Fire the Doctors?

On November 26, 2009, the Lung Cancer Alliance - California released the report “State Makes Little Progress on Improving Lung Cancer Outcomes“.

Bad news. How should we respond? How about the following:

All these bad doctors should be stripped of their licenses to practice medicine. They obviously have failed to reduce the lung cancer rates; consequently since they are not doing their jobs they should not be in practice. Such incompetents should be removed from the medical profession.

Ridiculous. Not a solution to the problem, and an insult to an entire group of highly qualified professionals. We would not offer such a “solution” to a problem and certainly would not assume that any physician should be judged by such a statistic. We know, for example, that in spite of all the evidence that smoking can cause cancer, millions of people continue to smoke. Their doctors have told them to quite smoking and offered help in doing so, without success. Penalizing the doctor will not solve the problem.

Equally ridiculous, though not as immediately obvious, is the common cry that teachers are responsible for the stubbornly low scores made by California school kids on their standardized tests. And since it is the teachers’ fault that the kids are not making good scores, fire the teachers! Get rid of the incompetents!

President Obama and his Secretary of Education Duncan are not proposing the firing of teachers, but they are planning, among other criteria, to rate, to judge (and that means to pay) teachers on the basis of how their students score on standardized tests. The implication is incompetence, and the insult to the profession is clear.

What about those scores? Do they indicate something important about the quality of teaching? In fact, there is considerable doubt among testing experts as to the validity of the standardized tests being used. Scoring involves a median point, so that every score is either above or below; thus 50% of the scores are going to be “below”, no matter what. Even if the scoring were done differently, the individual child is not being judged as an individual; the whole point of a standardized test is that everyone is tested the same way, regardless of individual needs, skills, or situations.

Take a look at the kids being tested in the populous inner cities - a euphemism for areas of poverty. Poverty for children means having inadequate access to healthcare; it means living in crowed conditions with insufficient parental attention and guidance (especially where both parents work or a single parent is trying to support a family, which is all too often the case), plus fear and anxiety because of gangs. In addition factor in English language learners and children with learning disabilities. Throw all of these into a classroom, give them all the same test, and then judge them by a score.

Take a look at the teaching conditions in these classes. Irregular attendance and poor health alone will guarantee that many of the kids aren’t present enough to learn the lessons they will be tested on. Where motivation is hampered by emotional issues, where the youngsters are feeling their way into new territory with customs and ideals different from those they learned in their homes, how well are their scores going to compare on a test that in effect competes them against luckier children from affluent communities?

Moreover, poor urban children move often - it is not uncommon for inner city children to move two or three times a year; each move calls for more adjustment and provides more difficulties for a child to overcome. Studies show that every time a child changes schools the probability of graduation drops 2% to 3%. With millions of kids changing schools several times a year, we can begin to see just one of the many reasons why those test scores and the graduation rates are too low. (Johnson, in his capacity as UTLA president, learned that it is not rare for a teacher to have a class that does not have one student in class at the end of the semester who was enrolled at the beginning.)

Rating teachers on the test performances of kids who live in all the conditions listed - and more - makes as much sense as rating cancer doctors on the recovery rates of their patients.

Unfortunately, the President and the Secretary of Education are showing a very limited understanding of education today and the role of the teacher. Every teacher knows that many social and economic factors have dramatic impact on a child’s classroom performance. When these factors are negative, they reduce the child’s ability to do well academically, and increase the difficulty of classroom teaching.

Instead of threatening teachers and humiliating their low-scoring students, let’s give proper support to all of them: enough time, enough materials, for teachers to work with students as individuals, and enough good sense on the part of the rest of us to refrain from judging them on the basis of questionable standardized test results.