Literary Indignation, Post #1

Honestly, the74 is a bit of an easy target, but let’s get right to it.

“… The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

In some ways these truisms don’t seem to apply to the prevailing notion of schools.

What? First of all, “truism” refers not to something that is true, but something that seems true and has no information. So why are we parsing a truism to see in which ways it applies to “the prevailing notion of schools?”

Most people would stop here. But let’s continue.

… to the prevailing notion of schools. Policymakers from President Obama on down have focused on the individual teacher as the locus for improvement.

Okay.

What about her colleagues, her administrator, her school’s culture, and the professional training she receives?

Colleagues: also individual teachers. Administrator: also an individual educator. School culture? Presumably influenced by… individuals. Professional training… received by… individuals. Maybe that’s why people have started with individuals. Perhaps.

“In the past fifteen years … we have really attended to individual [teacher] quality in a way that’s diverted our attention from all the other factors that affect someone’s effectiveness,” said Susan Moore Johnson, a Harvard professor of education.

With all due respect to Professor Johnson, the study of individual teacher quality has had a very concentrated focus on what contexts affect teaching effectiveness. The very idea of value-added is to (attempt to!) isolate an individual teacher’s contribution to learning. Data on contexts would certainly be used if available.

One study released earlier this year through NYU showed that New York City middle schools where teachers reported greater school safety and higher academic expectations also had larger achievement gains.

Makes sense to me! From the abstract:

“Increases in school safety and academic expectations for students also correspond to increases in student achievement. These results are robust to a range of potential threats to validity, suggesting that our findings are likely driven by an underlying causal relationship.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if this author was pretty sure about the causal relationship between school context and student achievement.

Matt Kraft, a researcher at Brown who has conducted several studies on school context, said that he believes context shapes teachers, but warns that the causal research is still in its infancy. “I would proactively caution anyone from saying that there is rock solid evidence that the school context has a causal impact on turnover and student achievement,” he said.

Hmm, maybe there are two Matt Krafts at Brown.

Still, insofar as policy has not focused on improving the context of schools, research may understate the degree to which context can matter. In other words, if more and better efforts were made to strengthen school leadership, professional development, and collaboration, the impact could be significant.

Correct. If we eliminated stop lights we would definitely start seeing significant impacts from installing stop signs.

As is often the case, identifying an area that needs improvement is much easier than developing policies that drive improvement. Simply put, there’s not particularly strong evidence for how to strengthen school context.

Maybe we should focus on individual teachers then!

In sum, policymakers might consider allotting time and money for teachers to regularly collaborate, observe classrooms, and serve as mentors — though it’s not clear whether these approaches would be more cost-effective than, say, raising teacher salaries or reducing class size.

What is the point of this paragraph? “In summary, maybe we should do something, but it’s not clear if that something is better than that other thing.”

Jackson said that allowing principals to have significant say in hiring and firing teachers might help lead to improvements and a stronger school culture — though of course that depends on having an effective school leader. And there’s not a great deal of consensus on how best to recruit, retain, and evaluate principals.

Wait, we have to ascertain how well an individual educator is doing? I thought the focus on that was taking away from our efforts on school context! (Note: I am a huge fan of Kirabo Jackson). To include this quote and then say “the focus on individual teachers has been misguided” is so stupid — he’s advocating for principals to evaluate teachers and get rid of the bad ones!

Round and round the debate goes, defying easy answers and clear policies.

This column is certainly not helping.

While there’s good reason to believe that no teacher is an island, much less is known about how to create school communities most likely to help teachers improve and make them want to stay.

The commitment to the island metaphor is admirable. Full of grit, it looks like.

But at least with the knowledge that context matters, policymakers might more purposefully try to improve it and study what is and isn’t working.

Are you suggesting that people, even the strongest advocates for accountability measures, were saying “hey forget about context and forget about studying what is and isn’t working?”

This brings up a good question: bad writer, or bad website context? (alternate ending: is the writer of this column an island…? This researcher says yes!)