A Familiar Reckoning: Therapist Quality and Teacher Quality
The Widget Effect, a 2009 report by The New Teacher Project, argued that schools were treating teachers as interchangeable parts, as though one were the same as any other. Everyone was rated satisfactory.
The report hit at a moment of political opportunity. President Obama’s Race to the Top grant program made improving teacher quality a top priority. The Gates Foundation had launched the Measures of Effective Teaching project, which aimed to develop a fair and reliable way of distinguishing teacher quality. The technocratic stuff went reasonably well, as Thomas Kane reported: “We showed that if you combine data from three different sources, you can identify teachers who cause greater learning to happen.”
But the politics?
Not so good, as Chad Aldeman’s careful postmortem here in Education Next demonstrates. Aldeman points to research by Matthew Kraft, who compiled ratings across the 24 states that had built new evaluation systems and found that in the vast majority of them, fewer than one percent of teachers landed in the lowest category.
The systems had nominally changed, but to little practical impact. Why? “No amount of investment in new evaluation systems would ever make teachers comfortable with consequential decisions flowing from those systems,” Aldeman wrote.
Today’s therapists are in a similar position. From their point of view, there are already several built-in forms of accountability. Patients can choose not to show up in the first place or not to return. A practice manager can fire them. In cases of serious misconduct, a licensing board can dismiss them.
How would they react to a new idea: measuring them based on outcomes, controlling for all the proper externalities, celebrating and rewarding the best, and at least notifying and offering help to those with consistently bad outcomes, followed by the possibility of counseling them out after months or years with no improvement in outcomes? They would not react well. They entered a profession with one understanding of accountability already in place. Politically, it is implausible to change that understanding retroactively. Let’s not try.