Are good teachers being required to behave in miseducative ways based on directives from school administrators?
Dear School Leaders and Policy Makers:
Our university used to boast of a 100 percent job placement rate for MA students with a freshly minted teaching credential. The Class of 2010 faced nearly 100 percent unemployment. A remarkable portion of each of my recent pre-service class sessions was dedicated to questions of employment and unemployment. That's a shame since the only thing bigger than these wannabe teachers' graduate school debt is their desire to improve the lives of children. Despite the wholesale debasing of teachers by the media, foundations and political leaders, I am inspired by anyone who still wants to teach and am honored to help them develop.
Apprenticeship is a powerful way to learn. That's why future doctors and teachers intern before being credentialed. The theoretical principle at work is that you learn best through the careful emulation, collaboration and supervision of a master practitioner. I remain staggered by the remarkable impact of student teaching on candidates -- for good and bad. It does not matter what my colleagues or I teach in the ivory tower of academia. Those techniques, learning theories, even deeply held values might be shelved within days of becoming a student teacher. This is commonplace when student teachers apprentice with the best educators. The results are more catastrophic when assigned to less competent, generous or inspirational teachers.
A few of my student teachers report being paired with teachers who are hostile, mean or sleepwalking. That's unfortunate, but not half as tragic as the lessons newbies are learning from the "good" well-intentioned teachers and principals. What are young teachers expected to learn from what they observe in today's public schools? Are good teachers being required to behave in miseducative ways based on directives from school administrators?
Here are just a few of the common scenarios being reported from the field.
- I asked several dozen California student teachers, "Tell me about science instruction in your school?" The nearly unanimous response was that elementary science education is a lot like Big Foot. Teachers have heard it exists, just never seen it for themselves. The Sasquatch Effect may also be applied to art, music, drama, social studies or any other meaningful pursuit not reduced to a standardized test. The innate curiosity of young children is being squelched while learning is supplanted by being taught or worse -- prepped. An archaeologist would be required to find evidence of thematic units, classroom learning centers, experiments or authentic project-based learning.
- Principals evaluate teacher efficacy based on the volume of their students. Students are taught to be quiet, compliant and work in isolation. Elaborate time-consuming systems are enforced for eating lunch in silence, walking down the hall and playing only with children in your own class, if your school is liberal enough to still condone recess. There is zero tolerance for joy, conflict, exuberance or the expression of any other human emotion. We then have the audacity to pretend that one of the benefits of schooling is socialization. Right, anti-socialization.
- Math and language arts instruction has been reduced to teachers delivering a script and students chanting. Neither teacher nor student is privy to the secret logic of the seemingly infinite and random list of concepts and skills being "covered" in preparation for the test. Second graders are forced to solve worksheet problems concerning half-dollar coins even if you can't remember the last time you saw one in circulation and the chincy manipulative kit does not include them. That's OK, because tomorrow's lesson will be on perimeter or from the new "algebra in-utero" curriculum. Nothing connects. There is no big picture. There's just more instruction, more quizzes, more tests and less learning.
- Reading is reduced to mechanical acts or a prelude to comprehension tests. Classrooms are devoid of books, except for the basal that interrupts each boring paragraph with a quiz and compels every child to read the same thing at the same rate, regardless of their ability. Strong early readers endure years of needless phonics instruction just because while struggling readers are poked, prodded and drilled. Students receive "credit" for books they race through, but only if the school purchased the computerized quiz for that title. Reading for pleasure, information or any other intrinsic reason has gone the way of butter churning. It's now an unpleasant unrewarding chore without the yummy creaminess. Yet, in the golden age of publishing and dynamism of the information age, we pretend to be mystified by illiteracy and low rates of independent reading.
- Not only has the standardization of curriculum begot test-prep and boredom, but "pacing" is its toxic spawn. Teachers are not only forced to pretend that every student is "keeping up" with whatever the pacing guide throws at them, but students are forbidden from "going ahead." My student teachers report that teachers are punishing kids for going ahead of the sacred lesson. Some teachers make these students sit in isolation outside of the classroom if they have the audacity to express understanding of what they are being taught. Make no mistake, this obscene teaching practice is a form of child abuse and demonstrates that teachers, even the best intentioned ones suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. At best, this phenomenon demonstrates that a primary lesson of contemporary schooling is helplessness. If you act helpless, your teachers will teach that lesson to their students.
Where will one find creative teachers when agency is deprived and compliance celebrated? Every subject at every grade level could be taught in conjunction with a current event like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but by whom? When?
Five years from now, will any teachers know how to seize the teachable moment and build upon student interest or connect the curriculum to the world outside of the school?
I realize that politicians and the media are kicking your ass, but it is morally reprehensible for you to compel teachers to behave in ways that harm or inhibit the natural potential of children. Invoking the Nuremberg Defense is unacceptable. Who will stand up for the children? For your profession? For what is right?
Let's imagine that non-traditional paths like Teach for America are effective and recruit the best and brightest university graduates as they promise. How many of these teacher candidates would be willing to suspend their own expression what they know about learning and allow academic content to be forced through the narrowness of the standardized curriculum?
What would you have me say to the young teacher who chokes up and testifies, "I don't want to become like that?" (referring to the terrorized, risk-adverse, authoritarians she sees in schools as a result of the high-stakes accountability movement)
Why should a young teacher work for you? After you remove all joy, creativity, freedom and individuality from education, who will teach your child?
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I am now completing my masters, and for my thesis I am developing my own inquiry-based curriculum for farm and environmental education. I'm incorporating the NSES and Project 2061 standards, but utilizing informal assessments so that students are free to engage their senses (and minds!), learn at their own pace, and actually be involved in their own education. I am far more excited now for the opportunity to set this in motion than I ever was about the prospect of teaching within the confines of the system. Here's to change!
I am a student teacher in Kansas City, MO. This is all spot on. Change agency is being sacrificed every day. For my Work Sample, we are making an integrated social studies unit. I asked a student if they liked social studies and he responded, "I don't even know what that is."
The tests created by businesses create the illusion of failure, the public responds with outrage, schools cut budgets in response to outrage, then school really do begin failing, then PRESTO! The businesses come back with the answers in a heroic fashion. It is a sick cycle and, at 22 years old, I already feel burned by it. What should we do?
one by one, and each child was to write the word down as it was called. The class had
been working on "word walls" of these words, etc., etc., all week, and it was pretty damn
boring. My son had the words memorized, and wrote down all the words, spelled correctly,
while the teacher was still calling out the first or second word. When the teacher saw what
my son had done, he was punished. He was made to throw away the sheet on which he
had written all the correctly spelled words, and had to start all over again, writing the words
only after they had been called by the teacher. I understand it's important to listen to the
teacher and follow directions, but...seriously?
Send me the legislators too :-)
Good to see another one of your thought-provoking articles my friend. This so accurately describes the current climate in public education:
"...terrorized, risk-adverse, authoritarians she sees in schools as a result of the high-stakes accountability movement".
It's truly awful, and made more so by the insistence that public education is failing because of its terrible teachers and their greedy unions. In fact, the "spirit" of public education is being held together by a tenuous collection of teachers who still care more about their kids than they do their school's outcome on a standardized test.
The rest of it--the data obsession, the coaching, the standardization-down-to-the-day curriculum, and the colossal amount of money being earned by testing factories--well, we can hope to the Almighty that the pendulum swings back to sanity at some point. But we're not getting much help from our elected officials and we've accepted as fact some pretty wrong-headed ideas about where education stands today. I'm afraid that makes me less than hopeful.
Kim
Unfortunately, IF this young man does his student teaching in most of the classes I know of, he will learn that students are numbers and their value is based on diagnostic scores. The centers consist of using the computers to take quizzes on programs you mention in your post, test prep or using Word to type a report for which the teacher will soon realize she has no access to the USB drive to save the work. District-wide teachers meet to learn from another, LTMs (Learning Team Meetings). What a great opp to learn from each other, right? No! The purpose is to crunch numbers. District-wide PD on writing, that I recently attended, was focused solely on the State's grading system and how to teach to it. This young man will have to participate in all of this.
Pretty soon, our system will have turned out another Stepford Teacher. What a proud moment for our education system!
I know of a few educators here in Australia that have voiced their opposition to mediocrity, suggested new paths and new tools -- know what happened to them? Their contracts didn't get renewed and they have bee replaced by less qualified, less experienced people who toe the party line of the day.
Creative teachers are at the mercy of their principals, IT departments and education departments. If they get a progressive administrator and a flexible IT department - magic can happen. If they don't, then either they fight and burn out or fight and get replaced.
Here pollies spent money on schools to keep us from tipping into recession - but instead of shoring up infrastructure and working towards more professional development - they built buildings.
Money couldn't be spent on technology or the wiring or internet connectivity or tech staff to support it. Politicians can then tell parents they've tipped millions into schools, so if they fail - it's the fault of teachers.
We need to educate the public on what constitutes a valuable education and come up with credible ways of demonstrating that value - or the fingers will continue to point in the wrong direction. Parents will look at whatever measures are easy to understand - here in Aus it's test scores and demographics - to judge a school's and their children's success.