What's a School

I was talking with a Teach for America teacher and he told me an anecdote about how the "worst" teacher in his school was indispensable because she had an amazing ability to resolve any and all disciplinary problems. It's not clear to me how someone gifted at maintaining order and, consequently, helping other teachers teach more effectively doesn't raise someone out of the category of worst. teacher. ever. into the category of necessary for the school's smooth running. Figuring out why complex institutions fulfill their socially beneficial functions requires thinking about, you know, the various roles and skill sets necessary for making complex institutions run smoothly, albeit inefficiently.

I take, in other words, exception to Matthew Yglesias' claim that,

there’s plenty of room around the margin for people to disagree about the best way to conduct these kind of evaluations. But as I’ve been saying, it’s only within the context of believing that teacher quality is important and measurable that it’s possible to coherently make the case for the importance of teachers and investing in them. Weingarten has the right instincts on this,

 because of the clear notion that "teacher quality" is something "measurable" in a straight forward kind of way and that this dispute is "around the margin," whatever that might mean in plain English. I also take issue because it's not clear he read the article with sufficient care. To wit:

Critics say that removing teachers is nearly impossible because of the obstructions that unions have put up. Administrators also bear some blame. Most evaluations are perfunctory — a drive-by classroom observation by a vice principal — and hearings to prove incompetence can be long and costly.

One reason it's hard to fire teachers, one could argue if given to overstatement, is that administrators, who are not members of the union, are lazy and incompetent and fail to fulfill their important role even as they get more money than teachers and have more say over how schools function. Another way to think about it is that figuring out who is a good, bad, or indifferent teacher is a complicated undertaking and that we should be working with administrators to see to it that they have the time and resources necessary to monitor and judge teachers' quality instead of blathering on about measurement and quality.

And

In Ms. Weingarten’s proposal, which she presented at a meeting of union leaders and researchers in Washington on Thursday night, teachers would be evaluated using multiple yardsticks, including classroom visits, appraisal of lesson plans and student improvement on tests.

All of which is another way of saying that the evaluation will be much more than "testing" those things that are "measurable."  As I read this, Weingarten is willing to work with administrators to see to it that they do their jobs because, after all, union members, which is to say teachers, want students to succeed and, oddly enough, they also want a decent salary and protection for from irrational supervisors. She is not falling into line with the simplistic notion that the non-crisis in our educational systems can be fixed if we would just measure little Johnny and Janey and then fire the teacher if the measurement isn't what Yglesias thinks it ought to be.