It Goes Without Saying

current education policies are on the wrong track, and it's because people who propose "reform" don't know one goddamned thing about education, never having taught themselves.

Education, it must be said over and over and over again, is NOT a business and schools can't be run on business models.

That hasn't stopped these ignorant reformers for trying to do it, though.

Richard Rothstein:

But there is a bigger problem, arising from a misunderstanding by policy enthusiasts of the econometric findings. What these studies actually find is that, in any year, some teachers get achievement gains from students that are about 0.2 standard deviations better than those of students who have typical teachers. The policy enthusiasm for closing the achievement gap simply by improving teacher quality stems from multiplying this result by five and concluding that a student who had such teachers for five years in a row would gain a full standard deviation (5 X 0.2) advantage. This assumes that the gains students make during the year in which they had a good teacher persist and can be added to in each subsequent year. But there is absolutely no evidence for such a proposition in the econometric studies or elsewhere. No econometrician has actually observed students, or data regarding such students, who have achieved such cumulative gains for five years in a row under the tutelage of superior teachers. The most reasonable speculation is that students who make big gains in a year will find it more and more difficult to make similarly big gains in subsequent years, even with the best teachers. The earlier gains are likely to be much easier. Would the decline in gain be less if the next teacher was also in the top quintile? Nobody knows. It is a topic on which there has been absolutely no research.

And finally, even if we could confirm that the effect of teacher quality on student achievement was as great as these misinterpretations of econometric studies suggest, we should remember that the studies themselves are based only on basic skills test scores of math alone or reading alone. As we have learned from the corruption stimulated by No Child Left Behind (and documented in Death and Life), teachers responsible for greater gains might be accomplishing this with more test preparation, and less quality instruction, than teachers responsible for smaller gains. Are high-quality teachers of math the same teachers as high-quality teachers of reading? Do teachers who do a great job of teaching math also do a great job of inspiring a love of the arts, of teaching history and civic responsibility, of developing students' ability to solve conflicts peaceably? We have no answers to these questions? If we did, should we seek to replace teachers who only do an average job of teaching math, but a spectacular job of developing character?

Educators have no control over outside environmental factors.