Promoted by Steven D. The author is Murvin Auzenne, a teacher.
One of the ongoing debates in America is what to do about public education. It was Michelle Rhee who was the lightning rod for everyone who opposed, rightly in my opinion, the corporate/right-wing effort to gut and/or privatize public education.
Her teacher-bashing, confrontational style of reform eventually flamed out in DC. But now there is a new lightning rod, Campbell Brown. Both of them voice real and sometimes resonant critiques of the failings of public education. Both place the blame on teachers, tenure and unions. The response to them has often been ugly, personal and not very productive. In other words, it has played into the very narrative that teachers and their supporters rightly oppose.
Over at TPM, Sabrina Joy Stevens has written a sane response to this unproductive debate. Her basic point: don’t let the real weakness of the Rhee-Campbell reform approach get lost in the personal attacks.
To this I say, thank God.
I teach in a private Catholic school and I have much more freedom to run a Dewey-esque (Wiki link)classroom than my public school wife. I hear every night of the ridiculous counter-productive policies and standards she must overcome to do her job. I just feel overwhelmed when I even try to write about this. Where to start?
Here’s one example to illustrate my point. She is expected to have an engaging, student centered lesson that changes activity and focus every 15 minutes. Yet she has three classroom preparations, and it seems that any time she may have at school to work on preparations is filled up with mindless meetings and other duties. She, like I, work at least three hours every night at home on our preparation and grading.
The theories of education and school management that I find associated with the Rhee school of reform are typically rehashed corporate models which the business community has rejected and moved on from many years ago.
(cont. below the fold)
Case in point: emphasis on writing, parsing, and fitting objectives into some cookie cutter template. This is the old “management by objective” theory which corporate America walked away from a long time ago. It is not a bad idea in itself, but simply and rigidly applied it does not work in education. A teacher needs to plan out his/her use of time, but when the production of these plans becomes the focus instead of what happens in the dynamic of a classroom the tail is waging the dog.
Case in point: holding teachers accountable for student outcomes, an imprecise goal at best, but taking away (in my wife’s case) a month of instructional time to test student achievement!
Case in point: my wife is expected to manage every type of student from the wheelchair bound special needs learner to the college bound one in the same classroom with no assistance ( no teacher’s aide, no additional prep time etc.). That means her test must come in not one form but as many as 3, with adjustments for the various special needs kids. It means that the lesson plans must be “differentiated” for the various learning styles and needs every class period, every day.
It means that her Principal can pop in and write her up because her “objectives are not written on the board,” or she didn’t vary her lessons enough that day, or her objectives were not sufficiently student centered.
What all this tells my wife is that she is constantly in the cross-hairs, no help is coming, and failure is always her fault.
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If you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you. Ben Franklin
Very good points. I would add the “whole language” theory of reading that is just a rehash of the old look-say method that failed so miserably.
Management by Objectives doesn’t work because managers, quite naturally, optimize what gives them the biggest bonus, not what’s best in the long run, or even the short run. Example: Objective: reduce inventory holding costs, pay manager a bonus for reducing inventory. Result: lost sales because of shortages of goods to sell, or production halts because of lack of raw material. Objective: Reduce the use of vacation time to cut manpower costs. Result: massive increase in unscheduled sick calls.
School administrations shouldn’t be running a lemonade stand. A month for test preparation for what in the ’60s took about five minutes. I base this on my grandchildren telling me that this time is not taken up in drill or review of key points/facts, but in endless teaching of test taking skills, i.e. don’t take all your time on a few questions, move on if you don’t know the answer and go back later, guess if you know two of the four answers are wrong and the like.
One thing I would add that you won’t like. Some teachers are rotten teachers. Others are racists. Others are bullies. Others just don’t care if the kids live or die as long as they don’t die in the classroom. You had them. I had them. We all had them. But those are teachers the union fights the hardest to save. It’s the same in an industrial shop. It’s the price we pay to protect the innocent. All teachers are not golden. There should be a way to weed out bad apples.
I think Whole Language, per say, is probably dead. I heard about it a little in the 1990s but not recently. But it is an example of how education fads can take hold and stick despite no real supporting evidence.
But test taking is now utterly nuts. I do remember having achievement tests in the early 1970s – maybe a 3 hour session one day per year with no preparation. There was an IAT and a CAT – one was Iowa the other California.
Today the tests literally take a week – half a day of testing for 4 days with the other half day off, and the 5th day is generally accepted as recovery time. But, far worse, because $$$$ are dependent on it school administrators require teachers to spend parts of their every-day lessons for sometimes months teaching kids how to take the tests.
And the upshot? The results are actually less informative to the kids and their parents than they were in the early 1970s. In the early 1970s you would get a grade level score (for example, “10.4” meant you were equivalent to a Sophomore 4-tenths into his/her school year) and a comparison to your scores in previous years. Now you just get a “proficient” or “not proficient” and a total composite grade.
Worse, the results mean less than before. Kids realize that these results have zero bearing on them personally and given their hatred for the testing week will often sabotage the results – especially in subjects where the teacher is disliked. As an example, my youngest daughter is a gifted writer – both a regular contributor to the local community newspaper and receiving of awards for her stories in state competitions. She regularly gets 100% on her creative essays. Yet she was marked “below proficient” on her standardized test for creative writing.
It’s a massive scam.
My experience in the mid-’60s was the same as yours in the ’70s.
My grandkids were in Elementary school between 1995 and 2005. The only one that i consider a good reader is, surprisingly, the one who was in special ed. He ignored the teachers and listen to his grandma and studied hip phonics tapes. The other two listened to their teachers and read at what I consider third grade level. Functionally illiterate.
http://www.hearourteachers.org/
A criticism of Common Core and all it involves from the left. The leader of this was a teacher for over 25 years, and still teaches music outside the confines of a public classroom.
Re: Case in Point, “my wife is expected to manage every type of student from the wheelchair bound special needs learner to the college bound one with no assistance”. I’m an old retired public educator. In the late 70’s as part of a Masters Degree program I wrote a paper I entitled “Up the Mainstream Without a Paddle” (Mainstream being the term back then used to describe placing special needs students in regular classes). Sounds as though it would fit the bill today as well.
Whenever the phrase “educational reform” shows up now, it is merely GOP code for privatizing “public” education”. When politics determines educational policy, what is good for kids is an afterthought at best. Got to keep our eye on the bottom line, don’t you know. Condolences to your wife for having to put up with the drivel, and my sincere admiration for her taking on an important, but thankless, task.
Everything needs to be run like a business.
It’s obedience to the Prime Directive.
All that is, can be bought and sold.
All that cannot be bought and sold, is not.
The world of buying and selling, therefore, will show us the answers to all our questions.
And in that world, being wrong in the same way as everyone else has already been wrong is a much better career move than being right in some new and unforeseen manner.