A Flawed Proposal

The Lung Cancer Alliance-California on November 26, 2009 released the report “State makes little progress on improving lung cancer outcomes”.

Many of these “bad” cancer doctors should be fired. If the cancer rates are not going down these doctors are not getting the job done and should be relieved of their duties.

If teachers should be fired for not raising standardized test scores then cancer doctors should be fired for not reducing the rate of lung cancer.

It is more important to fire bad doctors because they contribute to pain and suffering and even death.
A “bad” teacher slows the learning process which the student and future good teachers can make up.

My argument is absurd! Not as absurd as President Obama’s plan to rate teachers on the standardized test scores of their students.

Many scholars have serious questions as to the validity of these tests. Why then is the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan supporting this plan? This plan raises questions as to M r. Duncan’s competence. How much classroom teaching experience does Mr. Duncan have? My guess is not much.

The second problem is that no matter how hard the teacher works, fifty percent of all test takers will score in the bottom half of test scores. All standardized tests are normed for this fifty-fifty breakdown.

Low test scores are more prevalent on average among poor children, English language learners and students with learning disabilities. Under the Obama plan teachers with large numbers of these children in their classes are doomed to failure. They have a future of bad evaluations, no promotions and likely termination. What the president and his advisers don’t seem to understand is that with education as well as medicine there are many variables outside the control of the doctor or the teacher. A teacher that works with a student one hour per day had no control over what went on in that child’s life in the years before that student sat in their class or the other one hundred sixty three hours of that week not spent in class.

The president shows he is very limited in his understanding of the educational process and the teacher’s role in that process. Teachers can’t make students learn. Education is a discovery process, a process that can be accepted or rejected, explored or tuned out.

Every teacher knows that many social and economic factors have dramatic impact on a child’s classroom performance. This is proven when wealthy and middle class children score far better on average than poor and working class children on these tests.

The best predictors of public school test scores are the zip codes. Test results mirror very closely the value of the homes and the annual incomes of the families in that zip code. The standardized test score game is very predictable; the wealthiest areas have the highest scores, the poorest areas, the lowest.

Rating teachers on student’s standardized test scores is dishonest and makes as much sense as rating cancer doctors on the death rate of their patients.

Let’s hope the president will reconsider this flawed proposal.