By Mark
I am just old enough to remember Paul Harvey, and the "rest of the story."
Eve Rifkin, at our Arizona partner Stories from School has helped flesh out the "rest of the story" on that annual USNews "Top Schools" list, and it is as if she was reading my mind.
Between Waiting for Superman, Oprah, Education Nation, Obama's charge to raise the bar, and the resulting present (and I pessimistically argue ephemeral) empassioned focus on education in this country, it is clear that the whole story has not been told in far too many instances. Here is my take on the untold halves of the many stories told in the last couple of weeks…the rest of the story, if you will:
1. Unions oppose merit pay not to protect lazy teachers but because no one can come up with a fair and reliable way to assess teaching "merit." Issue number one: test scores don't work because not all teachers are in tested disciplines.
2. Those other countries who post great education stats? Their systems are different than ours. Some screen out special education kids. Some have separate vocational tracks which are conveniently not part of their data. Many in those systems lament the fact that the kids they produce are test-takers, not thinkers.
3. Weighing myself will not make me lose weight…I've being weighing in for years and the number is only going the wrong way. Testing kids more will not make them learn. In fact, testing actually takes up instructional time, the loss of which not surprisingly has a negative effect on test performance.
4. American schools held up as models of success always have the following by comparison to the mainstream: extra funding or an enrollment screen or both. These models are neither replicable nor sustainable in other schools unless those schools also get extra funding or an enrollment screen or both.
5. Every child can learn, but not every child will. To blame that solely on teachers or on students is yet another heinous oversimplification of the complex problems facing education, educators, students, and families today.
The rest of the story? I'm sure there's even more. I'm tired of hearing half-stories in the sound bytes mainstream America turns to as it's source of facts.
Agreed! A very nice list of points… I especially like #5. Unfortunately, as teachers, we don’t have power over that point.
In America, there still seems to be a persistent attitude of anti-intelligence on a social-wide level. Being educated isn’t esteemed (if you’re smart, you’re a NERD, GEEK, EGGHEAD, DORK, or worst, accused of “acting white”) and many families don’t teach their children to love learning. Instead, the constant refrain about education in our culture is that it’s just a path to $$$… which is a poor motivator to an 8-year old kid wondering what the point of learning his times tables or how to write predictions for a fictional text about a talking spider.
I agree that test scores should be used to help teachers teach better, and not simply used to out teachers. Test scores are too complicated a result to accurately diagnose a teacher’s skill, like having someone run a 5K in order to determine if she’s healthy. Maybe, a different day, she would have run better.
I am absolutely WITH you on the current underuse of administrators. First, I think we are overlooking the impact administrators have on the success of their school. Ineffective administrators should be fired. Right now, their impact is barely being looked at. Second, I think administrators need to be encouraged to ensure that their teachers are teaching well. Maybe this means training, increased freedom to take action, or more accountability (“Jim, your school has a high truancy rate, why is that?”), but we can’t keep piling on the assessments and not bring administrators into the equation.
In my district, bad administrators are like pedophilic priests – they just get shuffled around.
And you’re right, the current system of principals trying to get rid of ineffective teachers does not work. They need to be able to say, “do this, or you can’t stay.” They need to know what “this” is, and they need time to evaluate whether or not it’s happening.
I think the first step is that we have to acknowledge that not all students will learn in the kind of environment provided by the present public school model which, when stressed, feels pushed to sacrifice arts, vocational education, and even PE under the pressure to perform in the core.
I agree about your assessment of charters–but even the self-selection clientele certainly results in a different kind of environment than a class where students feel like school is a sentence they are compelled to serve.
There are ineffective teachers out there, but as we find over and over, there’s no easy way to get rid of them. The present push to use test scores is an attempt to avoid the difficult conversations that must be had with teachers who are not performing.
I think step one to getting rid of ineffective teachers is to free up administrators from having to jump through the myriad hoops mandated from above. If administrators could be in the classroom not just as evaluators but also as coaches, then those ineffective teachers could be identified, remediated if possible, or put on a plan of improvement and popped out of the business. That’s the hard way, but it is far more fair than using test scores.
I have my own opinions about solutions…none of them are easy or pretty or politically correct.
Mark,
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. If nothing else, the current media situation has forced me to examine whether or not I want to keep teaching, and I’ve had to take a good look around.
I’ve done some reading, and I have to admit a few mistakes I’ve made. First, not all charters get to screen their kids. Some are made up of whoever comes, in urban areas that’s typically high-minority high-poverty kids. Not all charters work, but I don’t hear that from the reform folk – what I do hear is that we need to look at the charters that are working and emulate them.
Now, what charters DO have is a population of students and families who have chosen the school. That makes a huge difference. But what if they choose the school because it offers something better?
I look around the halls at my school, at the pack of kids who wander ALL DAY LONG, or the kids I see heading up to Aurora instead of going to class, and I think, “He used to come to my class every day.” Or I think, “I don’t blame him, I wouldn’t want to be in ______’s class either.”
I feel like we cannot continue to defend teachers who are offering a poor product. I have the same poor, hungry, homeless kids as the guy down the hall, but they come to my class and care about getting their missing work in, and they don’t even go to his class. Or, they put their heads down and sleep.
So, in response to number 5, you and I both teach hard kids, and we teach them. I have had students I could not reach, but they are the once-a-year exception and they haunt me. They are not wave after wave of kids I wrote off as not wanting to learn. You and I both work with people who have given up on these kinds of kids.
What do you think can be done about that?
What do you think should be done about that?