What makes a good teacher? It's a question that has befuddled education departments across the country, though it hasn't kept enough of them from talking as if they knew. The best answer to that question we ever got was a few years back at Stanford from a nationally known scholar of educational statistics. He paused thoughtfully, considered the question, and then said, "We don't know."
Whatever critics say about capital-E Experts, at least this one knew what he didn't know. Ah, humility. It's the beginning of wisdom. But anyone looking for wisdom in the rarefied precincts of the Arkansas Department of Education should be forewarned: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
In place of the simplicity that is only the beginning of wisdom, and may be its end as it strives for Truth, the state and particularly those trying to improve education my be offered only verbiage instead. At great length.
The latest example to beware out of our state department of educanto has an acronym, of course. Even two or three. (Doesn't every instant solution to man's eternal questions?) The guiding principle for coming up with such labels is that they be (a) short and (b) misleading. And these latest abbreviations meet both requirements. One goes by the tag SOAR, which stands for Student Ordinal Assessment Ranking. And the poor reader, let alone the poor administrator told to figure it all out, is assured that the whole convoluted process is easy to understand. Even if that may require a few pages of directions. Or maybe a whole book of them.
This ranking system is a product of TESS, which stands for Teacher Excellence and Support System, though any excellence and support it offers may be hard to find, obscured as both are by this latest attempt to quantify the unquantifiable--a process that never seems to end for those convinced they can work out a simple formula or 12 to capture the art that is teaching. Or maybe the art that was teaching before the statisticians got hold of it.
Here's a sample of just how simple it is to calculate a teacher's SOAR--if you can stand it. To quote that noted educator Margo Channing, aka Bette Davis, in All About Eve: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" Or weeks of them if you're faced by pages of instructions like these:
"1. To calculate SOAR, a measure of growth between two academic years, first group all students who scored the same scale score on the previous year's assessment, and then look at just those students' scores on the current year's assessment. Apply percentiles to this distribution with the following formula SOAR = Pl/(n+1) where P is the position of the score in the distribution n. A constant value of 1 is added to the n count in order to center the percentiles for all groups. This SOAR percentile is simply a measure of student performance in the current academic year relative to their academic peers. 2. . . . ."
We're particularly fond of the word "simply" in the last sentence of that anything but simple paragraph, or attempt at one. But that's all right, the whole contraption comes with . . . Graphs! They're inarticulate modern man's substitute for words.
All in all, what the poor reader has here is another example of what Ortega y Gasset summed up early in another century, the 20th, as "the barbarism of specialization." And it's still going on, only Piled Higher and Deeper, which may be abbreviated as Ph.D.--in "education," all too often.
This latest wad of gobbledegook brings to mind the contortions the state's Department of Education has just gone through after being told--by law--to devise a simple system of letter grades for school districts instead of all those mysterious numbers it usually favors. Naturally it came up with a system that is anything but simple. Educantists may find this convoluted numbers game simple. Unfortunately, it may not be to anyone else.
Editorial on 09/28/2014