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The story coming out of Los Angeles is one of the more horrifying things I have seen in a while. I consider myself reasonably cynical and hardened, and I still have a hard time focusing on the full ramifications of what Mark Berndt is accused of doing to people in his school.

Yet, using value-added assessment, Mark Henry Berndt was a competent teacher.

I can't help but question the worth of any evaluation system that rates a person like that competent at educating children. People have identified the weaknesses of value-added assessment before, but it seems like leaving the human element out of any assessment of work that is primarily person to person interaction leaves out the most important piece.

My heart goes out to the people who have survived their interactions with this man. May their healing be constant and ongoing.

In his most recent Sunday column, Nicholas Kristof again wades into discussing education. This week, Kristof discusses the story of Olly Neal; When Neal was in high school in the 50's, he described himself as a "troubled high school senior" turned reader turned law student turned judge turned member of the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

Kristof opens his piece with a link to a study that used value-added methodology to determine that good elementary school teachers can make a difference.

He then goes on to the story of Olly Neal - and the story of Olly Neal is a great story.

Earlier in his high school career - as recounted in the Kristof article, Olly Neal

remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”

Later in his high school career, Neal cut another teacher's class and went into the school library, where Mildred Grady also worked. While there, he saw a book with a picture of a scantily clad woman on the cover - The Treasure of Pleasant Valley by Frank Yerby - and, as he didn't want to be known as someone who actually checked out books from the library, he stole the book. He brought it home, read it, and loved it, and returned to the library, where he found another Yerby novel.

And he stole that too.

And then, another.

And then, another.

According to the story on NPR about Olly Neal, Neal "read four of Yerby's books that semester — checking out none of them."

Later, at one of his high school reunions, Grady let Neal know that the supply of Yerby books was no accident. As described in the NPR story:

"She told me that she saw me take that book when I first took it," Neal said.

"She said, 'My first thought was to go over there and tell him, boy, you don't have to steal a book, you can check them out — they're free.'

"Then she realized what my situation was — that I could not let anybody know I was reading."

Grady told Neal she decided that if he was showing an interest in books, "she and Mrs. Saunders would drive to Memphis and find another one for me to read — and they would put it in the exact same place where the one I'd taken was."

And this is one of the ways that great teaching manifests itself: in meeting a kid where they are at, and by providing them opportunities that they are able to reach. At times, great teaching also means taking a look at the rules that are in place, and understanding that the potential success of one particular kid means breaking or ignoring those rules.

Kristof takes the story of Olly Neal and attempts to bend it to support a preconceived narrative.

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.

Unfortunately, this interpretation doesn't align with Olly Neal's story. In fact, Olly Neal's story illustrates the weaknesses of the exact types of evaluations that Kristof celebrates.

Mildred Grady was interacting with Neal in her role as a librarian, not in a teaching capacity. In a value-added assessment, Neal's other teachers - and NOT Grady - would receive the credit for any improvements made by Neal.

In fairness, Kristof also says, "there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer." But, no one is really arguing that. We can burn that straw man. This is about the same as someone declaring, "Reducing poverty is predicted to improve the nation's financial well-being."

Of course good teachers are part of the answer. And, of course, fair and rigorous teacher evaluations are part of the process of determining what makes teachers more effective. But, the successes of Mildred Grady - and the thousands of teachers who do similar things in difficult situations - don't fit into the types of evaluations that are being pushed as the cornerstones for measuring teacher effectiveness. Driving to Memphis to buy books for one kid to steal doesn't translate directly into a kid having success on the scantron - but this type of thoughtful, targeted attention is essential to the success of individual people.

I recently talked with another teacher who works in a high poverty school. This teacher works in special education, and their school has been on the cusp of not making Adequate Yearly Progress (or AYP) for several years.

In this teacher's class, there were three children who were on the verge of passing the test. Two of these children had diagnosed special needs, and had a primary language other than English. A third student also had a diagnosed special need and had a primary language other than English, but also had a physical disability, was on the free and reduced lunch program, and had been placed in foster care.

This teacher's principal approached the classsroom teacher around six weeks before the test with some explicit instructions: focus on the kid with the physical disability, and don't worry about the other two.

This administrator had done the math: according to the metric that determined a school's progress, the school would get more points toward AYP if the one student with more pronounced learning disabilities passed than if the other two students passed. In short, if the one kid passed and the other two failed, the school would look better on paper. This administrator had broken down the math on a class by class basis, and was giving his teachers - schoolwide - instructions on how to "succeed."

The teacher, who had tenure, told the administrator where to go. The teacher paid for this "disobedience" in the form of less than stellar evaluations.

So, when people like Nick Kristof call for more rigorous teacher evaluations, we need to be clear that one aspect of tying teacher evaluations to test scores leads to some people attempting to game the system.

Nick Kristof justly celebrated the creativity and caring of Mildred Grady. What types of evaluation measure the excellence of people like her? Portfolio-based professional development comes to mind as one option, but accurate, reliable, rigorous teacher evaluations involves improved education policy.

Improved education policy needs to look at education, poverty, and health as equally important elements to be addressed.

As has been noted elsewhere, SOPA and PIPA are "the latest in a series of bills which would create a procedure for creating (and censoring) a blacklist of websites."

While SOPA and PIPA appear to be dead, the corporations behind them have a lot of money, and they will not allow the death of these two bills to stop their efforts to control how people connect with information. While we should be glad that both bills, in their current form, are dead, we should not be fooled into thinking that this fight is over.

These sites allow you to contact your elected representatives:

• http://blacklists.eff.org
• http://americancensorship.org
• https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction

Additionally, you can register at http://voteforthenet.com to show your support for candidates who will protect the web from the corporations who want to dismantle it.

Friday night, while walking our dog, my wife and daughter met a family of five. Of the three children, the middle girl was around seven - close to the same age as my daughter. The oldest - a boy - was ten, and the youngest - a toddler between a year and eighteen months - occupied a stroller. It was cold last night in Portland, and the toddler was bundled up with extra clothes and blankets. The father asked my wife for money.

"The shelters are full," he said. "We're on the waitlist at all the ones we called."

"And we're not going to Portland Mission," the mother said. "I don't know if you've ever seen that place, but you can't bring kids in there."

When my wife and daughter met them, they were on their way back to Safeway. "It's warm in there," the mother said. They were trying to get money for a hotel for the night.

"But even a bench outside Safeway is better than Portland Mission," the father said.

And my wife and daughter helped them out as best they could, but it wasn't enough, because really, in that context, what does enough even look like?

Afterwards, as my wife, daughter, and I talked about it, my wife was struck by the feeling that they were new to the street. "He talked about how people are really possessive of corners," she said. "He was ashamed, but he was having a hard time finding a good spot to ask for money."

And today, I read about Samantha Garvey, a kid whose family had been evicted just before New Years, and how she is a finalist in a national science fair, and how her family is getting a home - and I am really excited to read about her success, but the happiness I feel for her is leavened, because I can't get around the fact that there are thousands of families just like Samantha's who will not be written about in the national press, and who will not be getting off the street, into a shelter, or a home. They will be going precisely nowhere, at least not anytime soon.

And at some point, the three kids my family met last night will end up in school, somewhere. And my hope is that the teachers who have the opportunity to work with them to further their education will have the tools - the money, the time, the resources, and the support - to give them what they need. And I hope that the work these teachers and these students do will be judged and assessed on its own merits, against the backdrop of its own distinct context.

Within the current educational reform discussions, it's very fashionable to say that poverty is not destiny and that things would get better if we could only fire more bad teachers. And, in a very general sense, these truisms - like all truisms - are general enough to resemble something that might even be true. But these oversimplifications - like many of the "obvious" solutions to "fixing" education - break, hard, against the uniquely human conditions within which people are expected to learn. The specifics of the various educational settings are often left out of the discussion, as they don't fit neatly into a truism that makes a good sound bite.

And each day, families drift into homelessness, the distance between the very rich and the very poor continues to increase, social mobility continues to decrease - and against this backdrop, with 22 percent of the children in the US living in poverty, with just under 24 percent of children living in households that experience food insecurity, we need to drop the pretense that education, poverty, and health are separate issues.

Today, my daughter and I drove down Sandy Boulevard, and she looked for the family she met last night. We didn't see them.

She sat back in her seat. "Do you think they found a hotel?" she asked.

"I don't know," I told her. "I hope so."

She wasn't satisfied with that. She likes more precision. She likes to know.

I didn't have a better answer.

Nicholas Kristof has a piece in today's NY Times titled The Value of Teachers. In this piece he points to a recent comprehensive study that looks at the earning gains for students who have "good" teachers.

The money quote comes in the third paragraph:

That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn.

Kristof buries the fact that the study is based on value-added methodology and conflates student performance on test scores with good teaching. He alludes to value-added in the 11th paragraph, but never actually addresses the fact that test scores and value added analysis aren't infallible.

The study authors (and this piece shouldn't detract from the worth and value of the study, which merits a read) are clear on this, even though Kristof is not. The executive summary (pdf download) of the study leads with a discussion of value added analysis:

Researchers have not reached a consensus about the accuracy and long-term impacts of VA because of data and methodological limitations.

The researchers conclude that, for their study, value-added analysis is a valid tool, as they look at over a million students from 4th grade to adulthood. As I said earlier, the study is a good read.

However, in his article on the study, Kristof uses false equivalencies:

Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don’t allow that kind of truancy, so it’s not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching.

Truancy and the quality of a teacher are two very separate things. Conflating them here serves a rhetorical purpose (truancy = bad; bad teaching = truancy) but aside from being an interesting rhetorical gimmick, it just doesn't make sense.

The piece also commits one of the standard mistakes made in many pieces about teacher quality: it assumes that there is an objectively "good" teacher that will work for every kid in every class. The reality is (and people who have worked in school with kids can attest to this) different teachers connect with different kids. Sally's great teacher will be Jimmy's average teacher. We're dealing with human beings here, and human experiences differ.

However, the main (intentional?) oversight in the piece is the complete inattention to the elephant in the room in the school reform debate. If a kid comes from an upper middle class or higher in the socioeconomic ladder, they will attend one of the best schools in the world, in the United States Public School System. The "crisis" in public education is not present in high-rent zip codes. So, when we talk about the problems facing public education, let's situate them honestly. They are connected to issues of poverty, and issues of health, and in many cases, to problems surrounding food insecurity.

Kristof alludes to the importance of poverty, but then dismisses the importance of the issue as something that can be undone by good teachers:

we need an array of other antipoverty measures as well, especially early childhood programs. But the evidence is now overwhelming that even in a grim high-poverty school, some teachers have far more impact on their students than those in the classroom next door.

In the piece, Kristof declares that the problems facing education have an "obvious" solution:

The obvious policy solution is more pay for good teachers, more dismissals for weak teachers.

Wouldn't it be awesome if it was that simple? Unfortunately, the realist in me has a hard time believing that poverty and inequal access to quality education can be solved just by giving good teachers a raise. Until we start talking about education, poverty, and health together, as three related issues, the "obvious" solutions will obscure our vision of the hard challenges we need to overcome.

And part of that discussion needs to include what happens to education when good teachers are forced to work under the limits of bad policy.

Image Credit: "Ms. Powaga - Fifth Grade, an Oasis in the Desert" taken by Michael 1952, published under an Attribution license.