Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner once said, "Never confuse activity with results." New York City Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam could do well to learn that lesson. Unfortunately, rather than judging schools by results, Lam and her team have focused on mandating superficial activity for teachers - apparently assuming that teachers, left to their own devices, could never do right by students. Specifically, Lam' s shop has developed a laundry list of do's and don'ts wherein teachers are forbidden, for example, to correct pupil "errors with red ink because that color is 'aggressive'"; from teaching grammar because it's "dull"; from giving spelling tests "because they supposedly strike fear, do not relate experience, and produce a distaste for language." Does any of this stuff yield positive results? Lam and her boss, Chancellor Joel Klein, were quick to claim credit for New York's performance (among the top two) on the recent big-city version of the National Assessment of Education Progress, asserting that the NAEP results proved that their mandated "balanced literacy" program was working. But as Diane Ravitch pointed out in the New York Post, the first round of NAEP tests were given in 2002, when Lam was still in Providence and before the mandated reading program had been implemented. Further, "NAEP was not designed to answer arguments among proponents of different ways of teaching reading. It tests samples of students. No one knows which students and which schools were tested, nor which reading method their teachers employed when the test was given."
"Klein's educrats undermine good teaching," by R.M. Isaac, New York Daily News, February 9, 2004
"Klein's data distortion," by Diane Ravitch, New York Post, January 30, 2004