The Impossibles

Freud once stated that teaching is impossible.

I doubt he meant a harrumph at the indolence and irresponsibility of his students. Nor, I suppose, a lash out at the folly of standardized tests, outcome-based standards or any other idealized version of education as technical tinkering. To assume, further, that he thought as a small government, low-tax, anti-public spending libertarian would be make him too much contemporary. History still does not allow a revision of the past in the identities of the present.

So what then did Freud mean?

Let me explain this question another way. In the current model of accountability (courtesy of NCLB), our educational system uses standardized, quantitative scores on tests to determine student knowledge and skills, and growth in knowledge and skills over the course of a set period (a semester, a year, a unit). Merit or performance pay synthesizes the students' learning into their teachers' effectiveness; the so-called "value-added" model of teacher accountability. Through inferential and raw/direct statistics, a teacher can be evaluated by the result of her students' scores on such exams. This process uses a positive gain as a determination of a successful student/good teacher; a negative loss as a determination of an unsuccessful student/poor teacher.

The flaw in this system is exposed when considering the reasons for schooling. Put another way, the qualitative rationale for schooling can not be analyzed through the quantitative measures used in schooling. While we believe we can measure a student's learning of concepts and skills, we have no method for measuring the justifications for learning these concepts and skills. This lack does not mean a better instrument is needed to do so. Rather, such instruments are impossible to create. What does all this mean? It tells us that no matter how efficient and effective our teaching, no matter how documentable through quantitative data our students' learning, no matter how empirical and obvious our beautiful numbers, we can not analyze the effect of schooling in the same way. Our measurements of learning give no significant or even sensical information on what effect that learning has on the the student or society.

Now, for me, this is a huge, huge thing. If I am not able to apply the metrics used to determine whether a student has learned to determine any justification for their learning, then either

1. there is no justification for schooling, or
2. the metrics used to determine learning need to be radically transformed.

Common sense, perhaps, explains why we would want our children to learn to read and communicate, to understand and manipulate numbers, to hold a common core of truths regarding the physical and biological sciences, to have knowledge of the history of our kind and the art of our cultural heritages. Common sense, as well, explains why our democracy needs literate, rational thinkers; our economy needs effective, knowledgeable workers; our culture needs the values and capabilities of appreciation for the products of human artifice. But common sense has no purchase in the accountability we employ in the institution of education. Common sense represents something tacit, but felt and experienced to be obvious. It presents a taken-for-granted obviousness, something one need not spend time defending. To question common sense is to question rationality itself. Yet common sense prevails in schooling through the curriculum and skills expected in our students. In other words, there is no need to statistically warrant the course and scope of study (with some ding-a-ling culture wars on the margin; part of Freud labeled the "narcissism of small differences"), because the why is implied in all this common sense. This paradox, or double-consciousness, of quantitative measuring and qualitative common sense exposes the impossibility of ever getting schooling right. "Right" does not exist; only politics does.

Teaching is impossible, not because it is difficult. Nor because it is too open-ended, or even indeterminate. No, teaching is impossible because, by the laws presented as how to measure its effect, we will never know what effect its effect has on students. The outcome of teaching, like the outcome of the experience of schooling itself, is immeasurable. Literally. Both are acts, or participation of acts, that ultimate point beyond themselves. Nothing that we can determine about what is learned tells us anything about what that learning means. Teaching is therefore the investing in a purposeful act the mystification of what that act means. It is a myth, mythic; teaching is the religion of everyday life. That we have chosen to place this practice at the heart of our social order is the finest expression of the mystery to existence.

Teachers are not bankers?

Paul Krugman has a smart brief this morning on changing the way bankers are compensated. Right now, rewards are earned through short-term success, without consideration of longer term effects. As he writes, "In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses."

Many of the current ideas about 'merit pay' and/or 'value-added' models of teacher compensation take a strikingly similar approach. Teacher earn their bones, and its rewards, when their students demonstrate competency of standards-based outcomes. Sounds like a sane approach. Yet, as for the bankers, teachers in this system (just like right now) are not held responsible for a students' success or struggle in the future. After all, how could they? Rigorous research methodology would never warrant any conclusion that claimed such a longer-term effect; too much life intervenes, making any claim specious, more projection than evident.

As part of the accreditation of teacher ed programs (whether nationally, through NCATE, or state-based - in Oregon, Teacher Standards and Practices Commission/TSPC), documentation must be presented that shows the effect a program has on the success of its graduates. In other words, my school must present evidence on the effect our alumni have on their students. The evidence? Some qualitative artifacts, but mostly, k-12 student test scores.

Schools are already on that path. A 'traditional' approach to teacher pay took teachers as salaried employees of a large system, where the overall health of the community significantly effected the learning of the students. Teachers were never paid well, comfortably more in recent years, but never comparable to professionals. Implied, though, was the role teachers played in the bigger wheel of society. Their effects, in essence, were part of something bigger.

To put this all in perspective, then. Teachers are to be paid in relation to how their students demonstrate the objectives for the year. They are not held responsible, at least in terms of their pay, for a student's performance in subsequent year; that is another teacher's load. Schools of education, however, are held responsibly for how their graduates perform once they leave, regardless of the intervening factors and contingencies that occur. If Krugman is correct, and I for one agree with him, then any pay-for-performance system established for educators replicates the dysfunctional incentives that spurred the financial crisis.

Gross National Happiness

Reading Joseph Stiglitz makes me feel as if my inner-conscience has been draped over the world. He comes with all the laurels (Noble Prize, full Professorship, extensive publication via peer-review) and he invokes all the logic of doing things differently because what we are doing now blows. I often do not believe that he means what he writes, since his ideas make too much sense to me.

Take this latest essay. The challenge of measuring the most inscrutable - the quality of human experience - renders moot any attempt. As he writes, "What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things." Using GNP as a syllogism for the state of society, the micro world of individual lives suffers for the macro world of a big thing: economic growth. A rising tide may lift all boats, true; but not everyone in the world has a boat. Or can swim.

Of course, using Bhutan as a model of clarity might not win over the same-as-usual empiricists. And this topic is itself another version of the defense of liberal arts learning, more or less. Still. It encourages me to trust what I think I know, to realize that some of the important people also know what I think I know.

Senator Ted Kennedy, rest in peace.

Some journalists will eventually ask other Senators whether they now have an obligation to pass a health care bill, out of respect for Kennedy.

That is not the right question. Instead, it should be:

"If Sen. Kennedy were on life support in a permanent vegetative state and his family was ready to end his life if Congress did not pass a health care bill by the time he fell into his coma, because his family says that that is what the Senator wanted because he told them even though he did not have an advanced direct because Medicare would not cover that kind of meeting with his physician, would the Senate and House rush back to D.C. to pass a health care bill?"

Perception

Give humans something to see, and we make a world of it. A phrase from a contract, a flower in a field, one moment out of the infinite moments of a day. We give it meaning, significance. Or we don't. Context matters, so both are true. The smallest thing means everything, as the largest, not at all.

This might just be another of saying that life and all its enterprise gives itself over to excess. We find meaning in the slightest fragment of perception. We plunge into what jumps to mind, what presents itself with the slightest flicker to our open senses. All is Surface, without end, perfectly smooth and complete, but infinitely dense. Depth is the meaning we give, the fullness we find in all things. We live in that slippage; content to skim across things as they are until forced by habit or purpose or intuition to free-fall into the grain, which we catch as meaning.

Think of some professions. Medicine, teaching, state craft, law; all require inquiry and expense. When dealing with others, heuristics make for human need. Doctors and teachers, politicians and soldiers must burn through resources with impunity if they are to heal or to lead. Outcomes matter, but these are the outcomes of people, for whom being is more than a description. Means must be human, too, must give in to the accelerating complexity of what being human requires. Our bodies constantly self-stabilize, unlike clocks whose gears lie inert before the clockmaker. Doctors get to know the body, how it functions and interacts with itself, through an extensive process of exploration. Again, the means are profligate by function. Teachers, too, come to understand their students in a similar; learning is both piecemeal and indefinite, the result of an individual's own condition, not the application of technology to a clear problem. No less legislators, nor generals, when dealing with others, can avoid messy extraneous efforts. We have to go too far, because the outcome in its rightness shows itself only after we wade in. In this sense, we splurge in order to figure out what we want the ends to be.

Isaiah Berlin once said that "we must be free to make mistakes." He was talking about political democracy, but I take him to imply truth as well. And it truth, reality. Being free to err is not a license. Rather, Berlin means that we are free to be correct. The world is not given (less so a government). We thus have a responsibility to search it out, to find meanings - many wrong, few right - benefiting our task. That is an awesome load. This "negative" liberty, in Berlin's phrase, restricts prior constraint on our experiences. Put another way, institutions (whether the state or church, the academy or the hospital) do have any final answers. Citizenship of state and of humanity requires us to ask more than the given.

The difficulty in this life is obvious. We must chart things for ourselves, in concert with others on their own courses. No more so than in the professions. Doctors and teachers go as far beyond the horizon of what is known as necessary to attend the person in need. Each patient, each student brings something new in a new way with new conditions. The freedom to make mistakes is limited by the dangers of being wrong, of course, with their deadly finality. Being right, though needs the space to avoid that danger, while also engaging the difficulty of understanding the particulars of any one person.

Learning is the word for the layered interaction of what a student knew and felt previously and how the new material is experienced. Teachers can not mandate nor control that experience. At best, they create climates rich with material (content, say) for students to work through, then layer on pedagogy. Since not all students will experience the same thing, not all students will learn the same way or at the same speed. A teachers keeps this classroom practice going, long after something has been learned. She is not being inefficient; rather, she is exercising her freedom to be right for this student in this lesson at this time. Business hates waste. Teachers hate doing less than is needed since what is needed might only be known after the fact. We call this "time." Imagine the irresponsible doctor prescribing the same drug to every patient with the same symptoms. Now imagine the teacher treating every reading problem with the same lesson. It takes time to create the work that leads to learning, for each and every student. In schools, time wasted is time not being taken.

To sum this up, think about the invisible hand. It works wonderfully for economic reason by evoking the image of centrifugal wind that naturally blows goods and services to their best use. It creates an order, spontaneous and beautiful, from the combined self-interest of its participants. Yes, if we consider the hand always already at work. Within its functioning order, energy is efficiently expended to achieve known, expected outcomes. That is the system in its pure form. How, though, did it get that way? What happened before? The human need for more, for expansive time and excessive action, generates the hand. Our interests follow from our discoveries, which follow from the kind of mazy runs we take across new fields. And new fields come to us in the briefest of forms. We find patterns wherever we look; meanings emerge with the effort to form them, no matter the text.

That is why we can see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. To be human is to be large, to contain multitudes.

WSJ

I like the Wall Street Journal. I subscribe. Its reporting is usually generous, its arts pages are limited but do inform me of books that I might never discover and its back-page columnists, while reflexively anti-Democratic, usually provide a coherent perspective and thought on an eclectic variety of content. Plus, its letters page stokes up the most interesting reading from patrons, even compared to the NYTimes. I read its editorials knowing I'll get a combination of business-friendly and politically-rightist cultism. At least, I tell myself, they offer a kind of one-dimensional transparency.

Right.

1. In his review of Rich by Larry Samuel, Adrian Wooldridge writes:

"From 1960 on, the ... rise of the counterculture stimulated hedonistic consumerism even as it eroded Puritan morality."

A facile, almost rote historiography about US social history, that attempts to reify liberalism as a dark path we best avoid.

I am not sure when the "Puritan morality" held (or what it is/was). Maybe during the "dying times" in early colonial history John Smith could call it up - he who does not work, does not eat. By the the post-Civil War gilded age, if not earlier, no morality of any kind seems to have stemmed the greed of corporations and their leaders, not if proliferating tenements, rancid and dangerous food production systems and aggrandizing trusts represent anything. I suppose we could even laughably claim that the Depression was caused by a sudden rise of people not working and still wanting food. But that would miss the greed infused market climb in the 20s, the immoral (at least illegal) speakeasies that sparkled with hedonism incarnate, the cooptation of Jazz and hipster lifestyles, and even the salience of films, like Marlon Brando's "The Wild Ones" (1953). My historical knowledge has gaps, but I use what I do have to make this point. Advertising, a form of history not constrained by fact, is a better culprit, for it has long sought to shake standard comforts, inviting us to put down everyday, conserving practices and try a new way of doing and being. But that argument would be anti-business.

So attempting to center the rise of rapacious consumerism on a brief period of reaction strikes me as cowardly. It blinds us from contemplating a more robust significance of the 60s: transparency hurts. Let's dispel the easy trope of blaming moral decline on a few freedom-actualizing hippies and free-lovers. And it is easier to offer a demagogic version of social illness (perverts pervert the purists' purity and we go to hell). Reconstructing a more evocative historical narrative requires, well, actual history and the willingness to put aside fabricated versions of American beauty. Mirrors are not windows, nor is history escapist literature. We will not regenerate republican virtue by hiding how we came to be who we are.

2. The editors make a mess in their opinon piece "Obama's 'Race to the Top.'"

Data. The editors state that educational spending topped $665b last year. Add in the $100b in stimulus funds staked already this year, and we are talking huge sums of money. The paper, however, plays loose with what this means. For instance, the stimulus money went to states in order to make up for the more than $200b they will not spend on education because of the recession. Next, the paper sees as spurious any charge of "underfunding" by explaining how President Bush increased federal spending on education from $28.3b to $37.5b. $9b sounds like revolutionary step, unless you realize that it increases the fed share by 1.5% of the total amount spent. In fact, the Bush administration increased its share from 5.1% in 2008 ($28.3b/$553b) to 5.6% ($37.5b/$665b). A whopping .5% of the total expenditures.

Third, in next paragraph, the editors write

"It’s also worth noting that the U.S. has been trying without much success to spend its way to education excellence for decades. Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates."

According to the Census bureau, there were roughly the same number of students in school in 1970 and 2003 (the last figures I could find), around 49m. How out of whack is a doubling of the money spent per pupil? If a comparison works (it may not - forgive my googling), a new house cost around $23k; a new car $3900; bananas were $.12/lb, a tube of Crest was $.77 and Jiffy peanut butter $.59. A 1970 dollar would be worth roughly $5.30; reverse that, and $1 today would buy > $.20 in 1970. While prices have jumped five-fold, the government has up spending two-fold and still achieved the same results. Consider as well that today a greater percentage of the students are English language learners, due to demographic shifts. That would mean that while they have had their total funding cut by nearly 60% in relative dollars and their student population now present greater academic challenges due to second language acquisition, schools and teachers have been just as successful as they were in 1970, at least in terms of test results.

Of course, the editors could have used the same statistics to argue for the abolishment for the Department of Education, due to how little it actually contributes. But their real zeal deal is vouchers.

Bait and Switch. The editors complement the White House for its "Race to the Top" program, which "the Obama Administration claims will reward only those states that raise their academic standards, improve teacher quality and expand the reach of charter schools," then criticize it for "being at the behest of the unions, also shuttering a popular school voucher program that its own evaluation shows is improving test scores for low-income minorities in Washington, D.C."

So the White is trying to improve education through a $4.5b competition to produce the most effective charter schools, something to which the teachers' unions object. Unfortunately, this only sounds good. It is not really good, because money does not go to voucher programs. Put another way, the Obama administration antes up just under 50% as much as Bush did (on top of $100b stimuli), specifically for a program to expand school choice, to the teachers' displeasure, but that is still not good enough, because the money does not go to voucher programs.

The Federal government spends way too much money on education and the Federal government spends way too little money on vouchers.

Merit pay/Performance pay - bad idea

When I became a teacher, I understood that the salary would be ever modest. At no point did I feel a sense of nobility and sacrifice as recompense, though. The money would be fine, enough to allow me to live in relative comfort, no yachts aside. And through my first clump of years, I was able to save. Even when I moved into higher ed, the salary had nothing to do with my decision; I loved the work, the time to go mental and wander around in ideas and the access to others equally (or not) committed to extracting human potential. Money, such that it did not leave me all achy for the juiciness of more, was always good enough. I also never minded that higher salary came with time. I granted that veteran teachers knew stuff, that practice honed something valuable, whether or not I could immediately cipher it. While there will always be extremes (does every school have an ol' Ms. Kennesque, cooking up gumbo during her math classes?), I respected the institutionally memory of the older teachers. What I was less happy about was the time-gap between the salary steps.

Perhaps I had too low esteem, never demanding my dessert? Subconsciously afraid to demand more, for I would then have to demonstrate I deserved more? Ignorant to what a market approach to my compensation could do for me? Understanding what it could?

No. The money thing just did not matter. I would make out a good life, be it ever so.

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Merit pay, or performance pay, or outcome-dependent pay - whatever; is a terrible plan. It reifies education as a temperament of acquisition, and reworks students into the means necessary for the money-laced ends of teaching. In short, it misses the reason we have schools in the first place.

1. Low riding goals. Much begins from the question "what is school for?" We can ask this in multiple ways: what are the ends of education? what are the outcomes of teaching and learning? what should be taught? what is worthy knowledge? And we do ask this, implicitly in how educators teach and expressly in how decisions are made about what to teach and how to teach it. Too often, few listen; lalalalalalalalalalaIcan'thhhhheeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrryyyyyyyoooooooouuuuuuulalalalalalalala.

These questions get answered aspirationally or particularly. The former consists of broad, engendering goals - life-long learning, democratic participation, productive citizenship, economic competitiveness, college-prep (reductio ad absurdum). The latter of prescriptions - curricula and content standards, pedagogy and structured lessons, discipline plans, or any state/district/school wide programs targeting specific, observable and measurable products from students and their teachers. Accept this either/or with the caveat that while educators routinely believe that both are possible, at the same time, in the same act of schooling, I take that belief as unfounded by reason. This question of telos - for why do we do what we do? - does not bifurcate in fact. The conceptual must, in action, settle into some concrete actual practice toward some reachable goal. The ends of education are both, of course, and therefore any policy attempting both is false.

We can strive for both, and should; we can not base a teacher compensation on both. Here is where merit pay games the question of why school, and gets the wrong answer. Think of it this way. As a teacher, I can have the philosophy that I am preparing my students for democratic citizenship. Through this lens, the curriculum and state standards are the vehicle by which I prepare my students. Following, I can believe that mastery of these standards is the best path to democratic citizenship. Therefore, I measure my success by how well students perform on assessments of the content. In other words, their learning comes with an implicit heuristic, that performance in my class on the knowledge and skills I set out for them will result, sometime in the future, in their successful participation in our democracy. Choose any of the aspirational ends, and this holds.

Yet, I will never really know if I have succeeded. Schools adopt mission plans based on these aspirations even though these goals will never be tested out. How would we know if we reached them? Some kind of longitudinal research that follows each of my former students along their live-path would gorge up all kinds of data that may possibly, tangentially correlate to their having being one of my students; that might work (recognizing that the longer out we venture from when the student was my student, the more live experience they undergo, the more distortion interferes with whatever increasingly marginal effect I may have had). Now, the individual student might say their democratic participatory zeal comes from their time with me. Maybe. The point is that schooling is not set up for such big picture objectives.

That means success - the teachers' and students' - if measurable (and thus the basis of performance pay) is a local phenomenon. The content I teach is itself the goal; what happens afterward is not my purchase. This decouples the aspiration goals from the particular classroom goal; the big picture is external to, and non-impinging upon, what happens in my class. Again, we can strive for both, but we only can accommodate one: the chosen content goals of a course. The better a teacher does at leading her student to these goals, it would seem, the higher her success. The higher her success, as the merit pay thinking goes, the greater should be her salary. You can tie these accomplishments to growth models, or portfolio documentations, work sample arrangements, grades or raw standardized test scores. No matter: the better performing her students, the better her pay for that merit.

Merit pay would mint fractured, self-contained ethic into an institutional trait. Teachers would not be responsible for anything beyond their course. 5th grade teachers need not worry themselves about anything the 6th grade teachers wanted; 8th grade math teachers could schluff off any vertical teaming with 9th grade math teachers. Schools would be fractured into separate islands of this-is-this, without any real justification for complementary approaches (I do recognize how prevalent is this state of schools already, by default and recalcitrance; that merit pay would in essence codify such atomization is, however, a qualitatively different level of disengagement of the goals of schools with the outcomes of teaching). Perhaps that is too strong condemnation. Very well. Still, I want to point out that any collaboration towards anything outside of the realms of each teacher's course expectation would be, depending on how radically specific the merit pay plan, optional. Or rather, outside their pay. Literally; if I can, in my own classroom, reach the goals held for me (and my students), there is no incentive for me to collaborate, other than the phony ethic of team-ness. Merit pay dumps out the virtue of teaching, in favor of a blinkered aggrandizing; I, me, mine.

2. Ethics

Kantian cosmopolitanism is disputational these days, what with President Obama willing himself a citizen of the world, and 49% of the country aghast at such not-quite anti-Americanism. So much less, then, for the ethical stance Kant imposes upon us humans: treat others not as means to your ends, but as ends themselves (more or less).

Merit pay - actually, any formal system that uses student performance as a mode of evaluating the teachers and the school - obliviates the moral relationship of teacher to student. The students, and their academic performance, come to serve the economic ends of their teachers. Nothing new here; move along. Parents have been choosing schools for their children based on things such as StaNines, Iowa tests, National Merit and SAT scores plus other fine metrics for several generations (not to mention home prices, but they can not be pinned directly on the kids - I don't think). Merit pay is nastier because it seeks to attract a "stronger" crop of minds (questionable in many ways on its face) into teaching with the incentive of earning gobbles of $ through the direct use of students.

True, a teacher's pay is properly connected to student effort, at least in the sense that teachers are responsible for what students learn. It would be fairly odd to not examine into student achievement when qualifying a teacher's work. Merit pay, though, risks turning student effort into teacher value. Without being too Marxist about it, when the student effort is manipulated by the teacher for the sake of more money (which is the practical result of merit pay) and student learning is measured externally (through test scores or other empirically sticky observables), students are both used as a means for teacher ends and alienated from their subjective experience of the learning. Learning is redescribed as evident through the numbers (or portfolio), not as something internal to the student. Neither of these admits the human, moral dimension of personal efficacy.

Critical theory and ethnography work against this kind of alienating education. Students are able to account for themselves their learning, or lack of it. The density of what exactly a student does learn - deep down and lasting, not just the shallower though more easily accepted observable outcomes - makes difficult assumptions that teachers can "see" their effect through students. Paying them based on an outside effect because of the unquantifiability of the internal actuality treats them as a-sensate. Their own experience is negated in order to fashion a terminal point to accrue credit.

3. Elusive/Illusive outcomes. The bottom line is that teachers do not teach for the money. Commitment to teaching composes a person divergently; the human factor opens outward into a world of shared meaning, and dangerous possibility. I am all for drawing in quality minds. I would rather incentivize them through the rewards of teaching, not exclusively one aspect of its outcomes. After all, the outcomes are elusive: how do we really know if our students learned what we think they learned? What do we mean by 'learned' anyway? Should a teacher who receives plenty of dough, relative to others that year, because her students aced the standardized tests be required to return the money if these same students fail the same test when taken a year later; five years later; at the 25th reunion?

It insults a teacher to assume that she will try harder because more money is offered. More money is nice. Value the teacher for the full scope of what it means to work with students, for the humanity they dedicate towards others. That, is hard, wrenching even. Treating people like people is perhaps the most crimped disposition in the human condition. That is a thing itself to be learned and experienced. It insults the point of education, at least the big picture aspirations that found the purpose of schooling, to commodify the outcomes (btw - I never appreciate the posters in schools that link graduation with higher salary; wrong message, if the point of schooling is to get student to learn beyond merely graduating, since they are not the same thing). I realize that anyone who already believes that merit pay is an idea worth considering probably views education through a business/economic parable of incentives. Too bad, especially for our students.