Darling-Hammond at Columbia Teachers College

Linda Darling-Hammond gave the commencement address at Columbia University's Teachers College (founded in 1887) last week. The Nation prints her speech in full. Well worth reading.

Then, as now, the creation of truly professional educators was subversive business. As scientific managers were looking to make schools “efficient” in the early twentieth century—to manage schools with more tightly prescribed curriculum, more teacher-proof texts, more extensive testing, and more rules and regulations—they consciously sought to hire less well-educated teachers who would work for low wages and would go along with the new regime of prescribed lessons and pacing schedules without protest. In a book widely used for teacher training at that time, the need for "unquestioned obedience" was stressed as the "first rule of efficient service" for teachers.
No wonder that obedience was prized, when the scientific managers’ time and motion studies resulted in findings like the fact that some eighth grade classes did addition "at the rate of 35 combinations per minute" while others could “add at an average rate of 105 combinations per minute"—thus schools were to set the standard at 65 combinations per minute at 94 percent accuracy. One speaker at an NEA meeting in 1914 observed that there were “so many efficiency engineers running hand cars through the school houses in most large cities that the grade school teachers can hardly turn around in their rooms without butting into two or three of them.”
During that decade, precisely 100 years ago, nationally distributed tests of arithmetic, handwriting and English were put into use. Their results were used to compare students, teachers and schools; to report to the public; and even to award merit pay—a short-lived innovation due to the many problems it caused.

No clip does it justice, though. Go read the whole thing.

And the folly continues...UPDATED twice

I see from this weekend's Globe that the next round of the Race to the Top folly is moving forward in Massachusetts: evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
You'll find the Commissioner's memo regarding this here; the proposed regulations (on which the Board of Education votes next Wednesday) here.
I'm pretty impressed at the chuzpah of the Commissioner in citing Linda Darling-Hammond as a footnoted source for his remarks about teacher evaluation, as hers has been one of the strongest voices in decrying this system as failed (you can find that full paper here; it's even more damning than the executive summary). You can find like research here (from FairTest) and here, a good review of why this doesn't work here and here,  and walk-through of how this plays out on the ground here.
I hope, in response to the article, that this gets fought by more than the teachers' unions. Our children deserve better than to have their teachers evaluated by a facile, discredited evaluation method.

UPDATE: I should point out that "opening these regulations for public comment" gets voted on by the Board next Wednesday (and, as a School Committee compatriot pointed out, what timing! Most teachers and parents won't see these until that Monday!), with comments due by mid-June and a vote on the regs at the end of June. No harm in commenting early, though!
UPDATED (as of 7pm): it appears that both Commissioner Chester and MTA President Paul Toner feel their perspectives were not well served by the Globe article. The MTA website has more information from Toner and this clarification from Chester:

“Both the headline and initial paragraphs of today's Globe story do not provide an accurate summary of my recommendations as they relate to the use of student performance measures. I have proposed that student learning be central to the evaluation and development of the Commonwealth’s educators. My recommendations require that for every grade and subject, at least two measures of student learning gains be employed. At the grades and subjects where MCAS growth measures are available, they must be one of the measures – but cannot be the sole measure. Further, I have not specified the manner by which the multiple measures of student learning are to be combined. Each district will develop and document the manner by which they will utilize the multiple student learning measures to determine whether students are making at least a year’s, less than a year’s, or more than a year’s gain.”

 That's not a huge relief, but it's better than it was.

Read the whole issue

It looks like the next issue of The Nation is very, very relevant to what's calling itself "ed reform" recently. The cover story gives an excellent summary of where we've been and where the Obama administration is taking us:

Before his election President Obama carved out what many regarded as a more progressive and enlightened position on education reform. Recognizing that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had become widely unpopular because of its overemphasis on standardized tests, he declared, "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test." He pledged to lead the nation in a different direction.

We are still waiting for a change of course. Since the election, the president and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have adopted policies that, to the chagrin of many of their supporters, have had far more in common with the previous administration than expected.

You can also read an article by the woman many of us hoped would have Duncan's position, Linda Darling-Hammond, comparing the United States to other countries and assessing what it actually would take the pull ourselves up:

Rather than establishing a framework for dramatically improving the knowledge, skills and equitable distribution of teachers, as high-achieving nations have done, Race to the Top encourages states to expand alternative routes to certification and to reduce coursework for prospective teachers, despite findings that hiring teachers from low-coursework alternatives reduces student achievement. Further, Race to the Top largely misses the critical investments needed to prepare and distribute excellent teachers and school leaders. Pay bonuses alone cannot succeed in recruiting and retaining teachers without efforts to create competitive, equitable salaries and working conditions. Removing low-performing teachers cannot improve teaching or student outcomes without strategies to ensure a stable supply of highly effective teachers who stay in their communities.

There's also an article on the too-oft-ignored magnet programs, which have been, for forty years, successfully working with all kids. You can also read about community schools (something ELSE Worcester has been doing), and real innovation. Oh, and Diane Ravich is in there, too.

Education on the Takeaway

Listen to this and tell me that we wouldn't have been better off with Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Ed.
Notice also the difference between what we're teaching and testing on and what we need to teach in order to do better on international tests AND do better on getting our kids a solid education.