure how to teach, or how to lead, which means you’re more free and open to creativity and innovation. Pursuit of education is perhaps liberation in more ways than we think.

Do PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores really matter? One would think so, because every time the latest round of scores are revealed, there’s a barage of “Sputnik-like” declarations of educational doom and gloom within the United States, all reminscent of when the Soviets launched the first satelite into orbit. Just like it did then, each time these scores come out, the declarations of“educational third world country” status is declared anew. The United States’ future economically is seen a bleak, and tales of woe begin. But there are some really good questions to ask about PISA.
If the United States suddenly vaults into first place in the PISA rankings will our country suddenly experience full employment and economic prosperity for all?

Will American businesses suddenly find all those “mythical-but-can’t-find-qualified workers?

Do PISA rankings by country really mean anything?

I would say “No” to all these questions. The United States’ “weak” rankings in PISA scores tell us absolutely nothing helpful nor does it indicate all the gloom and doom that policymakers public policy wonks like Arne Duncan have claimed in recent years.

Having a number one ranking in PISA scores is not a ticket to the economic promise land. Nor does it mean that we should take up the short-sighted view that our education system’s purpose—from kindergarter to higher education— is to feed the “human capital” machine for corporations. Sure, we want out students to be employable, but making sure they score high on an international test won’t do that. That’s short-sighted thinking. Education should never be about preparing students for the factory sitting down the street; it should be about preparing students so that they can learn and adapt for jobs their entire lives. It is simply short-sighted to see education as worker-training program. We need to train our students to be able to learn for a lifetime, be creative, be critical thinkers, and adapt to whatever comes their way. The jobs down the street will probably move to another country in a few years any way.

Using PISA data, or any standardized test data such as SAT as a scare-tactic and propaganda tool is a moral problem. Those who do that, are like the barkers selling a special elixir guaranteed to fix what ails. They should have the same credibility as snake oil salesmen. It is simply policymakers pushing their own brand of reform with the cry of “wolf.” Sure, our schools can always improve. We can teach our students more effectively. But, this clarion call of doom and gloom every time a round of PISAscores or any standardized test scores needs to met with skepticism if not just ignored.

“What’s the one thing that we could so to fix public education?” Lily Eskelsen Garcia answers this question asked by a businessman so effectively. I’ll let the video speak for itself.

Is education’s sole purpose to prepare students for the jobs of the future? I am positive that many educators who read my headline immediately ask, “What a dumb question! Sure, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.” But, is that really the case?

Educators have long accepted as a maxim that education should be about preparing students for the jobs of the future, jobs that don’t even exist yet. But is that possible? Can we actually, without a doubt, predict the kinds of jobs our students will have twenty or thirty years from now? If not, then are we not gambling with students’ lives by teaching skills to students declared by gurus and educational prophets funded by corporations to be necessary for our students’ survival?

We all know that the future can change suddenly and drastically. The fortunes of one industry can be sunk by a single invention. Examples? The record industry, video rental stores, etc. A whole family of industries can become obsolete with the changing times and literally, in the blink of the eye. Why then would we want to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet, especially when there is not a single human that I know capable of seeing into the future enough to tell us what our students need?

Take my own hometown community. Fiber optic manufacturers sprang up all around, promising to make our area the “Silicon Valley of the East.” To foster the promise of a future boom, our local fiber optic industry spent a great deal of time speaking and working with our schools, talking about the kinds of skills they needed kids to have in order get good jobs with their industry. There were joint workshops with their educational experts, exchanges literature and teaching ideas, and even visits to our schools to speak to our kids about the importance of obtaining the skills that their businesses sorely needed them to have. These evangelists of prosperity were everywhere, preaching and teaching the kinds of skills they wanted kids to have so that they could work in their factories when they graduated. Six years later, the bottom fell out of the fiber option industry. Companies closed and consolodated. Thousands were laid off. Plants were closed. Many of those employes of those companies were left stranded, with a knowledge specific to the cabling industry, that was now useless because the only industry around was in a downward spiral, with little hope of things ever returning back to the earlier boom days.

I am certainly not suggesting that we should not prepare students for the future. I am suggesting that to prepare students according to current industrial and corporate specifications is shortsighted and morally wrong.

Our job as educators should be much broader. Instead of providing graduates with industry specific skills, we need to prepare students who can leave our education system and do anything. They should be be able to act intelligently, learn as demanded, and be active citizens of the community. We should not be job trainers for the local factories. Those factories do not have the interests of our students at heart, nor should they. Their interest is in short term profits. Educators have to be visionaries and interested in the long-term. This means thinking about the educational big picture. We can work with our local industries and businesses to provide them citizens who they can then train for their jobs. To allow ourselves as an educational institution to become solely job training institutions is shortsighted, malpractice, and a disservice to our students.

“How reward power is exercised affects outcome. Compliance is most likely if the reward is something valued by the target person. Thus, it is essential to determine what rewards are valued, and a leader should not assume that it be the same for everyone.” Gary Yukl, Leadership in Organizations

As our political leaders and state level policy makers continue to try to find ways to “improve our K-12” systems of education, one persistent idea that just won’t go away is the idea of merit pay and punishment by accountability. They still remain faithful to the idea that somehow teachers will raise test scores if they are offered a big enough carrot or if their livelihoods are somehow placed in jeopardy enough to bring about a level of fear strong enough to give them the test scores they desire. After over a decade of “test-reward-and-punish” policies under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, you would think they would finally give up. Instead, money is still being poured into even more standards development and testing, in the hope that somehow education reform magic will happen. What these educational policymakers and politicians just don’t understand is performance pay and punishments are dead in the water before they are even implemented.

One of the reasons for the uselessness of merit pay is captured succinctly by Gary Yukl in his book, Leadership in Organizations. Rewards will only bring about compliance if those rewards are something valued by the "target person.” Don’t get me wrong, teachers and educators want to be paid fairly and be able to live comfortably, but educators know going into the the job that what they are doing is an endeavor much greater that a paycheck. Most are just not built to pursue the big carrots for their own sake. That is one thing that politicians and policymakers don’t get. Perhaps they are motivated by greed, but many of us are not.

Another problem with the carrot and stick approach to education reform is that many educators just don’t believe that test scores are a worthy goal to pursue. Most teachers who have been in the classroom see the tests for what they really are: a single measure focused on a small portion of learning given at a single point in time. That means the test can give s snapshot of only a sliver of learning, but it can’t be the ultimate goal of learning because so much of learning falls outside testing. Our current public education system is asking educators to believe that test scores are an important goal of learning, and many aren’t buying it, and never will.

As Yulk points out, “Even when the conditions are favorable for using rewards, they are more likely to result in compliance rather than commitment.” Rewards only get people to do what is required; they do not engage people’s hearts and minds totally in the goal of education. Under rewards, people aren’t committed to their jobs, the kids, or to the profession. Our current system of accountability and testing along with its reward and punish for test score performance will never work because at its heart, because teaching requires more than compliance; it requires dedication and commitment and no amount of money can purchase that.

Recently, I received an anonymous comment on my blog post entitled “Merit Pay in Education: An Exercise Manipulation and Futility.” I have purposefully chosen to not publish anonymous comments on this blog because I believe firmly that if you have something to say, then you should be willing to divulge your identity. Part of your message is who you are, and hiding your identity is actually hiding part of your message. At any rate, the commenter who calls him or herself “Engaged Parent” seemed to practically dare me to publish his or her comment. I won’t publish it as a comment, but I will share it here with my own commentary because there are some fundamental misconceptions apparent in that comment. Here’s “Engaged Parent’s” comment, then I will respond.

Even though you're going to NOT publish this comment I think it's worth sending it to you anyway. A teacher you are yes? I'm going to assume that.

Over and over again I see the same comments on how we can measure the success of education. It's great that we keep hearing how a merit program doesn't work but what's the alternative? It would be nice (for once) to hear a teacher tell us how a "bad" teacher can get filtered out of the system. I'm sure you will agree that not all teachers are good, there are always some bad apples in the bushel, no way around it. 
I agree, test scores are not always a good judge of how a teacher is doing but it does or it at least should give key indicators to a teacher that maybe what they're doing isn't the best for that particular mix of kids and that another approach might work better. But do they do that? I don't know.
Why are teachers the only ones who don't have to be put under the scrutiny of evaluation? The rest of the world has to go through it.

What I really want to say is I think that a happy medium could be met if careful thought was put in to it.
For instance:
10 % what did your students think of you?
15% what did your students parents think of you?
25% test scores
10% peer scores
15% self score
25% principal scoresIs that not a fair assessment? If not then come up with SOMETHING because personally I'm sick of hearing how teachers don't want to be assessed.

First of all, let me say that yes, I am a teacher, and I don’t think I’ve hidden that fact anywhere on this blog. You can find that information on the blog sidebar. I am currently a principal. As a teacher though, I am more concerned with your logic and misconceptions in your comment than anything else. First of all, you seem to suggest that merit pay should be implemented because we have no alternatives. Following this argument means that the rationale for implementing merit pay lies, not in whether it will work or not, but because we don’t have any other alternatives. That in itself is faulty reasoning. I certainly hope my physician doesn’t implement a treatment or my mechanic doesn’t simply initiate a car repair because he or she says, “What’s the alternative?” without considering the evidence of symptoms and lab test results that identify the problem.  You are hearing criticisms of performance pay because it has been researched and has failed to bring about the improvements sought, which is increased student learning. It has been tried in public education, even in North Carolina with no appreciable effect on the quality of education.

You next assertion seems to be thinly veiled when you state “It would be nice (for once) to hear a teacher tell us how a “bad” teacher can get filtered out of the system.” It appears you have a belief that “bad” teachers never get dismissed. I would agree with you that not all teachers are good, which I gather you really mean effective at helping students learn among the many other things teachers do. But contrary to your belief, they do “get filtered” out of the system, at least in my experience. So your belief that teachers who don’t do their jobs very good somehow are not subject to dismissal is another misconception. Teachers can be dismissed fairly but with “due process,” which means that I as an administrator must thoroughly document my rationale for doing so. Many administrators see “due process” or tenure as many call it, as an obstacle, but due process rights were put in place because historically, our education system was notorious for political firings and reprimands. Teaching historically has been quite political with school board members or even administrators firing teachers for noxious reasons. Teachers have been fired for being pregnant or even so a school board member can then hire a son or nephew. At any rate, it is a misconception that teachers who aren’t doing their jobs can’t be fired. It simply takes leadership and willingness to first try to help that teacher improve, then take the steps necessary to counsel them into another profession.

Still another misconception from you comment is that teachers aren’t under the “scrutiny of evaluations.” I have been an educator in North Carolina for 25 years, and I have always been subject to evaluations, so the idea that teachers aren’t somehow evaluated just isn’t true. Teachers in my state have been evaluated for years, and some are dismissed as a result of those evaluations. When you hear all the criticism of current evaluations systems, those do not come from the desire to avoid evaluations; it comes from the desire to have those evaluations be fair. You yourself acknowledge that test scores alone are not always a “good judge” of teacher, but there are much deeper issues with using test scores as a part of evaluation, such as the fact that more 70 percent of courses in a high school do not have these state tests. Teachers that I know aren’t trying to avoid being evaluated as you suggest; they simply want those evaluations to be fair and just, as any employee in any line of work would want.

Now, let’s take a look at the evaluation system you suggest. You provide several interesting sources of evidence for teacher evaluations. First of all, you would base 10% of the evaluation on “what students thought of the teacher.”  I hope you aren’t suggesting that students rate the teacher as a person. I suspect you are really suggesting that students are somehow surveyed on what kind of job they think their teachers are doing. This is reasonable in some ways, and I’ll agree with you. But there obviously has to be careful attention paid to the survey instrument so that its questions get at the heart of instructional prowess and not opinions about the teacher personally. The question then becomes, what do students know about a teacher’s instructional ability? The answer to that question could be used as a basis for survey questions. Our school has used student surveys for over 5 years, and one quite common problem is that the responses can sometimes be about anything other than the teaching. The data is useful, however, because it can help us make changes where there are genuine complaints and issues.

The second source of evidence for teacher evaluation you suggest is “what the parents think of their teachers.” Again, that seems reasonable, if what you are suggesting is a parent survey that focuses on a teacher’s ability to teach. For obvious reasons, the survey would need to move beyond asking the parent what they thought of the teacher as an instructor. But there are some issues that would need to be ironed out. For example, one issue that would need to be dealt with would be the fact that few parents witness the actual teaching teachers do in the classroom. They get most of their information about what happens in the classroom secondhand. I can tell you as an administrator that quite often  that secondhand information isn’t entirely accurate. A student often goes home and tells a parent one story about something that’s happened in their classroom or to them or what a teacher has done. That parent next calls the principal, clearly angry, until they hear what really happened. Using parent opinions about teacher practice would be especially difficult since they do not witness teaching in action; they have to rely on hearsay, which as we know is unacceptable in court rooms. Parent surveys could focus, however, on the parts of teaching that they do directly witness, such as teacher to home communication. At any rate, if parent surveys were to be used in teacher evaluations, they would need to be much more than simply asking a parent what they thought of his or her teacher.

The third source of evidence you suggest for teacher evaluations are test scores. That also seems reasonable until you try to implement that practice which we’ve done in North Carolina.  The issues are many. Some of the tests are inferior and are of questionable quality. Then there’s the fact that not all subjects are tested, which leads to questions like: Do you evaluate only those in tested areas, or do you develop and administer tests in every single subject area, which is quite costly in terms of time and money? In addition, some tests were designed in a way that they make poor choices for use in evaluating teachers. Tests like ACT and SAT were created for an entirely different purpose rather than measuring teacher quality. Additionally, tests designed for assessing student achievement have never been proved valid for assessing teacher quality. Other issues with test scores used as part of teacher evaluations? How do you separate the effects of previous years teachers on this year’s teacher scores? The list of issues with using tests as evidence of teacher effectiveness is lengthy, that’s why teachers and myself question the practice. A test is a test is a test is how much of the world sees it, but most of us who’ve been in education know tests aren’t as simple as we wish they were.

The fourth source of evidence for teacher evaluations that you suggest are “peer scores” which I suspect you actually mean peer ratings. Peer ratings seem to make sense too, after all, who would know better than a teacher’s peers whether or not they are effectively teaching. But the problem with this one is similar to the parent one: there are few teachers who actually know how effectively a teacher is teaching, unless of course you set up a system by which they peer observe. That would work, but it offers logistical problems such as finding time and means for each teacher to observe each other in action. Currently, we use peer observations in evaluations as a part of our process so your suggestion isn’t far from current reality. There is one additional issue with peer ratings too; teachers are often very reluctant to honestly rate their peers because quite often, they have to work with these individuals, and they are often their friends. You have to be pretty naive about human nature to see peer ratings working very well.

The fifth source of evidence for teacher evaluations you suggest are “self scores” which I would suspect you mean self ratings. Believe it or not, we already ask our teachers to do “self-assessments.” While these aren’t directly connecting to a teacher’s final rating, they are used as a part of the evaluation process early in the year. Teachers use them to honestly look at how they stand with our teacher evaluation, and many use it as a basis for their professional development plan. Of course it’s like any self-assessment; it’s only as useful as the amount of honestly employed in its completion. The main problem with self-ratings is if high stakes are tied to it in any way, how noble do you think someone would be to give themselves a poor rating if it could impact their job status?

Your final source of evidence for teacher evaluations you suggest are “principal scores” which I take to mean principal ratings. In North Carolina, this is practice. Principals complete a summative evaluation of ratings on teachers at the conclusion of every year. This is in turn used to suggest professional development for the next year. Principal ratings are certainly not without issues as well. Most of us have worked for bosses who were tyrants and completely incapable of making fair and partial judgments. Because of this danger alone, principal ratings have issues too.

I would say “Engaged Parent” you do get one principle right in your evaluation suggestion; we do need multiple sources of evidence for teacher evaluations. The issue is simply deciding which ones will effectively improve instruction for our students. We do need multiple sources of evidence to evaluate teachers, but if we choose the incorrect evidence, then our teachers don’t teach well and what we set out to do which was improve student learning never happens. We can’t afford to get teacher evaluation wrong because in the end our children will suffer.

So, “Engaged Parent” we do have evaluations of teachers. We also use much of the evidence you suggest above, and there’s talk of adding other sources as well. Teachers as a rule in North Carolina do not complain about being evaluated. Like any employee they do complain about evaluated unfairly, and that is a great deal of the criticism you’re hearing. I would suggest that since you have a great interest in teacher evaluations, you might want to read a book called Evaluating America’s Teachers Mission Possible? by W. James Popham. Popham goes to great length to argue what a good, fair and valid teacher evaluation would look like. He even goes through about every single source of evidence you suggest and points out the problems with them and suggests how those problems might be alleviated. It’s a good read for anyone, educator or non-educator, looking into the evaluation of teachers.

“Simply put, smart superintendents don’t poke hornets’ nest with sticks.” John Kuhn, Fear and Learning in America: Bad Data, Good Teachers, and the Attack on Public Education

Since the dawn of No Child Left Behind all the way through the Obama administration’s signature Race to the Top program, finding school administrators willing to criticize these federal programs and what they've done to public education is often difficult. As Kuhn points out, smart administrators “don’t poke hornets’ nests with sticks,” because it isn’t the smartest thing to do politically, but that is exactly what Kuhn does in his book, Fear and Learning in America: Bad Data, Good Teachers, and the Attack on Public Education. He takes on, with wit, energy, passion, and solid logic all the current education reforms that seem to be directed toward tearing down the teaching profession and public education brick by brick.

According to Kuhn, this anti-public education agenda began all the way back when the media, policymakers, politicians, and even educators uncritically accepted the problems with public education outlined in the Reagan-era education report, A Nation at Risk. This report set our nation on its current path of education deform because no one critically questioned its broad negative declarations about public education in the United States. As pointed out in Kuhn's book, this report "spurred a rising tide of negative reports" that were often accepted entirely at face value and uncritically, often, even by the educational establishment.

Throughout Fear and Learning in America Kuhn repeatedly takes on these education reform measures and those pushing them. He takes on the obsession with standardized testing in this country and the use of what he calls "standardized junk science" or the use of value-added measures to evaluate teachers. Kuhn also points out that "At some point education reformers stopped asking teachers to be accountable for quality teaching and started asking them to be accountable for miracles" and that the current reform movement powered by "policymakers, journalists, and think tank wonks embraced the pursuit of superteachers as a way to fix schools, and, ipso facto, society."  This "pursuit of miracales" as Kuhn calls it, has left teachers with three choices all bad: "perform miracles, fail, or cheat."

John Kuhn's book Fear and Learning in America is both entertaining and informative. He disperses anecdotes throughout the book that communicate the often unforgotten and human side to what this current reform agenda has done to our schools. He describes how all these measures have ultimately placed public education in America in "The Educational Dark Ages" where there are those well-meaning reformers who are pushing change out of noble intentions, but there are also those pushing these reforms who have more sinister and self-serving agendas. He goes on to point out that current educational reformers have conveniently discarded poverty and all other achievement-influencing variables because they have been deemed either off limits or too difficult to tackle.

Unlike some of the current books examining the anti-public education sentiments in the United States, Kuhn does not just passionately detail what's wrong with current education reform; he offers at the end of the book his own ideas on what can be done to improve education in America for all students. These all stand in contrast to the current educational reform agendas being pushed by state and federal policymakers and politicians.

I have read several books that examine this American phenomenon of attacking public schools, but Kuhn's book, Fear and Learning in America: Bad Data, Good Teachers, and the Attack on Public Education is one of the best yet! It's readable, entertaining, and passionate style make it both a page turner and an inspiration for any educator interested in the current state of public education.

"What today's disruptive world requires are everyday Gallileos, who ask their own versions of: What if our assumptions are wrong? How would that change how we think and what we do?" Bill Jensen, Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic

 "We are in the midst of a massively disruptive era, where most every system or rule for how we do things has been, and will continue to be, up for grabs," writes Bill Jensen in his book Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic. This same era is bringing massive disruptions to they way we do public schools too. According to Jensen, in this constantly disruptive age we live in, we have three choices basically:

• We can be extremely proactive. This means we ask the questions no one else is asking or willing to ask. These are the inventors and entrepreneurs who will be the causes of the next wave of what Jensen calls "innovative disruptions."
• We can be mainstream proactive. People who do this actively question most every "system, structure, and rule" placed before them. They choose the ones they will ignore. According to Jensen, they work around or change their lives according to these that they ignore.
• We can be reactive. These are the people who accept most everything handed to them. According to Jensen, they "hold on for dear life, waiting for the personal disruptions to subside."

A headline on this morning's News and Observer Website read: "NC Schools Deal with Fewer Dollars for Textbooks."  According to the article, textbook funding has been cut by 80 percent or more over the past four years. This cut, coupled with cuts in instructional supply money, teaching assistant cuts, among a whole laundry list of cuts makes it very clear that North Carolina public education is not a funding priority for our state legislature or governor. 

What is even more amazing is how our state is able to afford the largest increase in the number of state tests administered in state history, yet instructional materials and textbooks have been increasingly cut each year. What's wrong with this picture? Here's some points for thought.

• The expectation in our state is that teachers will provide ever increasing levels of high quality instruction while doing so with less and less instructional tools for the classroom.
• In the midst of it all, our state still manages to find funding to administer over 40 (the number depends on which tests you count and whose taking them) tests to all students during the course of the year. Now I realize the argument the testing and accountability supporters will make here is that "Testing is cost effective and that it just doesn't cost that much to give tests." Perhaps that's true, but if our state politicians and state level education bureaucrats were all that serious about providing a quality education for the students of North Carolina, then you would see the same level of commitment to provide adequate funding for textbooks, technology, and instructional materials for the classrooms. Why can't they muster the same enthusiasm and commitment for providing texts and classroom materials that they have for testing?
• It is cheaper to test, test, test than it is to fund classrooms. That's the reality. The state can easily churn out a new test or contract with College Board to give one more test, but to provide adequate texts,technology and instructional materials for the classroom is costly. But the logic behind this fails me. If you really want to impact classroom instruction, then put the money where it will do the most  good: the classroom, not additional tests and the testing bureaucracy that goes along with them. The most recent survey done by Marketplace Morning Report found that 99.5 percent of teachers paid an average of $485 to stock their classrooms the previous year.
• No teacher should ever have to spend their own personal money so that they can carry out instruction in their classrooms. Teachers are really dedicated people who work very hard for the most part. Many, many teachers spend their own money on school supplies for their classrooms just to be able to provide their students with engaging and meaningful learning. Yet, our state seems to always find funding to add a new test or develop some kind of new data program. Perhaps it's time to fund what really counts: classroom instruction.

"Since the formation of the United States of America, there has been debate over the roles and purposes of education." Christopher Tienken & Donald Orlich, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies

Because educational policymakers were so successful in using the Sputnik incident in promoting new education policy and change, it seems we have a new "Sputnik-moment" every 10 years or so, and with Arne Duncan, we seem to have one every time the latest round of PISA scores are released. According to him, our schools have been in a crisis since he came into office. Like education-researchers David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, one can't help but wonder whether or not this is a "Manufactured Crisis" which was the title of their book back in 1996. It would almost seem that Duncan and his fellow corporate reformers are using the same Sputnik playbook to push their tired, worn-out educational reform agenda of more standards, more tests and lots of airy rhetoric. Even in 1996, Berliner and Biddle tackled head-on the myths about declining achievement in national test scores and rising illiteracy rates. They painstakingly pointed out where the media, pundits and policymakers were getting it wrong. Even then, the myths continued unabated and many of them have continued through to this day.

At the heart of all reform efforts today is a both a fundamental disagreement on the nature of schools: it purposes and reasons for existence. Also at the heart of reform efforts by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and many others are what Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich describe, in their book The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myths, and Lies, as the "Eight Self-Evident Fallacies of the Modern Reform Movement." These eight fallacies are at the heart of current education policy from increased standardized testing, using of test scores in teacher evaluations, implementation of the Common Core Curriculum, and our incessant focus on accountability. These eight fallacies, according to Tienken and Orlich have their roots stretching all the way back to the Sputnik incident. I include their fallacies here with my commentary and I've taken the liberty of adding one of my own fallacies.

• "Fallacy 1: Government coercion will accelerate achievement." This myth believes that the only way to get educators and students to improve is through coercion, whether through sanctions or rewards. One would think that this same fallacious thinking would have folded after the miserable failure of No Child Left Behind, but it survives and has only spurred an even more high-stakes environment where teachers and students are now subjected to greater penalties and more testing than ever. At the heart of this fallacy is the belief that teachers and students do not work hard so we have to make them work harder. What government coercion is doing to teaching in North Carolina, and I suspect elsewhere is encouraging more who would might show an interest in becoming a teacher to seek some other more hospitable profession. Who wants to teach with the gun of accountability and test scores stuck to your head?
• "Fallacy 2: Big business values will improve public education." This fallacy puts faith in the business model as a way of saving education. It says that education will improve through competition and an intense focus on the bottom-line. It views teachers as expendable just as business and industry currently views their own employees. In the business model, workers are to do as they're told. In education, the same: teachers are not to question the latest policy, curriculum or reforms. Just do them!
• "Fallacy 3: Intuitively derived standards can replace empirically derived solutions." The standards movement, according to Tienken and Orlich are examples of authoritarianism. The entire thinking is, "We must raise our standards! We must raise our standards! We must raise our standards!" Instead of looking for the difficult solutions to improving education, our policymakers and politicians take the easy way out and develop one more set of standards. The problems in our schools involve child poverty, lack of resources, and a dwindling number of qualified teachers among many other things. Raising the standards in those situations does absolutely nothing to resolve the real issues we face.
• "Fallacy 4: Standards are technical specifications being confused with, but applied to human learning capabilities." The whole philosophy behind the standards movement is that students are passive vessels into which what is to be learned is poured. Standards ignore that students have an active role to play in learning. Learning is a mechanistic process, not an organic process. Under this fallacy, "schools are assembly lines of knowledge" and students are sped through on a conveyor belt and learning is done to them as they pass through. Standards ignore the human side of learning entirely and view it as a process to which students are subjected.
• "Fallacy 5: High-stakes, state-mandated testing and assessment programs will improve student learning." In spite of our country's obsession with testing and accountability, our PISA scores have remained flat. Our College Board testing scores haven't dramatically increased. (That's if testing is the right measure of achievement, which I am not convinced that they are.) Testing has not resulted in higher graduation rates. It has resulted in fostering a massive culture of distrust with teachers as professionals. State-mandated testing and accountability systems have ultimately turned our schools into places where little else matters.
• "Fallacy 6: All high school students will benefit from being enrolled in college preparatory programs." This fallacy just isn't true. While statistically, college degree earners might earn more, it doesn't follow that they do, or that they can even get a job. There are countless college graduates unable to find jobs, and that are working in jobs with no better pay than non-college graduates. Additionally, to believe that every student is capable of doing college level work isn't realistic and ignores reality.
• "Fallacy 7: Students and parents are unconcerned about the psychological abuses by one-sized  fits-all standards and testing." Most of parents want what's best for their children. Subjecting all students to a one-size-fits-all standardized education where their individual learning needs are discarded at testing time is malpractice. In time when we're standardizing everything in our schools, we should be personalizing. Assessments given to students that we know aren't going to be successful is idiotic. Our parents should be more upset about all the testing we do in schools., but they are not because our policymakers work hard to disguise all the testing done behind rhetoric, jargon, and even changing the names of tests.
• "Fallacy 8: Centralization of educational decision-making benefits our nation." Education needs in our country have always been specific to locale, and that hasn't changed. Our students need their needs met by responsive local school systems who can meet their needs without being encumbered by a mass of regulations coming from the US Department of Education and state departments of instruction. These bureaucracies may mean well, but they are always too far removed to see the effects of their latest rounds of decrees from on high have in the local school. The only thing centralization of educational decision-making benefits are those hungry for power. Big centralized bureaucratic education systems fail to meet the needs of individual students.

Yesterday, the media continued the tradition of sounding the alarm: "Our schools are doomed according to the latest PISA, or Program for International Assessment, scores." NPR chimes in with this one, "PISA Test Results for US Students Are Sobering," and Huffington Post has this headline, "US Test Scores Remain Stagnant While Other Countries See Rapid Rise." NBC news echoed Huffington Post with this one, "US Teens Lag in Global Education Rankings as Asian Countries Rise to the Top,"  One has to question when this incessant obsession with international test scores is going to stop. Why all this fuss about being first in test scores? Do they really think that somehow, magically, our nation will be transformed and educated when we suddenly move up the rankings?

Then there's Education Secretary Arne Duncan who is "Crying-Wolf" once more, when he says, "We're seeing a Picture of Educational Stagnation" as he pointed out at Townhall.com. About the only thing stagnant is his incessant droning about these test scores every time they come out.  Duncan hasn't learned the old wisdom that says "If you cry wolf too many times, people stop listening to you." Perhaps its time we do just that. He, no doubt, will use these scores as an opportunity to push his educational agenda of National Standards, National Testing, and tying teacher evaluations to test scores. His playbook of propaganda has become all too transparent over the past several years.

The truth is out there though. As Diane Ravitch pointed out in her new book Reign of Error, and as she points out in this Washington Post op-ed, "The myth persists that once our nation led the world on international tests, but we have fallen from that exalted position in recent years. Wrong, wrong, wrong." Ravitch points out that "THE UNITED STATES HAS NEVER BEEN FIRST IN THE WORLD, NOR EVEN NEAR THE TOP, ON INTERNATIONAL TESTS."

So why this continued obsession with being first? We have never been first since international assessments were first given in the 1960s or 1970s. Does that mean we haven't ever been economically competitive since? I think the history of business and industry shows that the economy did well during various times even when our international test scores were in the tank. The fact is, OUR ECONOMIC VIABILITY IS NOT TIED TO TEST SCORES and I would add, being first on international assessments isn't going to change our economic fortunes.

Perhaps it's time we, as educators, stopped accepting this mythology perpetuated by Arne Duncan and his Department of Education. It's time for us to demand that the media quit participating in this absurd obsession with test scores and comparing our students' performance with other countries, when we know that other countries game the system and test only more selective students.

Arne Duncan has not yet learned that apples do not compare to oranges, except perhaps in the narrow world he lives in. Educators at all levels need to start countering and questioning this Duncanesque perversion of the truth, and quit buying-in to the false mythologies his department of education is perpetuating. Sure, our schools sometimes struggle. We who are in the schools fight to reach students every single day. We teach our hearts out, and we have Duncan's Doom and Gloom constantly bellowing from Washington.

As far as I am concerned, he has "Cried Wolf" for the last time. He has nothing else left to say worthwhile. So I am no longer listening to him. I can't remove him from the Department of Education, but I can choose to stop listening to his blather. The sooner the Obama administration moves on and Duncan moves out, we can hopefully stop chasing myths and get down to the real business of improving education.

The truth is we are not going to test our way to economic prosperity, so it's time to realize that.

It's clear that North Carolina governor Pat McCrory still doesn't get it. In today's Charlotte Observer, he once again is pushing that same old tried and failed thinking that for some reason he just can't let go: merit pay for teachers. He doesn't realize that it has been tried, and it does not work. In fact, North Carolina even had merit pay bonuses for test scores throughout the early part of the 2000's and it was dropped when the budget shortfalls started. I would send him a copy of Daniel Pink's book Drive and the Vanderbilt Merit Pay Study if I felt he would read it, but sadly, like our entire North Carolina Legislature, ideology rules over reason every single time. For once, I would like to see a politician in our state capital and sit down and look at the facts, and maybe even read a book or a genuine research study rather than an ALEC written bill or some think tank report.

Governor McCroy, and many others in our state political leadership just don't get this from the Vanderbilt Study:

"Offering teachers incentives of up to $15,000 to improve test scores produced no discernible differences in in academic performance..." Washington Post, "Teacher Bonuses Not Linked to Better Student Performance Study Finds"

Daniel Pink's book would also make a great addition to the governor's reading list as well as a few Alfie Kohn and Dan Ariely books. It appears even our governor doesn't understand teacher motivations. Yes, it's true that teachers and educators haven't gotten pay raises for the past few years. Teachers just want fair compensation for the work they do. Most that I know, aren't motivated by money, and our governor just doesn't understand that because perhaps his motivation is driven by that.

Governor McCroy does need to look at finding pay raises for all educators and not in the form of "performance pay" either. It simply will not work, unless you're looking for a way to be cheap and perhaps keep from giving all educators a raise. Let's hope that's not what the governor is trying to do. So far, there's no test alone that determines the quality of a teacher or educator. Defining teacher and educator effectiveness is just too complex to reduce to some kind of numerical rating system. At worst, Governor McCroy's selectively giving raises by merit pay, to beginning teachers, and only to science and math, shows that he still doesn't value all of our educators. He still doesn't get it and apparently can't even think and act for himself because these are the same tired ideas that politicians have been pushing for years.