I have found yet another really stupid article about how we can fix education here in America.
How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders
This article starts with only the most sweeping rhetoric:
"We know that the task of reforming the country's public schools begins with us. It is our obligation to enhance the personal growth and academic achievement of our students, and we m...ust be accountable for how our schools perform."
They acknowledge the size of the issue:
"But those reforms are still outpaced and outsized by the crisis in public education."
And what’s at stake:
"the transformative changes needed to truly prepare our kids for the 21st-century global economy"
So, to recap, we must reform education because there is a huge crisis and our kids are not prepared for the 21st century job market.
What do we do?
First, according to the article, we all make the feel-good determination to be responsible for the future of our children. This statement means nothing, of course, but it is leveraged against the unwholesome thought that, "right now, across the country, kids are stuck in failing schools, just waiting for us to do something."
This mistakenly suggests that students are waiting for something besides their next text message, but I will get back to that in a moment. Where does the article suggest that all the responsibility lies? You guessed it, at the feet of the teacher. Yep, the individual teacher.
The article complains that we retain teachers based on "archaic rules" about "seniority" and "academic credentials." What do they mean? We like to keep teachers who have experience in front of a classroom and who have advanced degrees in their subject matter. Imagine! We want qualified, experienced teachers in front of our students. They go on to argue that this policy makes it harder to hold onto young, enthusiastic teachers while, I reckon, retaining those old cows who should be slaughtered for meat. No, seriously, not every new teacher is enthusiastic, and not every old teacher is a terrible teacher. To base an entire argument on a generalization is somewhat specious, no?
Then they pull the heart-strings with this poor, little, hypothetical girl who won’t go to college because her teacher had experience and education, vs. (presumably) some amazing, incredible self-taught enthusiastic dynamo who doesn’t need no fancy education or classroom experience to be a great teacher. Really, you can’t make this crap up. They say that each day we ignore this reality, we ignore the children preparing for adulthood. But so far they have not presented any reality. There are no facts, no statistics to back them up. So what is this about?
We find out two paragraphs later when they try to corral education with the business model. Of course, that is an apples and oranges comparison. In the business world, you are solely responsible for your performance. In the academic world, no matter how well you perform, you might have a class full of students who don’t want to be in your class, don’t give their best effort, might have learning disabilities, might not have a parent at home to help with homework, might be in a gang war with others in the class, might have lost their health insurance and can no longer afford their medication, or might just be the kind of head-up-your-ass student that I was 25 years ago. To charge some of my teachers with my crimes of apathy would be unfair. I didn’t try my hardest for most of high school because I really just didn’t care. And before that there was a two-year stretch where I was being harassed, threatened, beaten, ostracized, made fun of, and generally made to hate myself 5 days a week. Think I gave a shit about geometry class? I mean, I WISH they would have fired all my teachers. I hated them, too.
Beyond all that, though, there has never been developed a good way of measuring student achievement. If I am a teacher and I KNOW that I will be fired if my students don’t make A’s, what grade do you THINK my students are going to make? W...hat will they have learned? Who cares, they got A’s! If student achievement is to be measured by a high-stakes standardized test, and I know that I will be fired if they do not do well? What are we going to cover in class? That test. Every. Single. Day. What will students learn? An array of disconnected facts and how to logically eliminate two of the five multiple choice answers to better their odds when they have to guess. What will that teach them that applies to the real world? Nothing.
You know who comes out a BIG WINNER whenever we base our knowledge of student learning outcomes on a high stakes test? The Testing companies. You know who else? The congressmen that testing companies have bribed to mandate that their tests are used in K-12 education. What do the students get? Nothing.
What comes next in the essay? You guessed it! More soaring rhetoric about getting the best teachers and the best principals. Where are they going to get them? Presumably from some magical island that makes great teachers with no classroom experience and no advanced degrees, where, you know, enthusiastic teaching skills are just part of the genetic code, and where they don’t mind working for peanuts because the union has been dissolved.
Then comes the coup de grace of bullshit propagated by people who have no experience in education who want to suddenly swoop in and act like they know what the hell they are talking about: "We must equip educators with the best technology available to make instruction more effective and efficient."
Sigh. Who can argue with that? Well, you can’t, because they don’t provide which specific piece of technology they are going to use, where they are going to apply it to the curriculum, or how it will work. This is such transparent bullshit. Oh, we’ll use the latest technology to make everything better! Awesome, we should have just thought of that earlier.
What is the article’s underlying aim? Obviously, we have to do away with unions, close down public schools, open up more charter schools, and let the patriotic eagle of academic excellence fly free into the 21st century.
Ok, I am game. Who runs the charter schools? What are their outcomes? How are they measured? Who oversees them? Who are they accountable to? How much tax money will be diverted to them? Will students have books and desks? (GWB, who pushed for this trend nationally, would often tout the high scores of these charter schools that had sprung up in Texas during his administration. But further review showed that many of them did not actually have desks, chalkboards, textbooks or even electricity in a couple of places.) Students achievement was based on tests that students were told the answers to. Perfect.
So yeah, this is shit.