Chris Timmons: Legislator misunderstands teaching and teachers

The teacher who taught state Rep. Erik Fresen, R-Miami, his ABCs, if he or she were around, should certainly regret it.

Because — astonishingly, or maybe not — Fresen believes that the insights gleaned from a casual reading during a long airplane flight (Amanda Ripley’s “The Smartest Kids in the World,” according to Fresen) entitles him to remake state education policy, affecting 2.7 million students.

Education policy in Florida is already screwy enough, but Fresen has taken it a bit beyond what even savvy observers of Florida’s tendency toward the bizarre (and dumb) could anticipate.

Under the new law, which is called “Florida’s Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarships,” new and current teachers are to be rewarded a $10,000 bonus based on their high school SAT/ACT scores — here’s where you blush if yours were bad — or whether they are rated “highly effective” in their jobs. (By the way, new teachers would have to be in the 80^th percentile among SAT/ACT takers in order to receive a bonus.)

According to the Tampa Bay Times (a liberal rag! Don’t believe it!), Fresen’s idea became a last-minute $44 million line item in Florida’s 2015-16 state budget due to special session wrangling over the details of several education priorities.

This “incentive,” as it is called, is supposed to attract the top 10 percent of state students to the teaching ranks — getting big brains into the schools to boost test scores and say “accountability” in education works.

The Florida Education Association (FEA) says this is, first of all, inconsistent because it is not tied to “outcomes.” Rather, it is an investment in potential, and since the Republican Legislature has railed against and disapproved of rewarding teachers based on National Board certification, it is an egregious hypocrisy to go in this direction.

Technically, the law prescribes that 4,400 teachers would qualify for the reward under its standards. Yet last year, 68,373 Florida teachers were rated “highly effective.” The reward would have to be heavily prorated to accommodate this high rate of teaching success — or have more funding dedicated to it. But that doesn’t seem to have figured into Fresen’s math.

Mostly, though, Fresen’s idea is bunk because he wants to impose a false and bewildering standard of pedagogical effectiveness that can never pay full dividends. To tie funding to potential is necessarily to have more failures than successes.

One cannot anticipate faults of personality or temperament, or even a bad run of luck. Since Fresen takes as his models of excellence Singapore and Finland, it is surprising he would embrace a formula that rejects their entire approach toward effectiveness.

As Harvard scholar, Pasi Sahlberg, has written, both countries do not use “teaching effectiveness” as the sole measure of education success. For both Singapore and Finland something called “school improvement” remains the paramount goal and the only certainty for wide success. Generally, what that entails is solid support from the school’s principal and his staff of the aims of teachers, a good climate for learning, high expectations within it, keeping staff up-to-date in skills, and getting parents involved.

Teacher quality is good, but it only counts for one to 14 percent of the variability — that is, actual effect — on test scores. Student characteristics and family life count more.

Nevertheless, teaching is one of those mysterious and confounding areas where people (from politicians to your man on the street) believe they have all the answers but the mystery persists.

H.L. Mencken, the witty and jocose journalist of the 20^th century, once wrote in his “Essay on Pedagogy”: “The art of pedagogy [is] a sort of puerile magic, a thing of preposterous secrets, a grotesque compound of false premises and illogical conclusions. Every year sees a craze for some new solution of the teaching enigma… there is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it.”

Beyond the Bad Boy of Baltimore’s sound words, Fresen’s use of SAT/ACT scores as predictors of teaching ability is not only absurd, but against what the College Board says those tests are best used for: as a means of predicting the academic performance of college applicants.

If a generalization could be made about education: Most people could do without knowledge — knowledge being the “specialized” and “abstract” sort that colleges prize. Or to put it this way: most are unlikely to appreciate Herodotus’s Histories or Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady or some abstruse economic theory. Ignorance is the preference of a sizable majority of our fellow citizens — which is why Jay Leno had so much fun asking the common man on the street about the news.

Teachers can rarely remedy the average student’s lack of enthusiasm for knowledge; so teachers are, in essence, failures. But still, optimism and idealism have to be part of the job, like your Peace Corps volunteer. A disillusioned, lazy, harried, and embattled teacher would never do.

Students could possibly do without outstanding teachers, but are positively harmed when the ratio of mediocre teachers are unevenly spread about any school district.

Very few people are qualified to judge teaching aptitude. Especially people who read superficially, propose superficial ideas, and work in the state Capitol on the 4^th Floor.

Chris Timmons is a writer based in Tampa. Column courtesy of Context Florida.