Ignoring Diversity, Undermining Equity - Katherine Crawford-Garrett

For this blog post, I focused on Ignoring Diversity, Undermining Equity by Katherine Crawford-Garrett. I decided to build off of another blog post that I read by Jackson Reilly. 

This piece follows a first year assistant professor that faced scrutiny following an evaluation from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). The NCTQ is an organization that provides schools with guidance following research and evaluation.  

According to their mission statement, "We propose new changes to restore the teaching profession to strong health so we can provide every child with the education needed to ensure a bright and successful future and to offer all teachers—from aspiring to veteran—the conditions needed to thrive and succeed."

How exactly did the NCTQ "restore the teaching profession to strong health" at the University of New Mexico? For Crawford-Garrett, that meant lowering the college's rating by several points, specifically because of changes she made to an elementary reading course. 

Crawford-Garrett was a new professor at the university. She took it upon herself to change the syllabus she had inherited from the previous professor. She based her decision off her previous teaching experiences in Washington D.C. 

The fundamental changes made involved swapping out texts for ones that felt ore grounded both in skill and cultural relevance. In particular, she hoped these texts would provide a framework to delve into power and privilege, and how one grapples with multiple perspectives. 

Crawford-Garrett wanted to challenge the status quo, and was met with punishment. The NCTQ found the changes made to be a distraction and not aligned with the five pillars of reading instruction. 

In the end, Crawford-Garrett refused to make changes to her curriculum, despite being called into meetings with her dean directly related to the NCTQ rating.

Jackson did a great job of breaking down the justifications NCTQ had for lower the schools rating just because of a syllabus change. He also mentioned various organizations that operate with the same jurisdictions and powers. He states, "For years they have gotten to choose what they want on these tests and what students need to learn in order to succeed on them."

Jackson also had a very strong call to action that really resonated with me  The way that this changes is that teachers across the country begin to use their voices, just as Katherine did, and speak out about what their students are missing out on due to state testing.  We need to post on social media.  We need to get politicians to take it up as a cause.  We need to make learning more about our students – because right now, that’s often the last thing learning is about."

I often find that evaluations and teacher assessments get in the way of learning. Testing for students in the classroom becomes such a distraction that you miss large chunks of quality instruction, at least in my case. What makes a lot of this information even harder to accept, is that organizations like NCTQ often fail to deliver on their own mission statements. 

I was curious to see what the NCTQ accomplished through their strict eval process and was shocked when doing some research of my own. 

According to the Huffington Post, a study of NCTQ found that those "...who graduated from programs that meet NCTQ’s standards were more effective at raising students’ test scores in 15 out of 124 comparisons.

That's 12%.  

NCTQ President, Kate Walsh, argued that there wasn't enough data collected yet to support these findings. This was the first assessment of the assessing organization in 15 years. 

But lack of data sounds more like an excuse to me. Why haven't these numbers been tracked this entire time? As a first year teacher, I'll admit that a lot of school assessments and evaluations go over my head. I follow procedures because that's what everyone else does. 

This type of information genuinely scares me and makes me upset when I lose months of instruction to tests that may not prove anything. At the end of the day, it's just someone else checking off a box and moving on. 

Teachers need to be able to adapt their curriculum and syllabus. It's 2018. We should be talking with students about culturally relevant texts and social justice. These assessments only seem to get in the way of that without a real reason as to why.