By Dave Anderson:
I'm an evaluator by profession and training. Good evaluation is a continuous learning process as we attempt to close the OODA loop so that smart decisions can be made on the basis of accurate, relevant and timely information. Doing this should allow for better programmatic outcomes and awareness of the operating environment.
No Child Left Behind has been a boon and a curse to evaluators. It has been a boon because it has created numerous new positions and forced many organizations to engage in evaluation as a systemic activity for the first time. It is a curse, because on the whole, it encourages very bad evaluation practices. A "good" NCLB evaluation is basically an exercising in counting and 4th grade math.
Mark Kleiman expands on what a good evaluation in education should be:
Statistical quality assurance depends on sampling, not census
inspection; on paying attention to the entire range of outcomes, not
just whether a given outcome meets or fails to meet some standard; and
on process. And it is continuous and interactive rather than purely
retrospective...Applying statistical QA to education would involve:
- Selecting a sample of students for high-quality, expensive testing
rather than settling for the level of observation we can afford to do
on every student.- Using information about the whole range of performance rather than fixating on an arbitrary cutoff.
- Taking measurements all through the school year, not just at the end, and getting the results back to the teachers promptly.
There�s really no excuse for running our educational system on the management principles of 1920.
Last year, I argued that evaluation had shown a counter-intuitive policy suggestion had merit; increase class sizes in order to expand feedback would be a positive education result:
Reducing classroom sizes produces statistically significant but small positive academic
improvement outcomes. HOWEVER, it is a very expensive intervention.
Teachers are the largest single short term cost while increased capital
spending to build more rooms is a significant long term cost for this
intervention. The return on investment is fairly low.In a flush budgetary environment paying for effective but
inefficient programs and interventions may be defensible, but in tight
times, we need to think of something different. Dr. Yeh at the University of Minnesota,
in a talk I attended this week, and in several publications, argues
that other interventions have lower initial and sustaining costs while
producing similar or greater academic improvement outcomes. He
advocates for a rapid assessment/iterative loop learning system but
others such as positive behavioral support also show results that are
as effective and more efficient as reducing classroom sizes and
student:teacher ratios.
Being able to learn in a systemic manner and use counter-intuitive information to make good decisions is a mark of an effective and sustainable organization. I wonder if there are any polities in this country that would be willing to actually attempt to raise class-room sizes while adapting more effective and efficient pedagological measures or would those school boards be voted out next year?
I see from last year's comments the suggestion of larger classes was not received with unalloyed enthusiasm. But I, for one, like the idea. It appeals to my business side because of the economy of scale. Discipline and individual attention are not a function of class size but of organization. Most objections are based on the one-instructor-per-class model. With additional aides, proctors and/or assistance from other students those objections can vanish. In fact, the learning process might profit from having more than one teacher per class, particularly if a professional understudy or several "teacher's pets" selected from among their peers become part of the method. I see no reason that what works at the college level cannot be applied, with proper shaping, to primary and secondary education.
ReplyDeleteSuch a model on a cost basis might provide a more attractive professional trajectory as well. Any business school undergrad could work out the details.
It might be advisable to spell out more carefully what is meant by "education." The didactic part is pretty straightforward. But the imaginative part is hard to capture in large assemblies. Teaching at its best plants a learning seeds instead of hybrid crops incapable of reproducing past one growing season. My best classes were those I left knowing how much trmained for me to know instead of how much I had "learned."