Just why are teachers unionized?

As I write on Feb. 22, it has been interesting to view the revolt going on in the Wisconsin State Capitol, with public employee unions and their supporters protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s non-negotiable demand that they be stripped of collective bargaining rights. The monetary issues involved (increased contributions and copays for pensions and health benefits) have already been agreed to by the unions. But the governor insists he will not compromise on essentially killing the unions, which would have no purpose if they cannot bargain collectively over work conditions.

There are several intriguing aspects to this battle. For one, if the state cannot bear the financial implications of unionized public workers, why were police and firefighter unions exempted from the demand? One cannot help but notice that the exempt unions are the ones whose members have been more reliable supporters of Republican causes and candidates, whereas the targeted unions have more often supported Democrats. Union PAC money is almost the only potential counterweight to the now-unlimited funds available to candidates from corporate interests. Recall for a moment just who caused the Great Recession that undermined our security and nearly bankrupted our schools, cities, and states. In an era when income disparity has set new records evoking the Robber Baron period of our history, it is a useful distraction if the majority of us can be set at each other’s throats over who is being pushed to Third World living standards faster. (Pay no attention to the obscenely rich behind the curtain!) Are all these concerns irrelevant to the dispute? Likely not, but they are not my topic for the day.

I want to write about a particular target of the governor’s demand: teachers’ unions.

Why are teachers unionized anyway? Aren’t they professionals, and don’t we associate unions with protection for blue-collar workers from dangerous working conditions? You have to know something about the history of American public education to understand the difference it made to have teachers’ unions.

Pre-college teaching used to be a largely female profession, because teachers were paid so little their income could only supplement, rather than actually support, a household. Teachers who did try to support families routinely took minimum-wage summer jobs for the extra income. (I know this from the teachers I worked with every summer during my high school and college years as a waitress. We earned 25 cents an hour plus tips. They all had at least one master’s degree.) The best and brightest young women were often attracted to teaching when there were few other opportunities for them. Now, in an era with every work sphere open to them, most women with several degrees will expect a professional wage. In right-to-work states like Arizona, the starting salary for public school teachers of about $26,000 certainly discourages people with other options from entering the profession.

But decent wages and benefits are not the only reasons teachers had to organize and bargain collectively.

Before unionization, teachers were treated much like children: their behavior on and off the job had to be above reproach from the most conservative elements of society. Single women teachers, for example, had to live in chaperoned environments such as approved boarding houses. If they lived on their own, who knows what immoral trouble they might get into! Not so long ago, marriage — a hallmark of adulthood — automatically disqualified a woman from teaching. Even after married women were allowed to remain as teachers, they were routinely excluded once they were obviously pregnant.

Beyond those plainly indefensible restrictions, however, the entire system of public education conspired to keep teachers — both male and female — subservient. They were subject to the whims and prejudices of administrators and school boards. A parental complaint about a reading assignment, a grade, or something said in class could get them summarily fired. There was no respect for their professional expertise, which could be overridden by school boards with no educational credentials or experience. (In some ways, that lack of respect is ascendant once more, now that so many believe our most needy and vulnerable students can best be taught by Teach For America participants with five weeks of training and zero experience.) Authoritarian and paternalistic administrators expected quiet compliance and punished “insubordination.” Those we expected to help our children grow into adults with initiative and independence of thought and action were, themselves, treated like children.

If we truly believe that K–12 education is more than just child care, then we must treat its practitioners like the professionals they are. They must be empowered to continuously improve their practice as research and experience show us better ways. They must have the protection of due process to insulate them from the vagaries of public opinion about what and how to teach. The return of public shaming (as when the Los Angeles Times last summer created its own system of ranking teacher effectiveness based upon test scores and published the names of those they deemed ineffective — leading to at least one teacher suicide) is a throwback to that repressive model from an earlier century.

So, even though I have never been a union member nor lived with one and was raised in a very non-unionized part of the country, I can see clear reasons why teachers, in particular, would want to protect the unions that protect them.

But protection of members is not the only useful function unions serve. Educational lobbyists and union PACs are the only powerful advocates to counter the now-enormous influence of wealthy philanthropists and foundations in the fight over public education reform. Few members of the public seem aware of just how much a few extremely rich folks have changed the priorities and methods of reform. Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates and Eli Broad have no training or expertise in education, for example, but they have exercised barely checked control over where funding for public education is directed. (A brief example: charter schools in New York City are gifted with much higher per-pupil funding and allowed to restrict the number of special-education and English language–learning students, who are dumped in nearby regular public schools, which are then deemed failures for not producing better results with less funding and more needy students.) Parents and other community members may have concerns over these policies and priorities, but they are not organized to effectively advocate against them. Teachers’ unions are. When they are stripped of that capacity, the debate will be completely one-sided. We will all suffer for it.

Academics Aren’t Everything

It is repeated like a mantra in K–12 education that our focus must be on “improving student achievement.” I doubt that anyone disagrees with that as our primary goal. But I think, sometimes, that our focus on academics alone may be a mistake.

Why? Because it leads us to concentrate too much on curriculum and teaching and not enough on building better students, future workers, and human beings. We need to pay attention to the nonacademic skills and habits that are just as important to success in school, on the job, and in life.

My perspective on this is informed by nearly 20 years of work for a university and for a nonprofit organization in education outreach — that is, outside groups and individuals trying to help K–12 schools achieve their mission. Over those years, these outreach activities evolved from teacher in-service, push-in classroom activities, drop-in tutoring, and group tours and events for children to almost all one-on-one mentoring. Our focus changed as we realized what was really needed: not just changes in curriculum or teaching methods, but changed students.

Over and over, we saw students from the least supportive backgrounds succeeding through sheer determination, while others with many advantages languished. The difference in outcomes was all about personality and character — and traditional academic support does not teach those vital attributes.

University researchers are now demonstrating that “noncognitive indicators” can predict young people’s success in college and on the job. (See, for example, Michigan State University’s Group for Research and Assessment of Student Potential.) The number one predictor of success is “conscientiousness.” When a teen works hard, perseveres through difficulties, shows up regularly, and completes work as expected, he or she will almost certainly do well.

The critical step is that teens must learn to take the initiative, to realize that no one else can determine where they will go in life. Mentoring is one route to that kind of “eureka!” moment. The programs I have worked with have had as their primary goal this transformation of children into self-motivated adults.

While many teens have accumulated appalling deficits in basic skills, they need much more than subject-matter tutorials. They need help with analyzing their motivational problems, with learning to set study schedules, with devising strategies to get out of the deep holes in which they find themselves. Many have no clue, for example, how to deal with being in over their heads except by denial: ignoring homework, cutting classes, and flunking out. They need to be led through determining what can be salvaged, and negotiating with teachers and counselors over the best step to take next: intensified tutoring, makeup work, alternative assessments, changes in sections or entire classes. They need to become convinced that they are not just victims, that there are things they can do to improve their situation. Moreover, they need to learn that only they can rescue themselves. Mentors can diagnose and work on gaps in basic knowledge, can provide hand-holding and confidence-building, but the students must internalize the fact that no one can pour knowledge into them. They are the only ones who can guarantee their own learning. This realization transforms them in a way that no amount of factual knowledge ever could.

I also know, however, that high-quality, long-term, one-on-one mentoring is very difficult to arrange and to sustain. It is not, however, the only solution to the passiveness that holds so many young people back.

We are now learning ways to structure project-based learning and various kinds of team-based learning to encourage just this kind of social-emotional development. The New Tech High program, for example, which we hope to begin at our high school next fall, offers one such format for developing truly college- and job-ready students. The program site I visited last fall in Indiana offered grades for “work ethic” and “collaboration” as well as for content mastery. One could not receive an “A” without behaving in a dependable and conscientious way. Letting down the team prompted conferences that were very like performance reviews on the job, leading the student through a self-analysis of how he or she had failed and what to do differently. The student-created cultural code also discouraged absenteeism, intimidation, theft, and other bad behavior that will not be tolerated in college or work environments.

The key to the success of this program, I believe, is treating students more like adults (and teachers more like professionals, but that’s another topic). People tend to rise to meet higher expectations, after all. Children and teens can grow enormously through taking on more responsibilities. They gain poise and are empowered by success in completing real-work projects and presenting their results. Nothing builds self-esteem and confidence like accomplishing something you thought was beyond you. Challenge and collaboration, when carefully structured, can allow students to risk failure by aiming higher.

You cannot excel if you never try. Trying and succeeding whet one’s appetite for more. Enthusiastic and self-motivated students can’t be held back.

Teacher “Accountability” Systems

“Value-added” performance measures, which purport to rate teachers by whether a year of their instruction produces a year of learning gains in their students, are the new high-stakes method of deciding who goes and who stays in K–12 education. In pursuit of competitive grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), most states (including Michigan) adopted requirements for the use of “effectiveness data” in determining compensation levels for teachers and principals. This data is also, increasingly, being used to justify firing “ineffective” educators. I will limit myself here, for reasons of space, to discussing such performance evaluation schemes for teachers. I have a several concerns about them.

Are they accurate?

Can we all agree that the point of any teacher evaluation system should be to improve the quality of teaching? If so, then such systems must, first of all, be accurate in their analysis of the existing quality. If they do not, in fact, fairly represent the strengths and weaknesses of teacher performance, then they are worthless for the purpose of improving it.

This — the blatant inaccuracy of the evaluations — is the root reason for teacher anxiety and loathing regarding the “accountability” systems to which they are increasingly subject. While many such schemes advocate “multiple measures” of effectiveness, too many are based exclusively on students’ standardized test scores. The error rates in such data are simply unacceptable for high-stakes decisions. I imagine that teachers would not fear evaluations that mistakenly offer them extra help in improving their professional practice, but they would find it unacceptable to lose their jobs over bad data. Wouldn’t you?

Answer to the above question: Student test scores are imprecise measures — they do not fairly and accurately measure student learning outcomes. The U.S. Department of Education’s Technical Methods Report “Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains” [Schochet & Chiang, Mathematica Policy Research, July 2010, http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104004/] concludes that typical value-added performance evaluations of teachers are unacceptably imprecise. Specifically, “in a typical performance measurement system, 1 in 4 teachers who are truly average in performance will be erroneously identified for special treatment, and 1 in 4 teachers who differ from average performance by 3 to 4 months of student learning will be overlooked.” And that is assuming the use of three years’ worth of data; the reliability is approximately half as good for only one year of data. These error rates, they note, are greatly understated by certain assumptions, such as that students are randomly assigned to schools and to teachers. There are no controls, therefore, for differences in resources among schools or for differences among student cohorts.

The authors reference “findings from the literature and new analyses that more than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under control of the teacher. Thus, multiple years of performance data are required to reliably detect a teacher’s true long-run performance signal from the student-level noise.”

Moreover, the paper’s authors note that error rates they analyzed are only one factor (they list six others) that must be taken into account in designing and using appropriately any value-added estimators of performance. Not attending properly to such features in design and application makes the use of such schemes for high-stakes decisions both ineffective in achieving their stated purpose and manifestly unjust.

Do they improve teaching and learning?

The inaccuracy and unfairness of judging teacher performance almost entirely by student standardized test scores is only one problem with value-added performance evaluations. If we are truly interested in improving educational outcomes — and that is the point, isn’t it? — we must also consider the collateral damage they do.

• They undermine collaboration, which effective schools must encourage. Scoring teachers in ways that make them compete against one another inhibits or even discourages the sharing of lore and techniques that can make everyone better teachers. I recall the havoc created under Jacques Nasser at Ford several years ago when engineers were force-ranked in their evaluations (my late husband was coerced into doing some of the ranking then). This zero-sum game, in which one person winning meant another losing, penalized working together and encouraged sabotage of colleagues. It has taken many years to recover from the damage done. Is this the aim of folks who want schools to be “run more like a business”?

• They distort educational decision-making. Which classes students are placed in (should they be challenged or slotted where they can safely deliver higher test scores?); which students are held back or eased out of a school (dumped by charters or shunted into “alternative” schools); what is emphasized in classes (only what is tested); what level of thinking is encouraged (rote memory versus analysis or independent thought) — practices are encouraged that explicitly undermine good education.

• They are contradictory and inconsistent. On the one hand, today’s reformer bloc assumes that anyone can teach — or can administer a school or a district, for that matter. They find solutions in recruiting and placing “outsiders” through Teach for America or via the Broad Superintendents Academy, for example, with brief training and no experience. Yet the punitive teacher evaluation systems are predicated on the assumption that firing “bad” teachers and principals will improve schooling. There is no sense that these people, who have committed time, money, and working years to their professions, can or should be helped, instead, to improve their practice.

I recognize that public education is inherently political, in that we ultimately do what the people want. That does not mean, however, that those of us on the inside cannot try to change the tenor and direction of the public conversation. I deeply believe that the punitive tone of today’s education reform talk undermines the putative aims of reform. Blaming allegedly incompetent educators for all that is wrong in our society may get the rest of us off the hook (and, I add cynically, may serve the unstated interests of certain politicians and of certain corporations that benefit enormously from public spending on testing, textbooks, software, distance learning, et cetera ad nauseum), but scapegoating will not fix those problems. Never has and never will.

What would work?

I cannot stop at stating the problem but must at least make reference to my own preferred solutions. Teacher performance schemes are not all the rage just because we, collectively, want to blame teachers for things not under their control. All of us and all of our children have experienced at least one truly terrible teacher in our lives, and all of us would like to spare others that experience. So, how should teachers be evaluated?

Classroom observation is a time-honored way of seeing how teachers actually teach, even if it is rarely done often enough or with enough specific, useful feedback to make a difference. Teacher Larry Ferlazzo writes that effective observers “know our school, our students and me — and [have] judgment and skills I … respect. I know they are genuinely concerned about my professional development. They understand that helping me improve my skills is the best thing they can do to help our students…. These purposeful visits have produced detailed and helpful feedback that has made me an even better educator.” The Mathematica report notes that “value-added measures and principals’ assessments of teachers, in combination, are more strongly predictive of subsequent teacher effectiveness than each type of measure alone” [emphasis added].

Multiple data points regarding student assessment are required for valid measurements of student learning. A single set of pre- and post-tests annually is insufficient. Teachers working together to create common curricula and assessments for the same classes can not only assure that all students get the same exposure to a subject, but also help one another jointly improve their classroom practice to achieve similarly high levels of learning. This kind of professional collaboration actually does produce the result we say we want from performance evaluation systems: teachers helping one another to consistently become better at their craft, so that students can perform better not just on tests but in life.

For the point of the evaluation is not just to find out how well or how poorly teachers are performing. It is — or at least it should be — to make them better. If we do not believe that teachers, too, can learn, then we do not believe in education at all.

Note: the statistical mathematics used in the Mathematica study cited goes beyond any “expertise” I developed in a single statistical methods course 40 years ago, so my analysis is subject to error. The conclusions that are not direct quotations may be inadvertently misrepresentative.

Publication URL corrected 8 Jan 11.

May 2011 addition: you have got to see this animation summarizing Dan Pink’s Drive work on motivation and incentives!

So, how DID Finland do it?

I’ve written before about how we should emulate the way Finland pulled itself up, from a stultified, centrally controlled, Soviet-Era educational system to one in which all children perform spectacularly on valid international tests of student achievement. Here, I’ll share what they did and how.

Their success is real

First, let’s establish that their success is real. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests are sponsored by the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), although even more non-OECD nations now participate. These tests in reading, mathematics, and science were administered to 15-year-olds in 41–65 countries in 2000, 2003, 2006, and 2009 (results expected in December 2010). Each testing cycle focuses on one of the subject areas, with minor assessments of the others. The international average given is for the OECD (that is, developed) nations.

PISA tests are the gold standard of achievement testing. In order to do well on them, students cannot simply recall factual knowledge; they must extend what they know into unfamiliar settings to solve problems. Students who do well on them have also done well in life — the ultimate test of the success of schooling. In the 2006 cycle, Finland’s students were the top performers in math and science and number two in reading. (For comparison, U.S. students ranked 25th of 30 for math, 21st of 30 for science, and last in reading.) In the 2003 cycle, Finland was at the top in all three categories.

Student success is consistent across all schools

Differences in student performance within schools are generally taken as reflecting natural variation in inborn talent. Variation between schools, however, is an indicator of social inequality — in most places, there is some segregation by socio-economic class among schools, and the wealthier students’ schools have more resources. PISA offers sophisticated statistical analysis of performance controlling for class. Analysis of data shows that, unlike ours, many nations’ students achieve not only high average scores but also scores that do not vary much by socio-economic status: they have realized the ideal of uniformly high student achievement that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) set for us. Again, Finland is tops when it comes to equality of opportunity and performance. And, please note that Finland is no longer homogeneous: recent immigrants, mostly from poorer countries, speak more than 60 languages. In some urban schools, half of the students are from immigrant families whose native tongue is not Finnish.

Here are some examples of results, comparing Finland and the U.S. In the 2006 Science test, mean performance was 563 for Finland (the top performer that year) and 489 for the U.S. (and 500 for the average of OECD nations, on a 1000-point scale). An indicator of unequal opportunity leading to unequal results is the “between-school variance explained by the index of economic, social, and cultural status of students and schools.” This variance was 19% of the total variance in tested countries for the USA but only 1% for Finland. In the 2003 Mathematics test, mean performance was 544 for Finland and 483 for the USA (and 500 for the OECD average). The between-school variance explained by these factors was, again, 19% for the USA and less than 1% for Finland. Even without any controlling for these variables, performance varies by less than 5% overall among Finnish schools. Nearly ALL their students do quite well.

This success does not cost a fortune

I am always wary of examples of success in schools that spend so much more than average as to be irrelevant in the real world of shrinking funding for schools and other civic priorities. For example, the SEED school in Washington, DC, that was put on a pedestal in the recent documentary “Waiting for Superman,” is a residential school that spends $35,000 per student per year — an unattainable ideal for the vast majority of students.

But Finland has transformed its public schools to offer equal opportunity and to achieve consistently excellent results without spending a fortune. OECD figures show that Finland’s total expenditures on educational institutions, expressed as a percentage of Gross National Product, have actually declined over recent decades. Pasi Sahlberg, a Senior Education Specialist at the World Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki, produced an analysis that shows this, in “Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach.” He found only a weak correlation between student performance and “cumulative expenditures per student from age 6–15.” This figure for Finland was at the OECD average, whereas U.S. spending was about 20% above that average. Note, of course, that Finland’s comprehensive social welfare system provides much more support to less wealthy families than does the American system.

AN ASIDE: The dataset and tools for manipulating it at http://pisacountry.acer.edu.au/index.php are truly amazing. I encourage you to look into them yourself. When news media do reports on PISA results, as they surely will in December, their summaries and assertions may not be valid reflections of the data, but you can judge for yourself. PISA provides a Data Analysis Manual. You can even “Take the Test” of sample questions yourself to see how much more is demanded of students today! Or, use the Dept. of Education’s International Data Explorer interface at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/idepisa/. If you feel under-prepared to make statistical judgments, a report on US performance in 2006 from the National Center for Education Statistics can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008016.

* * *

To summarize, results on this well-respected test series demonstrate not only that Finland’s students are top performers, but also that their performance varies much less by economic, cultural, and social status than in our country. And they do not “throw money” at education to get these results.

So, what do they do differently that we could learn from?

Sahlberg, cited above, notes that Finland has not adopted the “market-oriented reform strategies” that have overtaken much of the rest of the developed world, including the U.S.: “Consequential accountability accompanied by high-stakes testing and externally determined learning standards has not been part of Finnish education policies.” Instead, cultivating leadership, emphasizing teaching and learning, encouraging creativity, ensuring equity, enabling and trusting teacher professionalism, and “intelligent accountability” have wrought this “miracle.” It was accomplished beginning in the 1990s, when Finland was undergoing “a severe economic decline characterized by a major banking crisis.” Sound familiar? Yet, ten years into the process, Finland began to be ranked by the World Economic Forum as one of the world’s most competitive economies, a distinction it has maintained since then. It is also ranked as one of the least corrupt nations — something we may have difficulty emulating.

We do not have the culture of trust, the respect for public institutions, and the shared values of honesty and equity that Finns enjoy, and that enabled their progress in transforming their educational culture. But, clearly, this values-based approach has worked for them — and reform efforts based on competition and coercion have just as clearly failed here, as elsewhere. Student performance on valid tests such as the PISA ones has not improved, despite the nationwide push that began with NCLB and continues under the Obama administration education policies. Collateral damage from these policies continues to increase, as measured by student drop-out rates, cheating on high-stakes tests, rock-bottom teacher morale and steady defections from the profession, elimination of flexibility and creativity in teaching methods, and a narrowing of curriculum down to the most basic of “core” subjects. What we are doing is not working. What do we have to lose by trying an alternative path?

The first step, it seems to me, is a national conversation about shared beliefs and values. No Mission Statement can make any sense until we establish that context first. Do we truly believe that all children can learn, given enough time and the right support? Do we truly believe that all children should have the same opportunity to succeed, which opportunity must be embodied in the uniformly excellent teachers, facilities, programs, and resources available to them? Do we truly believe that a well-trained and experienced teacher actually has some professional expertise worthy of our respect? Do we truly believe that a well-educated and superbly functioning adult needs more than the “three R’s” to get there? Do we even believe that our society will be better off if all of our adults are allowed and enabled to meet those standards? These are the kinds of beliefs and ideals that underlay the Finnish success.

The policies that flow from such consensus on values would be very different from what we have now. It might seem impossible to reach national consensus on anything, at the moment. But it most assuredly will never happen unless we begin to have these conversations. And we could make a start on the process at the state level, meanwhile. Suppose we subsidized higher education for teachers, to include the master’s level required for all Finnish teachers, in exchange for their teaching in Michigan’s schools for a certain period of time? We could make the payback period shorter for work in our needier schools and communities. This subsidy should be offered on a competitive basis, to attract our best and brightest to this important profession. And suppose we got back to reducing the inequity in per-child funding in our public schools from one district to the next? Suppose our state mandates for days or hours in the school year made allowance for time for teachers to collaborate and to develop their skills on an ongoing basis? Suppose we lobby our political representatives to allow us to divert some of the absolute fortune we spend on mandated testing of nearly all students in most subjects every year to targeted testing with results that are available to teachers in time to be used to actually guide instruction?

Are these ideas really so crazy? Does it make more sense to keep doing what is not working?

Waiting for Superman

I’ve been waiting to comment on the documentary Waiting for Superman, until I could let my emotions cool. For, make no mistake, this movie is brilliantly designed to evoke an emotional response. Anyone with access to televised news over the past several weeks has surely seen clips of cute but desperate children waiting and hoping to be chosen by lottery for the charter school slots that will make or break their lives.

I understand the rationale and the power of such vignettes. At least two generations of idealistic young people were attracted to careers in education by Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967) and Savage Inequalities (1991), both of which books illustrated with heart-breaking clarity the patently unequal educational opportunity available to poor children in this country — and tolerated by most of us without a whimper.

Superman, however, is different. It is taken as some sort of in-depth analysis of the problems with American public schools and purports to offer a solution: the charter schools that those heart-tugging children are so desperate to get into. I, of course, made a decision long ago (partly motivated by that first Kozol book and partly in reaction to my own experience with 12 years of parochial schooling) to support the best possible public schools as a solution that reaches every child. I have followed through on that commitment for decades, by volunteering thousands of hours in the classroom, starting and contributing ongoing effort to parent groups, working on a campaign to bring greater equity to public school funding in Michigan, and serving as a public school board trustee for 20 years. So, I am clearly on the side of public school reform that reaches all children — and that means fixing and investing in the structure and the people we have, rather than throwing everything out to start over.

Obviously, then, my inclination is to resent the emotional manipulation of the film and to cry out for a cooler-headed analysis of what is wrong and how to fix it.

I will begin by noting that the Harlem Children’s Zone model, which is implicitly touted as the answer, is no such thing. Not because it is a bad model, but because it is not replicable. Two-thirds of the project’s considerable expenditures come from private foundations and wealthy benefactors. The $16,000 per student spent in the classroom is just the beginning. A wrap-around series of social services begins with “Baby College” for expectant parents, and extends through free pre-school programs, free after-school programs, additional funding for “healthy meals,” in-school medical and dental care (with personnel paid for by a local hospital and foundation), and free college search advising. Additionally, the project organizes block associations, makes over playgrounds and parks, and renovates housing. In other words, it attempts to completely change poor children’s lives by changing every aspect of their environment.

Does anyone seriously think this model is coming to a school near them?

So let’s not pretend that it is The Answer.

Even the more attainable, garden-variety charter school is hardly a panacea. Waiting for Superman implies that they are all so wonderful that families do and should fight over getting slots in them. But the facts do not bear out this impression. A well-respected (i.e., not slanted) study by Stanford University found just 17% of charter schools performing better, 37% worse, and the remainder about the same as traditional public schools.

A better solution — one inadvertently endorsed by the film — is the Finland model. Setting aside that that nation’s children benefit from a birth-to-death social safety net that the Harlem Children’s Zone can only dream of, there are elements that we could emulate in an attempt to copy that country’s climb from the bottom to the top of international educational standings. (See Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education or Steady Work: How Finland Is Building a Strong Teaching and Learning System for a detailed account of how this transition was accomplished.) Teaching is a prestigious profession there; only a small percentage of applicants are accepted to the state-paid teacher education programs; the (fully unionized) teachers are very well paid. They are also empowered to design valid assessments themselves — and results on them correlate highly with international measures of student achievement. Ours do not.

The lesson I take from this is that treating and supporting teachers as professionals (which includes high standards in their recruitment, training, and performance) is a proven way to make tremendous progress, quickly, for all.

What motivates workers?

In the spring of 2009, I remember being infuriated by a Wall Street Journal article in which it was called “poetic justice” that the United Auto Workers would “finally have a direct stake in the survival and prosperity of General Motors and Chrysler.” The reporter was referring to the negotiated payments to the VEBA (voluntary employee beneficiary association) for UAW retiree health care being paid in stock rather than the agreed-upon cash, due to impending bankruptcy. I (not a UAW member nor a relative of one) found that opinion both stupid and insulting. In what way did auto workers not have a direct stake before? Their pay/pensions and benefits have always been dependent on the prosperity of the companies, and most of them held (now worthless) stock, as well — because they believe in and are proud of their work! When you are intimately involved in making tangible products that you, your friends, and your neighbors use every day, you are both literally and figuratively invested in their quality and in the success of the company. I think that personal stake is something not well understood by folks far removed from manufacturing. Pride is a powerful motivator.

What has this to do with education? It is now widely assumed that educators can be spurred to better performance by that universal motivational tool: money. The federal Race to the Top program of competitive grants specifically insists that teacher pay and job security be linked to performance — and that performance is to be measured largely by student performance on standardized tests. All over the country, teachers are being urged to give up tenure in favor of the possibility of much higher pay, should their charges’ test scores improve dramatically. The underlying rationale for this “pay for performance” is that teachers will thus be motivated to work harder at their jobs. This assumption, like the WSJ assumption that auto workers did not care about their companies or products, is also stupid and insulting. I cannot imagine that anyone goes into public school teaching for the money. The pay starts out low and, although it then doubles as experience and effectiveness increase, it also tops out at a relatively low ceiling given the level of responsibility and the number of degrees earned by most teachers.

No, teachers, I feel quite safe in generalizing, had less mercenary and more altruistic motives for going into their field. While it is possible that low pay can discourage and disaffect them, it does not logically follow that higher pay will energize and encourage them. Human motivation is simply not that one-dimensional. Once we get past a certain level of daily subsistence, we are much more satisfied by the intrinsic rewards of work — doing something well, making a real difference, growing in expertise, feeling useful and productive — than by how much we are paid for it. That is why so many materialistic Americans reach mid-life thinking “Is that all there is?” despite having reached their goals for acquiring all kinds of expensive stuff. The notion that more money will result in better teaching is insulting because it assumes teachers are both lazy and materialistic.

And now it has been proven wrong, as well.

The National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University (funded by a $10M grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education) employs “specialists in social and behavioral science, statistical analysis, economic theory, and policy analysis” to conduct “randomized field trials and evaluations of existing pay-for-performance programs” in public education. The report on one such study, the Project on Incentives in Teaching, or POINT, was released last week. This five-year study and analysis of a three-year randomized trial examined the effects on student outcomes of paying eligible Nashville teachers bonuses of up to $15,000 per year for increasing their students’ scores on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program tests.

The bottom line? “We sought a clean test of the basic proposition: If teachers know they will be rewarded for an increase in their students’ test scores, will test scores go up? We found that the answer to that question is no.”

This does not mean that teachers should not be paid more, but it should cause us to reconsider the simplistic pay-for-test-scores plans. If we really want to apply business principles to the improvement of public education, we should go back to W. Edwards Deming, who considered pay for performance one of the “Seven Deadly Diseases.” Instead, Deming suggests a continuous cycle of collaborative planning, implementation, evaluation of results, and adaptation of the plan in order to truly change an organization. And, imagine what being treated like professionals in this way would do for teacher morale and motivation!

May 2011 addition: you have got to see this animation summarizing Dan Pink’s Drive work on motivation and incentives!

How Language Affects Thought

I have long had a layman’s interest in linguistics, which seems inherently fascinating. Anyone who has ever beheld a child learning her native language through observation and trial-and-error will appreciate the complexity and magnificence of this apparently effortless achievement. Grammar is so illogical and yet inflexible that specialists have great difficulty trying to impose a set of rules describing it. Yet a toddler quickly learns — usually through simple modeling and no direct instruction — to replace logical expressions such as “I falled down” or “I want meats for dinner” with their standard versions. Ah, if only we could soak up new languages in adulthood half as well as we all did as babies!

Long ago, I watched a NOVA program in which a speaker of Basque repeated the same pair of words, which had separate meanings and sounds to her, and could not, for the life of me, hear the difference. The point of the program was how we are born being able to hear and to say all the sounds of every language but, in true use-it-or-lose-it fashion, unused neurons are gradually pruned away until we can only hear the sounds of our own language(s). So, adult Japanese learning English will say “Ros Angeres” not because they cannot say the “L” sound, but because they cannot hear the difference. (Presumably, a speech therapist can teach us to form sounds properly, just as profoundly deaf people can learn to speak understandably.) Similarly, a non-native English speaker might be unable to distinguish between the spoken phrases “that’s tough” and “that stuff,” although a native speaker will be able to without the help of any context.

Back in the 1980s, I enjoyed the theory behind Robert Logan’s book The Alphabet Effect. Building on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, he asserted that the phonetic alphabets of Western cultures, as opposed to the ideographic writing of the Chinese, both enabled and encouraged the development of deductive reasoning, abstract thought, and empirical science. Think of the implications of needing only a few dozen characters to write down anything, rather than needing new symbols for every single idea. Logan believes that, because Chinese characters are analogs of the words they represent, the Chinese are conditioned to reason by analogy. Westerners, using “meaningless” symbols (letters) to express ideas, are more likely and able to express them without space or time contexts — that is, as universal truths. This notion of “objectivity” is the beginning of the scientific method. The alphabet even gave us a handy way to begin to classify data (by alphabetizing), and classification systems are absolutely necessary in order to manipulate large amounts of data effectively. The concrete and practical nature of Chinese writing and thought made them terrific inventors. The abstract and theoretical nature of Western writing and thought made for better transfer and wider application of inventions.

Who knows whether any of this is true, but it is certainly thought-provoking. It indicates how much of what we find “natural” or “intuitive” is actually based in culture.

A recent New York Times article, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” by Guy Deutscher, expands upon the idea that the particular features of our native language may not constrain what we can think about, but they do change our habits of thought by obliging us to think, often, about something. An obvious example is that English requires us to specify, using tenses, when an event occurred — thus making us habitually take note of time, which has obvious implications for scientific research. Many languages (Spanish, French, German, Russian), unlike English, assign gender to everything — and “various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them.”

But the concept that was new to me, and so truly intriguing, is that languages differ strikingly in how they describe our orientation in space. I was aware that, in general in our culture, women tend to give directions in terms of landmarks and men in terms of cardinal or geographic directions (north, south, east, west). Once Deutscher mentioned it, it was also obvious that we tend to use geographic directions in wide-open spaces but egocentric coordinates (right, left, in front, behind) in small-scale spaces. But it had never occurred to me that languages might exist (among aborigines in Australia, Bali, Namibia, Polynesia, and Mexico) that have no words for or concepts of egocentric orientation. People who can only describe location in compass directions must therefore pay close attention, at all times, to subtle cues to geographic orientation, as well as constantly noting in memory any changes in their own position. And they do! Whether in a strange landscape, in poor visibility, inside a cave, or even referring to something on a television screen, they can instantly and accurately ascribe geographic orientation to what they see. They cannot explain how they know, they just do, even though this skill seems superhuman. Their speech is full of references to position; they could not possibly tell a story without constant notations of the positions of people and things and actions.

How do you imagine this affects other habits of mind? Do you suppose it makes them less egocentric? I bet they’d make terrific explorers on Mars, where the lack of magnetic poles makes compasses useless!

Another really remarkable linguistic difference is illustrated by the Matses language of Peru, whose speakers must always specify in great detail how they came to know any facts they report. Did they experience something directly, hear it from someone else, infer it from evidence, guess it based on past experience or general knowledge? They would never say the truth of a statement “depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” Any assertion that does not nail down the evidence for it is considered a lie. What fantastic lawyers they’d make! Or medieval theologians.…