That is a line from Standing up for teachers, the new Washington Post column by Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson, who seems to be one of the few major columnists who gets it.
From the very beginning of his column, Robinson makes clear his viewpoint:
Teachers are heroes, not villains, and it’s time to stop demonizing them.
And in light of the strike of Chicago teachers, he makes clear that one cannot and should not attempt to make a distinction between teachers and their unions, and supports the right of teachers to unionize:
News flash: Collective bargaining is not the problem, and taking that right away from teachers will not fix the schools.
Please keep reading.
Robinson makes it clear that he believes too much is being put upon teachers because of things they cannot control:
Yes, I’m talking about poverty. Sorry to be so gauche, but when teachers point out the relationship between income and achievement, they’re not shirking responsibility. They’re just stating an inconvenient truth.
He cites some approach research, about which you can read.
Let me speak from experience: I am recently retired after almost two decades in public school classrooms. It is true that family income is not totally determinative, but it is strongly influential. As one who has studied the research extensively, I know that school effects account for less than 1/3 of student performance, and teacher for perhaps half of the school performance at best: in other words, when you talk about the difference teachers make, when it comes to meaningful test scores, it is less than 1/6 of the variance.
Teachers DO make a difference, but in ways that may not show up on test scores. We encourage students to think more deeply, we teach them how to construct and support an argument. We help them learn to use tools that can help them own their own learning, from dictionaries and thesaures to appropriate sites on the internet.
We entice, we challenge, we comfort, we provoke, we do what we can to have the students go further, to be able to do more than they could before they showed up in oru classrooms.
The Robinson column is very good on the issues we confront as teachers. If nothing else, process this paragraph:
It is reasonable to hold teachers accountable for their performance. But it is not reasonable — or, in the end, productive — to hold them accountable for factors that lie far beyond their control. It is fair to insist that teachers approach their jobs with the assumption that every single child, rich or poor, can succeed. It is not fair to expect teachers to correct all the imbalances and remedy all the pathologies that result from growing inequality in our society.
We cannot, schools cannot, and unless and until America makes a commitment to address the real issues of inequality in this country, we will still have a crisis that those of us who work in schools (as I used to) will do what we can but it will not be enough.
Like Robinson, I do not have an objection to charter schools in theory, at least, not as they were originally proposed, although not as most of them are currently set up, which do not address the issue of those most difficult to to teach, and that in general do not perform any better than the public schools from which they draw.
Charters are being used to break unions, to take away from teachers any job security, are often run by people with no real knowledge of education.
There are many things we need to do to help teach ALL of our children. Unfortunately most of what passes for education "reform" fails to address the real needs of the neediest of our children.
And too much of the rhetoric demonizes teachers and their unions. Robinson ends his column responding to this notion:
But portraying teachers as villains doesn’t help a single child. Ignoring the reasons for the education gap in this country is no way to close it. And there’s a better way to learn about the crisis than going to the movies. Visit a school instead.
Visit a school.
Talk with the teachers.
Sit through a day with teacher and ask yourself if you could do that job. Howard Dean said that he could not be a teacher because his bladder was not that strong. That can be a real issue, if you have four classes in a row and the nearest bathroom is 60 yards to the entrance of the building from the outside temporary in which you teach - that was my situation for 7 years
Eugene Robinson is one of the few well-known pundits I have encountered who seems to understand the reality of teaching and public schools.
Read the column.
Pass it on.
Thanks.