On Education: Helping Teachers Help Themselves

 

ROCKVILLE, Md. — The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve.

The program, Peer Assistance and Review — known as PAR — uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel — made up of eight teachers and eight principals — can vote to fire the teacher.

Sitting in on two cases last week, I could not tell from the comments which of the panel members were teachers and which were principals. In one of the cases, 11 of the 12 panel members present voted to follow a principal’s recommendation and discipline the teacher; in the other, they decided in a 10-to-2 vote to reject a principal’s recommendation and support the teacher.

In the 11 years since PAR began, the panels have voted to fire 200 teachers, and 300 more have left rather than go through the PAR process, said Jerry D. Weast, the superintendent of the Montgomery County system, which enrolls 145,000 students, one-third of them from low-income families. In the 10 years before PAR, he said, five teachers were fired. “It took three to five years to build the trust to get PAR in place,” he explained. “Teachers had to see we weren’t playing gotcha.”

Doug Prouty, the teachers’ union president, said, “It wouldn’t work without the level of trust we have here.”

Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s state superintendent of schools, called PAR “an excellent system for professional development.” Senior staff members from the United States Department of Education have visited here to study the program, and Montgomery County officials have gone to Washington to explain how it works. In February, the district was one of 12 featured in Denver at a Department of Education conference on labor-management collaboration.

Dr. Weast, who calls the United States secretary of education, Arne Duncan, “a good friend,” said, “He’s told me, ‘Jerry, you’re going where the country needs to go.’?”

Unfortunately, federal dollars from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program are not going where Dr. Weast and the PAR program need to go. Montgomery County schools were entitled to $12 million from Race to the Top, but Dr. Weast said he would not take the money because the grant required districts to include students’ state test results as a measure of teacher quality. “We don’t believe the tests are reliable,” he said. “You don’t want to turn your system into a test factory.”

Race to the Top aims to spur student growth by improving teacher quality, which is exactly what Montgomery County is doing. Sad to say, it is getting the right results the wrong way.

It does not seem to matter that 84 percent of Montgomery County students go on to college and that 63 percent earn degrees there — the very variables that President Obama has said should be the true measure of academic success. It does not seem to matter that 2.5 percent of all black children in America who pass an Advanced Placement test live in Montgomery County, more than five times its share of the nation’s black population.

The 12 states that were awarded the billions of dollars in Race to the Top grants are using student scores as a measure of teachers’ worth. New York has decided that state tests will count for up to 40 percent of a teacher’s grade; Maryland does not have a magic number yet.

Mr. Duncan’s supporters have marveled at how he has used Race to the Top money to pressure states into adopting his education agenda. Dr. Grasmick, the Maryland superintendent, said the administration made it clear that if a state wanted to win a grant, the proposal had to include a formula for calculating student growth. Maryland toed the line and was awarded $250 million.

Asked if the state could make an exception for Montgomery because of the PAR program’s history of success, Dr. Grasmick said Gov. Martin O’Malley had been told that no modifications were allowed. Nor are districts permitted to appeal to federal officials, said Ann Whalen, director of the Implementation and Support Unit at the Education Department.

So here is where things stand: Montgomery’s PAR program, which has worked beautifully for 11 years, is not acceptable. But the Maryland plan — which does not exist yet — meets federal standards.

Dr. Weast said a major failing of Race to the Top’s teacher-evaluation system is that it is being imposed from above rather than being developed by the teachers and administrators who will use it. “People don’t tear down what they help build,” he said.

Maybe that is why Race to the Top has been divisive in so many places. In Maryland, teachers’ unions in 22 of the 24 districts refused to sign the state’s grant proposal. In New York and New Jersey, the competition has made the war between the unions and state officials even nastier.

Every politician who micromanages education today should visit a PAR meeting.

E-mail: oneducation@nytimes.com

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Currents: Finding the Words to Forgive Themselves

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — “Bloodshed,” declared the man on the other end of the call. He was panicked. “I don’t know whether this is the end of the road or capitulation or not, but it will be one day of bloodshed or two more — or, or, or, two more days of bloodshed, man.”

The man was not in Misurata or Dara’a or Kabul. The phone call dates to Oct. 6, 2008, a day that was going badly for David Lau. He was a trader at Galleon, the hedge fund of the fallen billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted of insider trading this month in New York.

A striking thing about the call between Messrs. Lau and Rajaratnam — and about the latter’s other calls with subordinates, friends and tipsters in the banking-consulting universe — is a certain human need they revealed. In call after call, these characters betrayed a burning desire to give their transactions a martial, bloody quality that they naturally lacked. They were finance nerds who longed to feel like gladiators.

“I’m long 25 and I’m taking the pain, but I’m — you know, I’m a warrior. They can’t kill me,” Mr. Rajaratnam told another associate.

So many of his sentences are like this, taking a profession of virtual buys and sells and breathing an artificial physicality into them: “I wanna blow everything out.” “The only guys who are whipping stocks around are hedge funds.” “It’s very stressful, you know, every day you come in and it’s — I feel like I’m fighting Muhammad Ali.”

Mr. Rajaratnam’s interlocutors do it, too. Instead of saying that they telephoned someone, they say: “I just lobbed a call in to Ronny.” Sports and war metaphors grip them. They talk in the language of “clearing the last sort of big hurdle,” of the “falling knife” of the stock market.

Language is a beautiful thing that makes so many ugly things possible.

Only the most ruthless humans can do bad things and go on with the knowledge of their badness. Language gives the rest of us a way out — a way of rationalizing, explaining, telling ourselves a story about ourselves. We are not terrorists, but martyrs. We are not greedy, we are doing God’s work.

I read through the transcripts of Mr. Rajaratnam’s wiretapped phone calls this week, with a focus on language. I wanted to understand how this crew of rich-people-longing-to-be-richer conceived of themselves, in their own words.

Their need, above all, to inject knives and blood and boxing into their talk was telling. A common criticism of high-flying financiers is that they are increasingly removed from the reality of their deeds — from the cereal and light bulbs and apartment towers that they fund.

Their detachment makes malfeasance easier, the critics say, for they know not what they sell.

The tapes bolstered that impression. Here were men who spoke surprisingly little about the companies they were investing in, the products they made and the like. The companies were nothing but text on the tickers of a triple-screen computer. But in speaking as they did, the ethereality of their work could be grounded by a feeling that they were creators, doers; men who moved things, made things happen.

George Orwell famously worried about the corrosive effect on language of manipulative governments; in later years, adspeak and textspeak have presented themselves as threats. But financespeak is an empire unto itself, and perhaps more influential than is commonly realized.

The tapes were a reminder of how little this particular language of business is tethered to the stuff of real business: inventory and profit and revenue and the like.

That is not what the hopscotching, globe-trotting figures on the tapes speak of. They are ceaseless jumpers from one stock to another, and they have developed a standardized language of “puts” and “holds” and “long” and “short” that lets them smooth the nuances of each business into a strange new whole grasped only by them.

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