The best thing about Lulu's isn't the free pizza, although
the pizza is pretty good.
You buy a drink, you get a freshly baked,
sandwich-plate-sized pizza. It's NY dough, so it's chewy and crusty, the way
God wants it to be. The sauce might be a little tart and the cheese is just ok,
but the toppings are only a dollar, so why are you complaining? Just get the
pepperoni and pineapple and be happy.
But, no, the best thing about Lulu’s is the skylight. It's a
dive bar WITH A SKYLIGHT. I know: a true dive, by definition, cannot be
improved with light, right? Wrong. Somehow that light, filtered through a metal
grate and hanging plants, coupled with the smell of fresh pizza, makes Lulu's
atmospheric and lovely. They also have a great selection of beer and
booze. It's one of my favorite bars in
Brooklyn.
Don't go. I don't want it to get crowded.
Anyway, sitting in there this beautiful mid-December
afternoon, I got a glimpse of one of the things that’s broken in our schools.
But, for the moment, back to the pizza. Here's how it works:
- you
buy a drink then get a ticket for free pizza
- take that ticket to the pizza kitchen window and order a pizza
- toppings? pay the pizza guy when you order
Easy, right? Simple, understated, and efficient.
That is, until a manager decided that having more
“transparency” in the system would make it work better.
Now: First two steps are the same. If you want toppings, then
- you
have to buy toppings tickets from the bar
- bring the toppings tickets to the pizza guy
What’s happened? It's
crazy. I saw the harried bartender explain the system over and over to
frustrated customers who walked back and forth between the bar and the pizza
window. I'd hate to see it when things get busy at Lulu's.
Listen, it's a ridiculous example, I know. But it's
illustrative of the stupid cost of manager-based systems in place of
field-worker-based systems. You’ve seen
it a hundred times. The focus on the
manager makes things worse.
Managers: It’s the
Quality, Stupid
States across the country, under the federal mandates of
Race To the Top, are in the process of creating and executing “teacher
evaluations.” As people everywhere debate the merits of these evaluations, few
people are spending any time talking about what these instruments actually
value. Every single evaluation model I've looked at is a manager-based
evaluation.
The problem? Managers-- in so many fields-- don't actually
do the work of those that they evaluate. They only monitor, evaluate, and
regulate their underlings. Managers create regulations-- like topping tickets--
because they don't KNOW what's going on. They need to have numbers to PROVE
what's going on.
Subsequently, manager-based evaluation tends to be skewed
towards things that can be quantified. Teachers are to be evaluated largely by
managers looking for good numbers-- which is the central premise of “teacher
evaluation.”
There is no better example of this flaw than the "Value Added" Model. At its best, the VA models help pinpoint really good and really bad teachers. That's good-- but a very small set in a system that worships bell curve models, as explained by the National Council on Teacher Quality in their study of DCPS (District of Columbia Public School) teachers in 2010. At its worst, and most common, it incentivizes teachers to make the students appear statistically stupid at the beginning of the year in order to show "growth."
You know what happens to good teachers when they get incentivized to make their students appear stupid? They get really demoralized. And they stop thinking about teaching in favor of thinking about avoiding negative numbers. Teachers stop focusing on quality and start focusing on quantity.
Teachers Should Evaluate Teachers
It's amazing to me that it's radical to say “teacher
evaluation should be done by teachers.” The teachers who evaluate other
teachers should be informed by data collected from managers, test-scores,
peers, and student feedback. Teacher evaluators
would, as workers in the field, should give qualitative evaluations, not
quantitative evaluations.
What do I say to all of those school managers
(administrators)? Order the ingredients, keep the shop running, and look out
for safety. Everything else—well, no offense, but it’s not really your
job. Keep those extra tickets to
yourself.
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