By Tom
Whether you like it or not, bit by bit, Ed Reform is happening. As it stands now, Ed Reform means more accountability using student test scores, merit pay using student test scores, more competition in the form of charter schools and their ilk, and alternative routes to teacher certification. Ed Reform is changing the way you perform your job, the way you're evaluated and the way you're paid.
Ed Reform may or may not be improving education in America. But it is definitely changing it. If you teach, you don't want Ed Reform to take you by surprise. You want to be prepared. You want to survive.
Here are your options:
1. Transfer to a better, higher-performing school. This should solve most of your problems, as Ed Reform will primarily focus on low-performing schools. It isn't difficult to find a high performing school; most major newspapers happily list them on their websites. These schools are usually found in nice, leafy suburbs, where every child has two parents, nutritious food and a zoo pass.
There are some problems with this option. First of all, you're a teacher, so you probably can't afford to live anywhere near these schools. Your commute will be hellacious. Besides that, transfers are based on seniority, so you'll find plenty of competition if and when a spot opens up.
2. Switch to a charter school. Charter schools are the darlings of Ed Reformers. The mavericks, if you will. They take public funds and use them to teach the heck out of kids that really, really want to be there. Results have been mixed, but the folks who work at these places are quite enthusiastic.
You may, however, be working outside a collective bargaining agreement. You may find yourself working longer days, longer weeks and longer years. This may eventually burn you out. And you'll be measured by metrics that your boss thinks are appropriate, which means you'll be fired if you don't measure up to them. And if your school doesn't fulfill the terms of its contract with the district or state, the school goes away. Along with your job.
3. Teach kids or subjects that aren't tested. About 65% of you are already doing just that. You're the kindergarten teachers, the art teachers, the counselors. Ed Reform relies heavily on data. Test data. No data; no reform; no worries.
There is, however, an unseen risk to this choice. Ed Reformers are fond of doling out sanctions to entire schools, not just the guilty, low-performing teachers. You may lose your job even though your students didn't take the tests. You may find this unpleasant and unfair.
4. Teach better. This seems like the simplest solution. If you pursue excellence in your craft, engage in meaningful and frequent professional development which you then apply to your teaching context, you should have no problems, right?
Maybe. But maybe not. First of all, Ed Reform tends to target school-wide performance. Your school could fail around you and take you down with it. Besides that, you and your performance aren't by any means the only factors determining student success. You could be the best teacher in the world and still be failing in a failing school.
5. Lead your entire faculty toward better performance. This is exactly what Ed Reformers want to see; go-getters like you, taking the bull by the horns and leading your school to the promised land.
There are, however, some drawbacks. First of all, you'll have to decide – together – where you're going. And how to get there. And how you'll know that you've arrived. There's bound to be some contention over all three of these questions. There will also be colleagues, maybe even a principal, who question your leadership. It will be thankless, exhausting work, for which you'll receive little, if any, monetary recognition. And then there's this: school improvement done correctly results in small, steady, incremental, and sustainable gains. Ed Reform will not wait for you. You've got about three years to get every student in your school up to grade level. You really only have time for the quick-fix, teach-to-the-test type of improvements. You will probably find your values compromised by pursuing this path.
6. Get involved. Understand that if you're a teacher, you are in politics. Use your voice to let our leaders understand what real teachers really do and how the solutions they propose will or won't work in your real school. Let people know that you, more than anyone, want to see education in America engaged in constant, sustainable improvement, based on common sense and informed by those who actually teach in America's schools. Encourage smart people to run for important offices. And encourage the rest of us to vote for them. Tell non-teachers what it's like to teach. And what it should be like. Somehow or other, get involved in Ed Reform before Ed Reform gets involved with you.
How? You can start with your union. Work with the people who have the knowledge, experience and infrastructure to enact change in the political world. You'll find that most of them share your values and passion. Not all of them, but most of them. You'll find that most of them know what it's like to teach, and care deeply about what it's going to be like. And if you don't like everything you see in your union, remember that it's a union; a grand compromise of all the voices who care to be heard. Including yours.
Or you can work on your own. Write for a blog. Write a letter to an editor. Write an email to a lawmaker. Write something to somebody.
Or you can just sit back, relax, and let Ed Reform happen.
And I wonder how feasible it is for a teacher to “insist” that all students learn. It sounds wonderful, but it isn’t realistic.
The danger of taking on full responsibility for a student’s success is that it relieves every other stakeholder of their responsibility.
As for job security, it shouldn’t be automatic. Teachers should only stick around if they’re doing their job correctly. But that should be determined by what they do in their classrooms, not by how well their students perform on tests.
What I find curious about this current wave of Ed Reform is that only the teachers in high-needs schools are targeted as failures. Certainly some are, but I have a hunch that there are just as many failing teachers in the rich suburbs. Those teachers, however, are able to “hide” behind their high-performing students. We all know that there are schools in this country in which you could put a folding chair in the front of the room and the class would still ace their tests.
And that’s the point I was trying to make with this whole post: Ed Reform in its current iteration is about blaming teachers for the fact that not every student performs well on tests, when it’s really far more complicated than that.
I agree that our response to “Ed Reform” need not be doom and gloom. But the key is this: practicing classroom educators need to nose, nudge, or force themselves into the policy decision making about ed reform so that the reforms can be built with reality as opposed to pure ideality in mind. Many teachers are taking on this good fight, and for that I am thankful.
I posted that despite the “homelike” typo because I’m on an iPad, and can I just ask anyone out there why it has to be so hard to write and edit text on an iPad? Arrrggghhhhh. It’s so close to brilliant, and just not.
Okay, you’re right that it doesn’t work that way, and that’s terrifying because we have a growing population of children whose parents can’t or won’t sit down and supervise homework. But here’s the thing, what if it could work that way? What if a school’s structure and atmosphere were so effective and powerfull that kids were educated despite their homelike?
That’s where my mind keeps going. I keep wondering what would happen if no one made excuses, if every teacher insisted every child learned. Would some kids still cut to smoke pot? Probably. Would some still struggle because home was not conducive to studying for a math test? Probably. But, my guess is it wouldn’t be sixty percent of the African American kids who struggled. It would be a much smaller percentage. The numbers we’re seeing now in terms of the kids who spend thirteen years in school and still can’t pass a basic reading or writing test, those numbers expose that something is wrong with the system. We simply cannot say that sixty-seventy percent of African American parents don’t monitor their child’s homework.
As always, Kristin, your comments are articulate, wise and challenging.
And I agree with you, to a point. Teachers do need to be held accountable for the work they do. Ed Reform, however, is increasing holding teachers and schools solely accountable for the results.
I’m sorry, but I will expect parents to do their part in educating their child. I have two children and one of them is sitting next to me right now working on his homework. Trust me, he wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t for me. And if he fell behind his classmates because I didn’t insist that he did his homework, I would have to share the blame. And so would he.
I will also expect lawmakers to share the responsibility for educating our children. We’re being asked to do more and more with less and less and it just doesn’t add up.
You’re right, lawyers and doctors are held to a high standard. But a lawyer isn’t necessarily to blame if her client is actually guilty. She can only do so much with what she has. And a doctor can’t be expected to do so much when his patient smokes, drinks and eats Cheetos all day. Nobody expects to him to singlehandedly make that patient healthy.
Schools, on the other hand, are expected to take whoever comes through our doors and turn them into college-bound scholars, no matter what.
It doesn’t work that way.
You guys, I just don’t think our response to Ed Reform needs to be so doom and gloom.
Burned out teachers? They’ve always been there. It’s a hard job, and always has been. It’s a job that gets you a “Wow, you’re a teacher? You’re a hero. I think teachers should get paid more than lawyers,” when you share your profession at a cocktail party and gets you a “What’s Wrong With Our Schools?” on the cover of Time Magazine.
Teaching and public education have really come under the microscope lately, thanks to NCLB. But come on, in some ways, it was a long time coming. For how much longer did public education think it could coast along serving a certain population of kids and completely failing another population of kids? How much longer did teachers think that, unlike lawyers, doctors, waitresses, artists, politicians, saleswomen, shop owners, writers, chefs (and on and on and on), we would be guaranteed a job regardless of how good we were at it?
Right now, Ed Reform is about trying to solve the riddle, and it’s about getting serious with expectations.
I think teachers love to complain. The complaining is burning me out faster than the negative media. Some schools have had their entire staffs fired, but what percentage is that of public schools? A miniscule one. Some charter schools are full of students who want to be there, but not every high-performing charter school is filled with students who want to be there. I’ve talked to teachers who went door-to-door in the projects to recruit kids to fill their new charter schools, and those students out performed every other school.
We complain about testing, and yes, testing needs to be made more accurate, but in my district it doesn’t matter what test you throw at kids, the white kids do well on it and the African American kids bomb it. That’s not the intellect of the student, that’s the education the student has received.
And we complain about families, and values, and nutrition, and preparation. I’ve complained about those things on this blog. But the fact is, there’s only one entity that claims to be the organization that educates kids, and takes tax dollars to get the job done, and that’s public education. If what we’re doing isn’t working, then we need to change what we’re doing. And it doesn’t have to require more money, fewer students, or faster computers. It requires a shared mentality that kids come first.
I think you all have that, Tom, Mark, Brian and Tracey. Many teachers have it. But not every teacher. Not every teacher wants to teach well. Not every teacher, Tom, is teaching as well as she can. Not every teacher can teach well. Some teachers shouldn’t be teaching, but there is this mentality that teachers deserve absolute job security, for fifty years. And we want to be respected like doctors? What doctor can fail patient after patient and still keep a practice? What lawyer can lose case after case and still expect clients? Teachers are weird, that way. There are exceptional teachers who are leading the horses to water, and the horses still aren’t drinking. Okay. So what next? Do we just blame the families and the communities and the culture and the lack of resources? Or, do we keep trying to solve the riddle?
I think Ed Reform is about trying to solve the riddle – trying to gather valuable clues, trying to eliminate the obvious dead ends – and I’m for it.
I know we all disagree on that. I know that not everything about Ed Reform is great, but it’s better than rolling along, wasting money, failing kids, and continuing to demand more respect and more pay.
Great post, Tom. But, I’m still not sure exactly how to survive this. I feel like I need to go on one of your 50-mile bicycle rides to get past the “How Much More Can We Take?” article.
Tom, great post, but that last link was brutal: Teachers Wonder: How Much More Can We Take?
Maybe they think old teachers are bad teachers, and this is just an easy way to get rid of us.
Twenty years ago a retiring teacher told me “It’s too bad that young people coming into this profession will never know how fun this job used to be.” He was a great teacher, and he was right.
Good teachers don’t need sleep. Or money. They nourish themselves off their love of teaching children. Any less and they should be fired.
Hyperbole, of course, but there’s some truth in it insomuch as too often teachers are expected to be the martyr…and anything short of that is somehow a lack of dedication.
You mean work eleven hour days? I don’t know Mark; when would I sleep?
I think we just need to teach harder. If we all just taught harder, kids would learn better, right?