A recent bill proposed in the Florida State legislature to allow dissatisfied parents who are outraged by their children's lackluster academic performance to fire their teachers reminds me of a Modest Proposal I wrote several years ago: "If Doctors Were Treated Like Teachers."
The "parents' rights" bill, concocted by the Wise Heads in the Florida legislature, is certain to create a great deal of conflict between parents who, rightly or wrongly, perceive that their children aren't "learning" enough to give the school a satisfactory rating on the standardized test scores, and teachers who feel they are being asked to "produce" test scores of dubious value. This legislation would be assured an even more disruptive outcome if yet another bill proposed by the Florida lawmakers takes effect: allowing teachers to "rate" their students' parents! This way, the parents and teachers can be at constant war with one another, the students will be caught in the middle, and any possibility of cooperative learning strategies between home, school and student would be made untenable. I don't doubt that this toxic situation is precisely what the Floridian politicians hope will happen to provide them with an excuse to funnel yet more funds into the charter school trough.
My "Modest Proposal," however, is that this method of making public education dysfunctional ought to be taken to the next step: another bill should be passed to empower the students to fire their teachers unless they are up to the young learners' standards. A passing grade from students, however, would only guarantee their teachers another year of employment, after which they would undergo the scrutiny of their students once again.
After all, giving students the authority to judge their teachers is based on the market-driven premise that the primary "consumers" of the "education industry" who are being offered an "occupation enhancing information product" would be best to judge the quality of the merchandise. The CEO-principal and other administrators are, after all, the "impulse shoppers" who occasionally drop in to see how their employees are merchandizing the "learning-content modules" that are being standardized in order to be properly evaluated.
Students are the best judges of their teachers whom they see all day five days a week just as customers of any salable item evaluate their satisfaction or disappointment with their purchase. With students holding the fate of their teachers in their hands, the success of the "learning commodity" would be assured: graduation rates would soar, tests would always have a 100% passing rate, and the level of learning, at least on paper, would match the best that Finland had to offer.
Or just perhaps, sometime in what I hope is the not-too-distant future, common sense will prevail and people will realize that in a culture that equates learning success with units of widgets produced, little if any meaningful education for the majority of students will occur until we accept the fact that education is far too complex for anyone to offer such simple-minded solutions as Florida has displayed. I've been teaching for almost fifty years and all I know is that there are many good ways of teaching but there is only one bad way to teach: and that is by insisting that everyone teach one way.
We all grasp how the 'schools' in the middle east promote the fanatical reasoning of the country's dictators, or how North Korea's absolute control of SCHOOLS and the minds of its children is central to the dictatorship's survival.
The dumbing down of America is exactly what we are seeing.
America the stupid, where young adults cannot do the work needed to accomplish anything meaningful (and jobs that require critical analysis are sent to India or China), Ensuring that absurd rhetoric is accepted as truth, is exactly what the war on teachers is all about.
Across America, if anyone bothers to go to sites like the NAPTA site (www.end teacherabuse.org) it will become apparent that the top teachers, the senior mentors have been sent packing EVERYWHERE,, harassed out after a lifetime of dedicated service...labeled as dead wood, by those who needed to silence the voices of the real PRACTITIONERS, the ones who knew what learning looks like, and what it takes for children to learn critical thinking skills, not merely information. Facilitators of real thinking skills had to go so 'hand-picked' candidates for the most powerful office in history could spout nonsense and reveal their ignorance, but 'win' primaries.
American public education no longer works, after decades of producing citizens who could read, write, think or create and who made America great. Instead of looking at some outside source for the organized assault, people point to teachers.
Hospitals or law firms would not use such evaluation methods to confirm excellence, but as everyone knows, anyone can teach, and a license in pedagogy is no indication that a practitioner with five years of expensive PROFESSIONAL education grasps how the brain acquires skills and learning. The disrespect for the profession is evident. No one (but me) uses the term "teacher-practitioner" and the media refers to the practice of law,or the practice of 'medicine' but never to the practice of pedagogy (psychology of the brain and learning acquisition). The media chatters about 'teaching" and never about 'learning'!
This is just another assault on the educational institutions, by an organized group ( i.e. a cartel) that needs an ignorant, easily manipulated citizenry, who swallows whole, the propaganda and rhetoric they spread on the stations and in their print news media that they own and control. Schools and thus, teachers are under an organized assault, and it is working.
One size does not fit all - not in parenting nor in education. All students are not created equal (remember the genus in physics class who never had to crack a book?). And teaching needs to fit the community, the school, and the teacher own personal touch.
Education is teaching the students how to learn not give an A to D answer. How many things in my life has had an "A B C or D" answer? Not a single one I can think on.
Thinking cannot be legislated.
"Educating for Democracy: Let Teachers Fire a Student - A Modest Proposal"
Private schools get to do that. Maybe it's time for public school teachers to have the same privilege. There are disruptive students and care-less parents that hinder the learning of other students and then the teacher is blamed.