Jonathan Alter Joins the Teacher-Scapegoating Chorus: I'm Calling BS

It is convenient to blame teachers for America's education woes because it lets everyone else off the hook. Tragically, this has become the vogue opinion in the mainstream media, and I'm calling bullshit. Jonathan Alter's latest column in Newsweek pushed me over the edge. Here's the implicit argument:

Why do kids drop out? Not the stultifying test prep, overcrowded rooms, chronic absenteeism, or lack of personal connection to a counselor. It's bad teachers.

Why are America's test scores lagging compared to other countries around the world? Not deep-seated cycles of drugs/violence/ignorance in many neighborhoods or an antiquated school calendar with a ridiculous summer vacuum. It's complacent, unionized teachers.

What's the solution? Scrap the unions, clean house, and let the market sort it out.

Alter writes with certainty, "the key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't."

This spirit of exceptionalism is dangerous. According to Alter, you're either born with the teaching gene or not. You may have spent years earning a teaching degree, but that's worthless because, as Alter bizarrely claims, "most teachers' colleges teach the wrong stuff."

So who are among the special, birthrighted good teachers, benighted with secret understandings unavailable in higher ed institutions whose sole job is to prepare teachers?

Wendy Kopp, influential founder and leader of Teach For America, offered living examples of her vision for what teachers need to do in her recent commencement speech at Washington University. She cited Colleen Dunn, a rookie teacher working with struggling first-graders in St. Louis:

At the end of the school year, after nine months of days that began for Colleen at 4:30 in the morning and ended with her falling asleep over grading papers, lesson planning, writing parent newsletters, her students had made two years of progress in reading and math. The students who had started out so far behind were ready to enter second grade ahead of average second graders.

Judging from Colleen's example, the achievement gap doesn't need to exist...

Kopp's speech advances the argument for a paradigm of superteacher messiahs, one Alter appears to embrace. Surely, every example of an individual superteacher is above reproach and deserving of great praise.

But if Colleen is the model, working from 4:30 a.m. until a daily collapse, who's out? Forget single parents, who know more about facing challenges than just about anyone. Forget most that don't have the access to accrue the eye-catching resumes of Teach For America applicants. Forget people who choose balance over being a workaholic. The hero-martyr superteacher, cast in the mold of Hollywood friendly Freedom Writers or Dangerous Minds, is not replicable or realistic.

I agree with Alter that there are some complacent, ineffective teachers out there who should be fired. I also agree with Kopp that Colleen sounds like a superb teacher. However, this obsessive focus on cleaning house and demanding superhuman performance misses a larger point. (Time Magazine drew similarly raised blood pressure when they featured DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee on their cover in December 2008, scowling and holding a broom. The headline spotlighted her gutsy "battle against bad teachers.")

Most teachers in America are smart and dedicated enough to help their students achieve. They're not the unaccountable fiends holding kids back, as Alter portrays them with his broad brush. Poverty, deficiency of support services, disjointed curricula, overemphasis on testing, and overcrowded classes do far more to impede student achievement.

If you are reading this with the slightest inclination to agree with anything I've written, Alter has already prepared for and discounted us. He'd refer to you and me as parts of

"the Blob, the collection of educrats and politicians who claim to support reform but remain fiercely committed to the status quo."

BS. I want kids to learn and I want bad teachers to go. I welcome reform and genuine accountability in my classroom, but to do that right it needs to come from more than a single, reductive standardized test.

We need those with the biggest microphones to stop scapegoating teachers and their right to have a collective voice, and to start stepping into living classrooms to see what's really happening on the ground. Then they can tell the real story.

Dan Brown is a teacher in Southeast Washington, DC and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle.

Follow Dan Brown on Twitter: www.twitter.com/danbrownteacher

Comments

[dcampbell]

Thank you, Well Said.
As for Alder's references to Teach for America graduates. I have just completed 36 years of teaching and teacher preparation. You can find all of my insights in my book, Choosing Democracy; a practical guide to multicultural education.
I recall as a new teacher in Pittsburgh, Penna, from 1964-1967, I was excited and stirred by excellent writing of a few new teachers. Jonathan Kozol was just getting started, and others. John Holt, others, great stuff. The problem was, if you keep on teaching. The stuff that I found brilliant as a first year teacher was romantic and unrealistic after 3 years of teaching. Now, after 36 years of teaching, I know that the great ideas of the new teachers are valuable, and the experience and the wisdom of the veteran teachers are valuable. Claiming to rescue the schools from the viewpoint of a person with 2-3 years of experience, or a writer with no teaching experience, is naive. At a policy level, it is irresponsible.

[MsC]

I completely agree with you Dan. If you read the comments on any article about teaching, you would think that public school teachers are the most evil, lazy creatures in the world and solely responsible for the rotten state of the world right now. We're supposed to be innovative, yet follow the text/pacing guide precisely so that we're all on the same page on the same day. We're supposed to involve and engage students who have only had the craptacular school breakfast (mostly refined carbs and sugar) since they had the school lunch yesterday or who don't give a crap about school and are only there because their parents don't want them at home.

I've been a teacher for 12 years and love what I do. I spend my summers preparing for the upcoming year and recovering mentally and physically. Colleen from the article is going to be one of the 50% of teachers who quit within 5 years if she keeps up that pace.

As for merit pay, I'll sign on for that just as soon as the politicians sign on for merit pay based on the number of people in their district who are fully employed with full, good health care, the quality of the air and water in their district, and their responsiveness to their constituents. I'm not going to hold my breath on that one though.

[nflanagan]

Billy/Philly is right--a small percentage of teachers may be a small percentage of "the problem." No good, hard-working teacher wants to teach next door to a slug. So get rid of them--but The Problem is a much larger and more comprehensive issue.

Earlier comments identify components of this Problem, here in America: an anti-intellectual culture, the false assumption that we know how to leverage systemic education reform, the facile blaming of ed schools or unions, the belief that teaching cannot be rigorously analyzed and improved, and our ongoing media-driven schism between a public and a private socio-economic governance model. Plus, of course, the unprecedented and dangerous gap between haves and have-nots in the home of the brave.

In the end, Alter's column is about money--worrying that the stimulus funds will be used to "protect jobs" rather than stimulate reform. I would argue we do NOT know how to re-shape with any certainty--we're still in the pilot stage with most reforms. And all arguments about money and education in America come down to two things: #1) it's my money and you can't have it and #2) I don't want my children to go to school with "them" (whoever your own personal "them" is). These arguments are dressed in noble language to conceal intent ("the soft bigotry of low expectations")--but strip away the "policy initiatives" and rhetoric and what's left is not pretty. Great piece, Dan.

[Clausvz]

I was particularly appalled by Alter's assertion that "we know what works now and should just go ahead and fund it." That comment betrays staggering ignorance. If only it were that easy. The people he denigrates as "Educrats" would jump at guaranteed strategies for closing achievement gaps and ensuring all students' success. The reality is that his favored reforms--p­articularl­y performance pay--are far from sure bets. All but the most ideologically blinkered supporters of those reforms agree that they need a lot of work and development before they can become very reliable means of addressing complex problems. Alter is unwilling to acknowledge any trade-offs involved in implementing new reform ideas, and so it's hard to take him seriously.

[Beanzer]

I wish Alter and his ilk would spend more time really researching and less time pointing fingers at those of us who are in the classroom every day. I would be happy to have him trail me for a day and see what it's really like. As you said, "Poverty, deficiency of support services, disjointed curricula, overemphasis on testing, and overcrowded classes do far more to impede student achievement." I completely agree. This year is my 13th year in the South Bronx and I have never had so many children with such huge issues: parents in jail, parents in drug treatment or still addicted, violence in the home, etc. One of my smartest kids lost both parents in the span of less than a year. So many of my kids need mental health support and our counselors are so swamped. This year I am grateful for the fact that I have only 30 kids in each class; some years I've had as many as 38.

[oustfan]

What's sick is how the neocons think the public school system is fine but don't want nationalized health care. We're all entitled to education AND health. If single payer health care is socialism then so is education.

[Konnie]

my son in law is a teacher. or rather a drama controller. the percentage of actual teaching is less
than 30%. the rest is being a referee, an administrator, a counselor, a hand holder, a juggler, a policeman, babysitter, and judge.....­.........h­e has hung in there for 20 years. he is sooo burned out,
and he lives in a small town , in the bible belt. but he has the same issues as the bigger cities:
meth labs, gangs, babies having babies, parents who blame everyone except themselves for
their chldren's bad behavior, fractured families. last year he had one boy that was single handedly
taking care of his mother who had cancer. a high school kid taking his mother back and forth for
chemo! think sat scores were the top thing on his mind? they don't teach future teachers how to take
care of those issues in college.

[billyfromphilly]

I'd say that a very small percentage of teachers are probably a very small percentage of the problem. That's like saying you can solve global warming solely by switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. I think the bigger problem is our entire attitude towards education. I was a very shy and withdrawn child but liked to learn. Unfortunately most of the people at my schools growing up had no intention of learning anything and made sure to make my life miserable just for trying to participate and do well in class. So I stopped participating, kept my mouth shut and my grades suffered. It was the only way to avoid all of the harassment. And I went to a half decent suburban school. I can't imagine what it's like for a smart kid trying to learn at one of these inner city schools, they sound like prisons.

[tvmistake]

Another excellent post. I agree with every word. This desire to blame teachers for our flawed public education system reminds me of people wanting to blame unionized factory workers for the demise of GM and Chrysler. It may be psychologically or ideologically satisfying to some people to believe that it's the front-line workers, not the decision-makers, and certainly not the system itself that's to blame for poor results, but it's nothing more than counterproductive denialism.