Perhaps no issue in America generates more heat and less light than the allegedly dismal state of public education. The most recent inflammation followed the release of international test results showing American students languishing in the middle of the pack. From President Obama on down, our leaders fret that we will lose our place as the world's greatest economic power if we're not training our young folks to compete against the Chinese (and others). And, of course, it must be teachers' fault.
Reading the newspaper or watching the evening news leads one to believe that teachers are overpaid and under-worked. Powerful politicians and wealthy philanthropists claim that teacher unions are hell-bent on protecting incompetents. Nearly every policy initiative is predicated on the idea that we must bust up the unions, end the public school monopoly and introduce good business practices into schools. Incentives, merit pay, evaluations and accountability - these things will straighten out the miscreants and restore American preeminence in education. (They've worked really well for American business lately, haven't they!)
Seldom mentioned is the rather simple fact that teachers are perhaps the only variable that hasn't changed over the past few decades. From my earliest school days in the 1950s until today, some teachers are superb, some competent if uninspiring and a few lousy ones. Most everything else has changed dramatically: Family structure, stresses on working parents, social and economic inequity, popular culture, the ubiquitous and corrosive effects of electronic media, racial and ethnic diversity, just to name a few.
But the press to make teachers accountable is incessant. "Tie pay to performance," the bureaucrats rage. For the past few decades teachers and schools around the country have been assessed by their students' results on standardized tests. As frustrated bureaucrats belatedly acknowledged the complex variables at work in the achievement-testing morass, the new buzz-phrase in teacher assessment became "value-added." Perhaps student test scores can't be accurately compared across the many social and individual variables within or between schools and districts, but we surely can compare how much any particularly teacher improves the test performance of the children in her care, can't we? Maybe or maybe not, but the process is destructive in either event.
Teacher assessment schemes these days are often designed in tandem with proposals for merit pay. Merit pay is a long-standing red herring, based on the unproven notion that teaching will get better if financially incentivized. Some evidence from schools in Israel and India suggests that financial incentives work. The evidence from school districts around America is mixed, at best. To a great extent the argument in the current economic environment is moot. Given flat or reduced funding for education in most districts, merit pay, even if it raised motivation for some teachers, would be emotionally and financially devastating to others. You can't serve more of a shrinking pie to a few without starving others. Good schools are characterized by teacher collaboration and esprit de corps. Merit pay, particularly when all teachers are underpaid, is divisive to community spirit, at a direct cost to students.
The greater problem with current teacher evaluation schemes is that they incentivize bad teaching. With or without merit pay, the assumed straight-line correlation between test scores and teacher quality drives the worst practices. When one's job or the very existence of the school depends on students' short-term test results, even the best teacher will compromise or abandon the rich and powerful experiences that benefit students most. Great teaching requires patience, flexibility, good humor, and a sophisticated understanding of individual ways of learning and rates of development. Great teaching invites students to engage their imaginations and construct their own knowledge. Great teaching focuses on important questions instead of "right" answers. Great schools have music, art and lots of recess. Great schools and great teachers know that relationships among and between children and adults have the most profound impact on students' emotional development and long-term academic achievement. Every test-score based evaluation system compromises many or all of these things.
Of course teachers should be held to a high standard. We all should be. In every school, public and private, administrators, parents and students know who the good teachers are. Most teachers are deeply committed to their work, dedicated to their students and trying to do their best in a system gone mad. What we need is resources to pay them properly and support their professional development. And we must reject the educational policies that tie their hands and force them to treat their students like raw material on a production line. There's plenty wrong with education in America. Teachers are not the problem.
Follow Steve Nelson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/snelson0248
Accountability for tenaciously tenured school administrators and ofiicials has been usurped by current laws meant to protect districts from liability and litigation, but ultimately employed to abuse power, funding and teachers. Teacher abuse is a well documented issue and its catalysts reveal an insidous corruption within districts and unions, which share a lucrative symbiotic relationship. Our CBA at LAUSD concedes that the EducRAT$ priority is protecting LAUSD, which THEY are, not students or their teachers, who it has advesaral relationship with.
Perhaps this has something to do the notorious yet unchecked corruption in its numerous, unnecessay units and offices. Whistleblowers will not be tolerated and without civil rights on public school property (denied at district discretion), there is no such thing as free speech, much less due process.
The corporate owned media outlets help perpetuate propoganda against students and teachers, minimizing the frequent scandals constantly erupting around LAUSD and sensationalizing every story that suggests teachers are culpable for the failure these white chalk criminals are getting rich from. We can't win in this perverse system and neither will students.Join us Perdaily.com
Please forgive me if my rant runneth over.
On a related note, governors like Chris Christie in New Jersey are part of the problem regarding overheated rhetoric around teachers these days. His taped verbal beat-down of a teacher at a town hall last month and the relatively warm reception it's received was both sexist and indicative of a nation's screwed up priorities. If the people lamenting the lack of livable wages were police officers, firefighters, or EMT workers, Christie's comments would have created enough negative publicity to hamper his efforts at re-election in three years. But because it was a shrill teacher, it was okay to tell the woman in so many words to get over it and be quiet. Until we see teachers as providing a a service as important and as patriotic as a police officer or firefighter, expect the battle for corporatizing K-12 education and teachers as customer service representatives to continue.
On a related note, governors like Chris Christie in New Jersey are part of the problem regarding overheated rhetoric around teachers these days. His taped verbal beat-down of a teacher at a town hall last month and the relatively warm reception it's received was both sexist and indicative of a nation's screwed up priorities. If the people lamenting the lack of livable wages were police officers, firefighters, or EMT workers, Christie's comments would have created enough negative publicity to hamper his efforts at re-election in three years. But because it was a shrill teacher, it was okay to tell the woman in so many words to get over it and be quiet. Until we see teachers as providing a a service as important and as patriotic as a police officer or firefighter, expect the battle for corporatizing K-12 education and teachers as customer service representatives to continue.
But in Secondary Education, how do you determine which teacher is the under performing one. You can't as this article elaborates, because their are to many factors you have to include other than, "Are their students are all making B's." One problem of (secondary) education reform no one seems to be discussing is the students' drive for success. You cannot MAKE a high school-er want to learn and strive for success.
So now the problem is high school pass rate; the fact is too many students are graduating from high school that it has essential lost its luster, requiring the "average" students to achieve one more level of education, limiting well-paying jobs.
The second fact is that everyone cannot earn a college degree; our economy could not handle everyone being lawyers, doctors, or even computer tecs., someone needs to be at McDonald's flipping the burgers, and in our factories making our products.
So the question for reform now is "How do we eliminate she "bird" courses, courses so easy you can fly right through them, and formulate classes that will be structured in order to equip high school students with the skill set they will need to be successful with their continuing education?
I teach at a community college, where some teachers fail 30% or more of their students. These teachers are "deeply committed to their work, dedicated to their students and trying to do their best in a system gone mad." But students don't turn in homework, don't read the text (if they buy it in the first place), don't pay attention, or don't come to class. And guess what - there is little to nothing a teacher can do for a student who just doesn't care. You can be as exciting, engaging, caring as you want, but if the student's only response is "so what?" it's all for naught. And high school teachers have it even worse. At least college is voluntary.
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
If at first all of the data is overwhelming, I just wrote a post with abbreviated charts that might help you get an overview. Here's that link: http://www.inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com/the-good-news-about-pisa-scores-and-now-we-know-what-the-real-problem-is/
What I don't understand is why the press/media is not all over this latest news. This is a really important and convincing report that should be leading our public policy for the next 50 years.
theschoolprincipal@inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com
"Shanghai, China topped the list with 556 but is not included in this analysis because Shanghai is a city not a country and because only 35% of Chinese students ever enter high school and because "when you spend all your time preparing for tests, and when students are selected based on their test-taking abilities, you get outstanding test scores.""
So...just as I was saying...some countries' (or in this case, cities') reported results mask the role of selectivity. In the US *any* public school student may take this test - in Shanghai only the top test-takers are selected for it.
I spent 18 years in Public Education and did not encounter a single teacher who was not all for fair and balanced evaluations.
"Teachers must demand a seat at the table and not just through their unions, but through their own voices."
Yes! Teachers are first and foremost individuals, regardless of whether they belong to a union or not. And the vast majority of them care deeply about their students.