538 reasons the fight for education is so hard.

I was perusing the suggested articles from Google this morning and stumbled upon this doozy from the pop culture science phenom 538.  Naturally my blood pressure went up and my heart sank, because I knew immediately it was another piece of ammo for the education reformers to use when attempting to manipulate public opinion while instituting policies that destroy our educational systems in favor of one where students are sorted by their ability to meet random expectations, instead of one where we strive to help students find their way to meet society's expectations.  

First let me say, reading the article I didn't get the impression the author was attempting to involve himself in the debate.  In fact the majority of his discussion is focused on academic debate, and the value of how the science is moving forward.  Unfortunately there will be collateral damage, insofar as politicians will use this as an erroneus reason to institue more punitive and destructive policies.

Let's talk about why, even if we assume the entire thrust of the article is accurate (I have serious reservations about the true randomness of the study, as well as the ability of VAM mathematics to remove teacher effects from the noise, and I'm not alone), focus on educational success through testing is a poor idea.

1.  Teacher effects are a small portion of overall student achievement.

So much of the "Bad Teachers"  argument is centered on the idea that teachers are what holds children back from overcoming poverty, or from achieving at a level to keep America "globally competitive"  or fix the mismatch between open jobs and workers (both premesis are incredibly flawed)

The reality is that teachers account for about 20% of the achievement of students, so even if we assume that the premise of the research is correct, it won't make enough of a difference to significantly alter achievement.  Obviously all teachers should be of the highest quality, and we should evaluate teachers well and remove teachers that are actually bad, but the way we focus on this it seems as if this one thing would solve all of our problems, when in reality it obscure the changes we need to make as a society.

2.  Test scores are a poor indicator of overall success.

The main problem with every argument for VAM, SGP, any basis of evaluating teachers schools or students based on test scores, is that test scores are extremely limited forms of assessment.

We obsess over international test scores as an indicator of economic success, but there is no evidence for that, so a laser like focus on assessing education through test scores seems misguided.

We Obsess over student's achieving certain scores as a measure of whether they "deserve" to graduation is also misplaced, as their is no correlation between high test scores and life success for individual students.

Is the point of education to judge our schools and students and teachers on measures that don't actually predict anything that matters to us as individuals, or to our children leading happy successful lives?

3.  The cost of these tests is absurd.

So the test don't measure an appreciable effect on the child, the tests themselves aren't really good indicators of whether or not children will succeed, and yet we want to use them to judge teaches and children.  And at what cost?

1.7 billion annually.  Some argue that is a drop in the bucket compared to overall educational spending, But that number doesn't account for the ancillary expenses, such as the time for current employees, or the additional employees hired to manage the requirements for collecting and reporting the data.  Or the material purchased from the companies that make the tests to help prepare for the tests, or to remediate the students who don't score high enough on the tests.  Going along with that paying for staff to teach classes during the day or after school to help students pass the tests.

In addition to the monetary costs, there are also the opportunity costs, all that time focused on the tests (since jobs, funding, graduation, so many things depend on succeeding on them) takes away from the other things we should be teaching.  As a science teacher I spend too much time on facts and recall because of the content on the tests, time I should instead be spent on teaching students to develop experimental techniques, perform project based lessons, all the skills that we pay verbal homage to, but create policy that forces us to ignore.

In short, while we can discuss the quality of the techniques used to assess teachers and their scientific viability, we are in reality missing the point.  Is improving this science even where we should be focusing it?