The standardized testing wars are so repetitive and predictable that I tend to mentally check out of the whole dialogue whenever it starts up. And start up it does, perennially in almost every education district, because testing is an essential component of public education in democracy but public school teachers have, inexplicably, remained unionized rather than professionalized virtually all over the world and unionism is mostly just not compatible with the objectives of testing.

I’m checking into the dialogue this time because even though the alleged fault with the testing is as fatuous as it ever was, the campaign here in British Columbia to discredit it has taken on an unacceptable element of brinkmanship - unacceptable, I believe, because it represents a considerable risk being imposed on teachers. In being encouraged by their union to boycott the FSA tests, teachers are being asked by their union to engage in flagrant and unmerited insubordination, and not for the first time in recent memory in this jurisdiction. There are times for such tactics, but the FSA tests are not one of them. This can only end badly for teachers, in the form of discipline incurred, public respect lost, a return to more invasive forms of oversight such as inspection, or possibly the loss of their union altogether.

Militant unionism is on life support everywhere, but nowhere more so than in BC. And I think the BCTF knows it, and is making a last-ditch effort to keep it alive with this call to arms. Who knows what evil genius wants to keep it alive, but it reminds me of a myth in my neighbourhood, Vancouver’s Strathcona area, which narrowly escaped being razed in favour of a highway many years ago. To this day, some people still believe that deep in the bowels of City Hall there exists one malevolent bureaucrat whose sole function is to keep alive the dream of a highway. Perhaps there is a similar Gollum-like figure hunched protectively over its ring somewhere in the labyrinthine structure of the BCTF, poisoning every successive generation of leadership with its bitter outlook and enslaving them to its quest.

The lifeblood of militant public sector unionism is member anger. Anger at government, and when that won’t do, anger at perceived social injustice or anything else that will allow unions to pull together their members on a supposed moral high ground against a common perceived enemy. The Fraser Institute is serving beautifully as the enemy at the moment. It isn’t always this easy. Teachers’ unions sometimes have to go so far as to create the enemy from thin air, as when they negotiate really difficult working conditions such as integrated classrooms, and then whip their members onto the warpath to protest about how hard such classrooms are to teach unless they are shrunken in size to the point where the diversity is reduced.

I wrote about this anger-manipulation strategy 7 years ago in The Republic ("Teachers Angry! Details at 11"), and also pointed out at that time that the exercise of this strategy in public has the effect of influencing teacher recruitment, selectively attracting people to the occupation who are inclined towards ideological extremism and thus prone to jumping on bandwagons even at high personal risk. Having a preponderance of new members of this sort will allow the BCTF to sustain its militant strategy for longer.

In the US, in contrast, the education reform movement has penetrated unionism, spawning TURN: The Teachers’ Union Reform Network. I had the good fortune to be hired to do a report on this group of union locals, which was published by the Society for the Advancement of Excellence in Education in 2001 ("Teacher Unions as Players in Education Reform: A Canadian Look at an American Trend").

TURN consists of union leaders who have recognized the fundamental truth that renders militant teacher unionism both irrelevant and unsustainable: there is such a thing as an incompetent teacher. They’ve converted their organizational strategy from the cloaking and protection of incompetent teachers, as the BCTF continues to do, to the effort to assure and improve the competence of all teachers, in effect professionalizing teachers. They’ve accepted testing as an essential component of that effort; they use it to demonstrate the gains they make and if the tests aren’t adequately reflective of what teachers can do, they work to ameliorate them rather than to eliminate them.

The TURN locals did not have to compromise union principles in order to deal assertively and productively with teacher incompetence. They devised methods that include peer review and expert teacher guidance, better professional development opportunities, competitive wages with performance-based salary systems, internship programs for new teachers, and many other mechanisms that are intended to not only eliminate the incompetence (without eliminating the teachers!), but also to keep funding and staffing high and growing. And in the odd case where dismissal is the only option, the unions stand for fair evaluation and due process.

I heard from many of the TURN local presidents I spoke to in the course of my project that their change of strategy generated the most enthusiastic response from hard-working, long-suffering, COMPETENT teachers who were tired to the bone of having to carry their incompetent colleagues, covering up for them, compensating for the work they left undone, and having the quality of their own work diminished by association, not to mention seeing student achievement constrained. “Why didn’t you do this years ago?” was a common reported response.

If the BCTF ever does go this route, that question is going to be very hard to answer because the BCTF has known about TURN for some ten years. When I attended a TURN meeting in 2001, I was surprised to be welcomed with questions about whether a previous visitor to their organization from BC had “TURNed” BC’s teacher labour relations climate around at all. Apparently the BCTF had sent one Mike Lombardi, then in a senior staff capacity with the union, to a previous TURN meeting to investigate their initiatives.

When I got back to BC I naturally contacted both Mike Lombardi and then-BCTF president David Chudnovsky. Writerly interest notwithstanding, as a citizen I was heartily sick of both teacher incompetence and labour strife, and I was eager to hear whether the BCTF had found anything at TURN to emulate. But… they wouldn’t talk to me because the organization that had hired me was on their “hate” list. In fact, the BCTF apparently tried to ensure that no teacher union leader from any Canadian province would talk to me.

Certainly the evidence of the intervening years suggests that the BCTF chose to remain militant and angry. And now that Mike Lombardi is a Vancouver school trustee and part of a board that is actively supporting the BCTF’s hostility, there is some evidence of his opinion as well. Chudnovsky, in contrast, seems to have steered clear of education since becoming an MLA, so there is hope yet that he might have had an independent interest in an alternate approach and might eventually make some moves toward trying to see such a thing happen.

But until someone makes an unexpected move, we remain saddled with the unresolved matter of incompetent teachers.

It’s not really the union’s fault that there are incompetent teachers. That, rather, is the fault of several other organizations, among them the BC College of Teachers, which grants teachers their licenses apparently without ascertaining competence. Then there are the school districts, which hire and retain teachers apparently also without initially ascertaining and later managing their competence. Most districts appear to require little more than a license from prospective teachers, and the granting of a license seems to require only graduation from an accredited university teacher training program. As such, the role of teacher education is obviously crucial.

Schools of education come under public scrutiny far too seldom, but when they do their failings are glaring. Their dedication to ideology rather than to effective instruction methods is rampant and near-universal; most teacher training in Canada resembles little more than indoctrination into a cult, the cult being that of self-righteous militant anger which the union can later nurture and manipulate. And in case you thought they might have some redeeming value, far worse than this can be said of the quality of much of what passes as research in education faculties (all of that with apologies to the people in those faculties who aspire to standards higher than the norm in their field).

To the extent that competent teachers do emerge from these faculties - and they do - as far as I can tell they are produced by accident and predestination, not by their teacher education.

Unions cannot change education faculties, of course. But neither are they forced to support them by covering up the incompetence they produce. Any union that chooses to participate in the cover-up, especially in a climate where the government is also content to remain fairly inactive on the subject, leaves the door wide open for some other agency to address the incompetence on its own terms, as the Fraser Institute has done.

It is not a coincidence that some of the TURN unions had, when I looked at them, set up their own teacher academies as a secondary level of teacher training. It is feasible for the union to ameliorate incompetence in this or in any number of ways rather than to engage in spurious warfare over testing which amounts to using competent teachers as human shields to protect their incompetent colleagues.

Governments have always tested students to evaluate education delivery, and as former education functionary Jerry Mussio points out to Vancouver Sun reporter Janet Steffenhagen on her blog, for most of the history of education in BC, such testing was only reported internally, and only in aggregate. But for all that testing, little has been done in response to the results even if the results showed teacher incompetence. The government seems to have always relied on teachers to act spontaneously on the results in the spirit of self-improvement. Unfortunately no spirit of self-improvement exists in education. In fact, the culture of teaching has always been such that incompetence was not even mentioned, much less acted on.

The public, I think, took due note. And so, enter the Fraser Institute, which opened the gates to a veritable flood of pent-up public demand for frank evaluation of teachers and schools. It is to the credit, not the blame, of the Fraser Institute that it stepped into the gap. Far less credible organizations could have done so instead.

The rankings were a stroke of brilliance, partly because they only put in black and white and on paper what people were doing anyway, as reflected in property values as people moved around to shop for schooling especially before catchment areas were opened up.

But denial is so endemic to public education that very few functionaries at any level will speak in favour of the rankings. Even the minister of education decries them, and even Christy Clark, talk show host and former minister of education who faced off on her show with BCTF president Irene Lanzinger about the campaign to boycott the FSA tests, stated that she didn’t like the rankings part.

I think most of this is lip service intended to appease the union, an effort to find common ground from which to problem-solve and build harmony. But as I’ve said, the union is not in this to be appeased or in pursuit of harmony. They’re in this to generate hatred from the public and strong reactions from government in response to which their members will pull together and cling more closely to the union.

Anyone who seeks to appease them will only generate more huffing and puffing on some other aspect, an equally fatuous one no doubt, that is even more beneath anyone’s dignity to discuss.

Mind you, it is hard to imagine anything as fatuous as the claim that the FSA tests do harm to children.

Even if they did - even if the tests make students anxious, even if they take up much needed hours of class time, even if they are not perfect and could be improved, and even if they provided no useful information about children's learning - the tests are worth doing because they are the only mechanism that exists for the public to evaluate teacher competence. Of course they also reflect the efficacy of curriculum, funding, school policy, school demographics, and so on, but above all they reflect the efficacy of teaching.

One would wish not to say this, of course, to students or even to parents, because then they will realize that by manipulating their test performance, they have power over their teachers (not that it ever matters since nothing is done, but still). Unfortunately, in light of the union’s crusade, it has become necessary to say it in order to deflate the hysteria with which parents and students - and teachers - have now been deliberately infected.

The tests should not be generating hysteria, or even anxiety, in anyone. The tests are not high stakes (they are no-stakes, as pointed out in an excellent National Post editorial), and there are opt-out provisions for students who are truly unable. The tests do not steal anything from instructional time because they constitute practice of skills being taught (even if they did steal time, the time could probably be made up by skipping a few movies in the week before Christmas or year-end). Nor do they require teaching to the test since they test only what should be being taught anyway. They are not stressful for students unless the students are underprepared, and if they are underprepared then by default there is something wrong with their teaching, which should be identified and corrected - which is the whole purpose of the tests in the first place.

If students are anxious about the tests, then they have been made anxious by adults with questionable motivations. It is not difficult to present tests that should not worry most children in a way that does not worry them. Consider the approach taken by Sandra Dean, author of “Hearts and Minds: A public school miracle,” who spoke at a Vancouver Inner City Education Society conference a few years ago. Deans told the conference that she presented government tests to her Oshawa students as a special request from the minister of education in Toronto to see the best work they could do. Her students were not anxious, but eager.

Surely if children can be this receptive to the tests, then adults can be receptive to the rankings. Since denouncing the rankings won’t mollify the union anyway, I see no reason not to enjoy and fully support the rankings; may they live long and prosper!

Now, I’m not here to say the rankings are perfect or ideal. With more data, they could be far, far better at identifying which schools and which teachers are really delivering the best value to the students they have. As the union itself points out, testing after four years of school reflects the work of at least four teachers, in addition to the knowledge possessed by the student prior to admission. The rankings are actually pretty effective at capturing value for the minimal amount of data they use, but with annual data as well as student intake testing, they could be far better.

They could, if one tried really hard, be as good as sports rankings. Teams are ranked, but sports statistics absolutely excel at enabling observers to fully understand both team performance and individual player performance to see who to credit or blame for the ranking. In hockey, goals scored, shots stopped, shots taken, penalty minutes incurred, power play minutes, and the interplay of all of the above allows a very nuanced evaluation of each player’s contribution to team outcomes, adding enormous texture and depth to the team’s overall result.

One of the most interesting aspects of sports statistics is the extent to which the public is engaged in debating each element of performance and its connection to everything from league policy to coaching to officiating. As an education observer, I watch the sports media with deep envy, especially when I listen to Dan Russell’s Sports Talk show on CKNW in which Dan and callers who appear to be hugely representative of Joe Average talk about performance and policy at a very sophisticated level.

In contrast, the quality of public discussion about education and teaching is poor. We know little of how to evaluate what is happening to our kids in schools. Parents are prone to saying things about their children’s teachers like “She’s very creative…” but if they’re unsatisfied they often can’t put their finger on what they feel is missing. I think that more data, as well as different presentations and analyses of such data would be fascinating and would improve the quality of citizen understanding enormously.

To match what is done in hockey, standardized testing would have to occur at least once per year, preferably more, and be indexed to enough other school and student variables to understand each success and each failure. Data would need to be aggregated on a per-student basis and accumulated for each student’s full 13-year school tenure, providing a measurement of the effect of each teacher on the eventual outcome of every student, and the capacity to measure each teacher’s effect on students overall.

And it would not be the relative outcome of the student that is compared in rankings, but rather how far the student has actually progressed in each of those years.

I actually suspect that if such a full picture of teacher performance could be painted, the teachers in many of the so-called low-performing schools would be seen to be providing much greater value to their students than are teachers in the so-called better schools, where advantaged students have other ways of learning and thus often come to school already knowing much of what their schools are credited with teaching them. The Fraser Institute actually does a pretty good job of approximating that with its attention to parents’ years of education, but this is an imprecise measure and misses several variables. With really good data and lots of it, and with more information about the students themselves (how many are going to private tutoring for example, the effect of which is to make mediocre schools look better than they are), the actual work being done by a school and its teachers could be far better measured and reported.

If teachers paid this much attention to their own statistics, ironically the Fraser Institute would not have to. The institute wouldn’t even want to, since an organizational culture of self-improvement does not attract the same scrutiny nor offer the same degree of opportunity for commentary that a culture of denial and cloaking does.

The culture of denial and cloaking can surely not be tolerated for much longer by any government that seeks to be perceived by the public as electable or re-electable. I cannot see any reason why a government would keep teachers tied to a union that continues to foist such a culture on them, and on the rest of us. I wonder when it will become possible for teachers to choose a representative other than the teachers’ union. And when that does happen, I wonder how many teachers would continue to choose perpetual anger at nothing.




Edited by Karin Litzcke (02/02/09 10:08 AM)