Warning: <rant>

Controversial opinions.
Long road with
sharp curves ahead.
Author spent too much time in school,
as both a student and a professor.
YMMV.

My guess is that the article deliberately
omitted the main point: As good as the
teacher was and as good as the performance
of her students was, the evidence
from the testing of that teacher on
her 4th grade students on 4th grade work
was that
that teacher added relatively little to
what her students already had when they
entered her class. Or, in a sense, with
the way their teacher evaluation system works, the
good teachers of her students were in
K and grades 1, 2, 3 so that by the start
of grade 4 the 4th grade students were already doing
really well at grade 4 work and, with the way
the measurement of amount added by that 4th grade teacher
was done, that
teacher
was seen to have added relatively little. So,
adding relatively little, she was evaluated
as not doing well.

Added? Why the emphasis on added? Well, suppose
you are teaching 4th grade, your students come into
your class struggling with 1st grade work (it can
happen), you work hard, and in the one year get
your students good at 1st grade work, 2nd grade
work, and 3rd grade work, whew, three years of work
in one year, but, still don't have the students good at
4th grade work. So, such a teacher, taught three
years of work in one year, should, still,
be rated very effective. So, likely such situations
are the source of the interest in measuring
what was added.

Now measuring the added amount is likely,
in some cases,
tricky both for both testing and statistically.
And, likely the severity and rigidity of the system
kept the 4th grade teacher from moving her 4th
grade students on to 5th and 6th grade work
and, instead, kept them grinding away
at just the 4th grade work they already
knew so well that the teacher had little to
add. And if she had moved her students
ahead to 5th and 6th grade work, then the
test, of just 4th grade work, would not
show that progress and the teacher again
would be measured as not adding much.

So, net, for a 4th grade teacher,
a really good 3rd grade teacher is
a tough act to follow!

It's sad to see such stress and struggle
with K-12 teaching. We are so wound up
with the goal of
"no child left behind"
and, to this end, coming up with
systems to beat up
on teachers
that don't get us to that goal, that
we have really poor systems of evaluation
and, with high irony, fail at some basic
academic tasks and have far too many
false alarms. Bummer.

Or, if you can't do statistics well, then
don't do statistics at all. We're better
off with no statistics than with bad
statistics. Have I seen some really bad, we're
talking brain dead, statistics in K-12
education, up close, and personal? Yup!

Net, I wouldn't trust the Statistics and
Evaluation Branch of the New York State
Department of Education to get 2 + 2 = 4 correct.
Why? I've seen just way too much fumbling with
statistics. Or, bluntly, effective application
of statistics to important real situations is
mostly quite far beyond the abilities of
ordinary organizations -- it's just too hard
for them; they just can't get it right;
they make messes and do harm.

Here's one way to slow down nearly any
application of statistics: Go to some
statistics texts, get the assumptions,
and then demand that the assumptions be
justified. One assumption? Sure,
independence -- that assumption is
so powerful that, in anything much
closer to daily reality than
quantum mechanics or dice rolling,
it is essentially impossible to justify.

Looks like the goal of "no child left behind"
has generated a massive bozo explosion.

My dad was a fantastic educator, and his
description of the ideal in education was
a student sitting at one end of a log
and a good teacher sitting at the other end.
Try to characterize this educational environment
with statistics? As they say in New York,
f'get about it.

But, really, no worries, mate: There is a
safety valve -- the main source of education
anyway, the home. E.g., I had a friend who
went to a NYC school where most of the students
knew only two words, and they could say those two with
a wide variety of variations. The abbreviation
of those two words was just "MF". That's all
they knew. Not very articulate, but, then,
usually they did get their meaning across, but, then,
their meaning was not very advanced, either.

My friend? In the third grade,
he was sick at home for a week with the flu,
and his mother was shocked to discover that he didn't
know how to read. So, in that week, she taught
him. Then he knew how to read. In school?
Maybe he also learned different ways to say MF.

Education?
He did quite well: Got PBK at SUNY, Ph.D. at
Courant, and was a Member of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton. His education
was (1) in K-12 or (2) at home? Three guesses,
the first two don't count! Or, four years,
K-3, the schools couldn't teach him to
read, and his mother did it in a week.

Yes, maybe by grade 12 he knew the binomial
theorem, and maybe his mother didn't teach
him that at home, but, really, still, his
education, the real key to his education,
was at home.

My dad told me about a basic book on education,
Dewey, Democracy and Education. So, since
I was spending so much time in school, I wanted
to know why and read the book. At one point
Dewey defined education -- passing down
from one generation to the next, where he
was quite clear that what gets passed is
both the good and the bad, not just all good.
Well, net,
most of that passing down happens at home,
and there's next to nothing K-12 can do about it.

Actually, a lot of people understand this basic
fact and, thus, want education to start at
birth, that is, have the government provide
the basic home parenting in, shall we say, at risk
situations. I believe you will find that our
current President is in favor of this! In
other words, he sees the at risk situations
as so hopeless that for a solution it is
necessary to replace the home itself. Maybe
he's correct.

Sorry 'bout K-12: I trust that it really can
do babysitting, that is, keep the kids off the
streets and, thus, mostly out of crime and
drugs, keep the sixth and seventh grade
girls from getting pregnant, etc. For much
more, well, in some of the at risk situations,
tough to have much more; or watch the PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education-of-michell...

with "The Education of Michelle Rhee". She tried.
She was good. She tried hard, really hard.
In the end, she accomplished basically zip, zilch,
zero and nichts, nil, nada. The teachers themselves
commonly believed that the goals were just
hopeless. Or, she was unable
to make the K-12 schools make up for poor
homes. Sorry 'bout that. But didn't we know
that already?

Well, maybe George Bush believed that education
happened in K-12 and that, thus, we could solve
the problem of poor education by a program
like No Child Left Behind in K-12. Well,
W also believed that "The Iraqis are perfectly
capable of governing themselves", i.e., have
the country stay together, as one country,
a democracy, and
not split apart into Shiites, Sunnis,
Kurds, and Others, with fighting, torture,
atrocities, civil war, little problems like those.
So, just help the Iraqis write a constitution,
hold elections, and all will come together singing
"Why Can't We Be Friends?". Where did W get
that really strong funny stuff he'd been smoking?

Bush 41 was
smart enough to stay the heck out of Baghdad.
Bush 43 was not. Maybe W was not the brightest
bulb on the tree. "No child left behind"?
I understand:
W, if your father had only had that goal in mind!

"More educational statistics, Ma!". Then,
for the poor performers, "off with their
heads!*. Might not make the situation much
worse!

YMMV.

</rant>