Humility and Wisdom Necessary Ingredients to Reverse the Widget Effect

In June 2009 the New Teacher Project released its latest report, The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness (Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). Published a few months earlier, Larry Cuban's Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (2009), updates his landmark historical study of teaching practice, How Teachers Taught (1993). These two pieces, read side by side, high-light the challenges to improve teaching practice on a large scale. Taken together, they bring to bear economic and historical lenses on the persistent questions: Why do we continue to allow weak instruction to go unaddressed in schools? What can policymakers do to ensure more teachers in the work force are able to foster students' academic growth? The authors of The Widget Effect (Weisberg et al., 2009) coined this term to name the "flawed assumption that has pervaded American educational policy for decades--the assumption that teachers are interchangeable parts" (p. 9). The report studies teacher performance management policies and practices in 12 school districts in four states. Its major finding is that teacher evaluation systems fail to "produce meaningful information about teacher effectiveness" (p. 10). Without such information, administrators are unable to recognize and reward the most talented, weed out the most incompetent, and provide targeted support to improve the practice of the vast majority of teachers who fall in the middle of the performance range. For the authors, this amounts to an unacceptable indifference to instructional effectiveness that reflects a deep disrespect both for teachers and for the most vulnerable students in schools who are most likely to experience poor instruction. To enhance information administrators and teachers have available in making crucial teacher decisions, the report argues for a comprehensive reform of the evaluation systems and policies governing teachers in public schools. Specifically, they suggest a four-pronged strategy to reverse the Widget Effect. * Adopt a comprehensive performance evaluation system that fairly, accurately, and credibly differentiates teachers based on their effectiveness in promoting student achievement. * Train administrators and other evaluators in their teacher performance evaluation system and hold them accountable for using it effectively. * Integrate the performance evaluation system with critical human capital policies and functions such as teacher assignment, professional development, compensation, retention, and dismissal. * Adopt dismissal policies that provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit the district and a system of due process that is fair but efficient. (pp. 7-8) Like many, we support the report's central tenet, that treating teachers as widgets is disrespectful to teachers and detrimental to the profession. We find refreshing the idea of a teacher evaluation system that values teachers' individuality while holding teachers accountable for student learning. Although the report offers a sensible, rational approach to both raise the bar for instructional practice and root out subpar instruction in public schools, we believe it is unlikely to occur unless accompanied by a simultaneous transformation in the public policy/media climate as well as professional organizational norms and practices. To contextualize this claim, we turn to Cuban's Hugging the Middle (2009). In Hugging the Middle, Cuban (2009), who has lived his professional life with one foot in schools and the other in the world of educational research, aptly characterizes the policy/media climate in the following terms: Since the mid-1980s, state- and federally-driven reforms aimed at improving student academic achievement have sprinted through U.S. schools.... The theory behind the business-inspired standards-based reform, then and now, is that when state leaders clearly prescribe goals and outcomes that schools must meet, accompanied by clear rewards and penalties, yet leaving the process--how schools meet goals and benchmarks--to the districts and schools themselves, then schools will perform better than they have. …