Test Patterns In NYC Schools
Most children are, in effect, wards of the state. They spend their weekdays in state institutions called schools and are meant to spend evenings and weekends doing homework that’s prescribed there. Education is inherently political, as suggested by the primordial work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic,” much of which is devoted to the subject—and Socrates’s defiance of the sophists may be the first successful challenge to a teachers’ union, for which he paid with his life.
There doesn’t seem to be much downside to challenging teachers’ unions these days, as seen, most recently, in the release last Friday of New York City’s ratings—deeply flawed ratings, as Amy Davidson explained earlier this week—of teachers working in grades four through eight. The consensus that seems to have crystallized around the issue—one that includes pretty much everyone but the city’s teachers’ union—is disturbing. It’s one of my political rules of thumb that, when liberals and conservatives advocate the same policy, it’s a harbinger of disaster, because they agree on a course of action for different reasons and neither faction poses serious questions regarding the other side’s logic.
In his 2010 Profile in the magazine of Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, Carlo Rotella writes that Duncan “argues for linking teachers’ pay to their students’ performance.” Duncan said that his objective is to equalize “educational opportunity” as it divides across racial, but, he says, even more across economic lines. Liberals such as Duncan hope that the rating of teachers on the basis of their impact on students’ test scores will help poor children have the benefit of teachers who are as good as those teaching the children of wealthier families. Conservatives favor the policy for bringing the free-market element of reward and punishment to education, and, along the way, weakening the protection that unions afford teachers who are deemed to be underperforming.
Both sides seem to accept the view that the high-stakes testing of students is a good way to assess both their achievements and those of their teachers. The sorry state of this non-debate leaves me—as the father of two teen-agers, both of whom (one a recent high-school graduate, the other currently a high-school student) have always gone to New York City public schools—strangely nostalgic for the heyday of an public official whose points of view I have often found unpalatable, even offensive, then as now—namely, William J. Bennett, who was Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan from 1985 through 1988. Bennett (who is now a radio and television commentator), advocated the testing of teachers (and now favors comparative evaluations). But, while Secretary, he also spoke frequently, forcefully, and specifically (even if wrong-headedly) about what was being taught in schools—about curriculum.