The Hartford Business Journal identifies me as a “freelance writer,” which suggests that I am a Renaissance Man, equally expert in environmental protection, banking regulation, insurance fraud and why higher wages reduce aggregate supply at each wage level, especially at the elastic portion of the supply curve.
If I were a niche kind of guy, I would be identified as the “electric forecast load” writer, or the “how much commercial real estate crap do the banks actually have on their books” writer. But no, I roam the intellectual prairie in my freelance kind of way, comfortable with writing almost anything except for “how-to” columns.
That’s right. I don’t have the patience to provide remedial education to folks who just aren’t up to snuff on stuff. That’s why I’m so cranky around editors.
Is that small flaw so terrible that it will drive me from the newsroom in disgrace? Of course not. Being almost perfect, or being exceptional to even a small, target audience, is enough to get you through the day in most fields.
Which brings us to the topic of today’s column, which may have been unclear up to this point, since I am a Renaissance Man and might be writing about almost anything.
Governor Malloy has promised that the upcoming legislative session will produce “major steps” toward better teacher evaluation techniques.
It won’t happen, of course, just as it won’t happen in the other 8,599 jurisdictions that have promised to reform the systems that determine how bad, exactly, an educated, certified, licensed, branded and presentable teacher has to be before he or she can be shown the door.
In Connecticut, Governor Malloy and the unions will conspire to do some very minor tinkering with the “last in, first out” layoff policy in most districts, which bases layoffs on seniority, rather than competence or allure. The unions like it that way, but some modest change will allow Malloy to pretend that he has “reformed” teacher evaluation — without actually exploring how and why almost every teacher in creation is evaluated as doing just fine.
The evaluation tool popular at the moment, student test scores, is, as they say, better than nothing — especially since “nothing” is what the teachers’ unions would prefer. But, it has at its heart a philosophical flaw that is almost unsolvable.
The teachers are presumed to be Renaissance Men — adept at teaching everyone who walks in the door.
Because most teachers are unionized in a way that makes them no more “professional” that coal miners or textile workers, there is no coherent way for a teacher to say, well, sure, my aggregate scores might be kind of lousy, but if you look at my kids in the top 10 percent of the class, they all break SAT test score records, go on to snobby, Ivy league universities, and become wealthy, tyrannical newspaper publishers.
And there is even a rare cadre of teachers who improve test scores with kids at the low end of the academic pecking order; but who might not crank out investment bankers from Snobby Suburban High.
The problem is, with rare exception, teachers can’t and won’t market themselves as effective niche performers — and school systems are reluctant to, or forbidden from, labeling kids in a way that would sort them by likely performance.
The assumption: Every professional educator is a Renaissance Man — no matter the student, no matter the circumstance. What evaluation tool is right for such nonsense? There are only so many Cohen the Columnists.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
