Value added ed research

by David Safier
I'm behind the curve on this story — I've been out of town — but I'm going to violate the bloggers' code and write about a story that's a full 5 days old. If the U.S. Blogger General wants to put me on probation, that's fine. I can take the heat.

I don't have much faith in educational "research." Its conclusions have to be taken with generous grains of salt. They're worth looking at and thinking about, but it's foolish to take them as the last word on the subject. As for this data driven drivel . . . the idea that you can reduce the quality of students' educations to scores on a test is a fantasy promoted by soul impaired number crunchers. Take the numbers, graphs and charts, put them into the hopper with lots of other types of observation and analysis — that's fine. But to make those numbers the defining factor in determining what makes for good education: that's nonsense.

But this, I think, is a great idea. Find teachers who are successful in high performing schools, pay them $20,000 extra to teach for two years in low performing schools and see if they can transfer their skills to a different, more challenging environment.

Think of all the advantages. If the transferred teachers are successful with their new classes, all their students will benefit, and there's nothing more important than that. We'll have some of our best educational minds — people who know what works in the classroom, not scholars and researchers who are at least two removes from the students — in a position to give us their personal observations about the differences between the students, staff and schools in the two environments. And if these teachers are successful, we'll have a rubber-meets-the-road indicator that we need to recruit more of the best and the brightest into teaching.

What if these teachers meet with heartache and frustration, and their students don't perform better for them than for other teachers at the school? We'll have to rethink the idea that there is such a thing as a "great teacher" who can walk into any classroom and improve students' learning. I'm sure that's an oversimplification that could stand a bit of qualification. A brilliant, scholarly type might be terrific in a highly academic setting and a bust in a class full of reluctant learners. Someone who knows how to steer students by brute force of personality might not have enough to offer to highly motivated students. Some teachers' skills may transfer to classes where the students bring different mind sets to the classroom, but others may not. One-size-fits-all doesn't work in education.

Seven school districts are part of this experiment nationwide, and TUSD is fortunate to be one of them. No matter what happens, this will be a very important research project, based more in human interaction than in numbers. We'll certainly be looking at test scores these teachers generate from their students, but for my money, we'll learn more from their experiences and observations than from the numbers.