Evaluating Teachers

Teaching in a public school has sometimes been a perilous proposition. In the worst cases, teachers have been subject termination for the content of their instruction, and we might imagine what could happen to a person teaching about evolution in an evangelical district. Only slightly less egregious would be the practice of firing more experienced teachers because new ones are cheaper.

The traditional response to these problems, avidly defended by teachers' unions, has been to offer tenure to teachers with a certain number of years on the job. To an extent, that solution works, in that it de-politicizes the act of teaching and provides some idependence, if not autonomy, for teachers to do their jobs.

Of course, the system also allows incompetent or lazy people to keep their jobs without the concern experienced in almost every other profession about adequate performance. I myself had some terrible teachers, at least one of whom was sleeping with his students, because tenure made it so difficult to move people on. As someone who works at an independent school, I am therefore grateful for the fact that tenure does not apply; we have been able to get people out when we need to do so.

Fairly assessing the actual performance of teachers is not so easy, though. Unlike most other professions, teaching can only be evaluated secondarily; that is, we judge the effectiveness of teachers through the actions of someone else -- the students. Teachers can say with justification that test scores don't accurately measure what they are doing because it is the kids, not the instructor, who must do the job, in the end. Start with students with less talent, with fewer resources, with trouble at home, with inadequate nutrition and you will end with lower scores.

That's why efforts to include classroom visits and other tools in evaluations makes so much sense. Intimidating as these approaches can be, teachers must face accountability for what they actually do. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan noted, “When everyone is treated the same, I can’t think of a more demeaning way of treating people... Far, far too few teachers receive honest feedback on what they’re doing.”

It's time for teachers to see themselves as professionals rather than tradesmen. Standards matter, and we need to help craft and enforce those standards.

The Supreme Court and the Rule of Law

In a recent post on SCOTUSblog, Lyle Deniston notes the suspicion of judges held by many members of the Supreme Court. In the oral arguments for Tibbals v. Carter and Ryan v. Gonzalez,  attorneys for the states of Ohio and Arizona argued that judges should not be permitted to institute indefinite stays of execution for defendants who are temporarily incompetent to participate in their own appeals. As Deniston points out, the justices were highly skeptical of the practice, largely because they assumed the judges would not be impartial in its implementation. At one point, Densiton refers to Justice Alito 'who suggested that a lot of judges “don’t like the death penalty,” so why should the Court leave to their discretion the issue of stays for incompetency in these death penalty cases?'

This is an alarming attitude for the Court to take, in part because it suggests their assumption they they themselves would be incapable of judicial neutrality when faced with similar problems. Why should we trust judges' discretion? Because their job -- the very name of their job -- requires it. They are there solely to use their discretion. What can it possibly mean for the highest court in the land to say, or even to imply, that we can't trust the judiciary? How can our system, or the very concept of the rule of law, stand up under such skepticism -- or is it cynicism?

The First "Fiscal Conservative"

         FA Hayek

Wesleyan University professor Richard Adelstein introduced  me to FA Hayek almost twenty years ago, but I had never read his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom until this week. I knew Hayek was the classic conservative economist, who placed his faith in markets and who mistrusted big government planning more than anything. I knew that, through the University of Chicago, he spread his influence such that he was, in some ways, the founder of the American libertarian movement.


I had no idea, however, how lucidly and powerfully he wrote, nor how truly liberal he was. In fact, Hayek used the word "liberal" in the old, 19th-century way -- to mean those opposed to dictatorship and those who believed in the right and the power of the individual to decide his own fate.

For Hayek, the conflict was  not between government on one hand and liberty on the other, but between governments that helped facilitate liberty and governments that suppressed it. Mostly, he feared central planning, the effort to make government decide the values -- economic and otherwise -- of all people with goal being perfect efficiency and perfect equality. Planners, he feared, were the first step on the way to totalitarianism because they believed that some rational eye in the sky could decide for everyone what was good and right.

But Hayek was not anti-government. Unlike today's Tea Party types, who eschew all government, Hayek believed it was essential for wealthy societies to provide some minimal quality of life for everyone by funding programs including -- wait for it -- government-sponsored health care. He figured that programs like these only allowed more opportunity for serious individual decision-making. In fact, his second-greatest fear was a drastic difference between rich and poor because it might provoke the kind of thinking that led to Hitler in German and Stalin in the USSR.

I wish the whack-jobs in our political arena could read and understand Hayek, so we could get to the real business at hand and stop wasting our time debating nonsense.