Every teacher I know says the problem with their classes is not enough resources, too much focus on teaching to tests, and too many students per class.
And I heard Obama on the radio today talking about his Race to the Top plan, where schools compete to show their compliance with standards to get money from the federal government. Obama said we need accountability from teachers. His plan amounts to a test, with a list of requirements and a total score possible for each item. Making education funding a priority gets ten points at the most, sufficiently focusing on private and charter schools is worth forty points. There's all kinds of crap to get scored on. This is what they call stimulating improvement, about four billion dollars to stimulate education by top down standards.
We do want accountability. We need it from our spouses, our police officers, our employers, our employees, our landlords, and our neighbors.
And with accountability there is one who does the accounting, and that which is accounted for.
Race to the Top, aside from bringing to mind the undignified scramble to a single, coveted position, by desperate and grasping teachers, also brings to mind the pyramidal, top down nature of our school system, which is precisely what's jacking it up.
Back in good old Red China, I was able to give my students a competitive edge in learning English by working equally with the parent and education administrators. Everyone had slightly divergent interests, but we all had a common goal, getting these children to speak the best English possible.
This is what I focused on. I had seen other teachers always blaming the students, or the culture, or anyone else beside themselves. And I knew that I couldn't do this. I also knew that the people hiring me didn't know how to get Chinese students speaking fluently, since this was the biggest problem in English education at the time, and still is.
So rather than looking for people to blame, I took responsibility for my own students' success. They were not responsible for their success, for they had not chosen to be there, and had no choice in how they spent most of their time. The parents were not responsible, because their English levels were inferior to my own. The school administrators were interested in general parent and student satisfaction.
But, in order to help my students, I also had to be free to change what I needed to change and learn what I needed to learn.
I would have had a much more painful time of things if I had been teaching in an American public school. The teachers I work with now are hindered by paperwork, overloaded with students who blend into a vague crowd control issue, and isolated form the people making the decisions on how their classrooms are run. When new research catches the administration's or principal's interest, new rules get laid down over the teachers.
Before stressing accountability for teachers, Obama also made kind remarks about our Nations teachers. But this appreciation didn't extend as far as granting more power to educators in determining educational policy. Instead, he's lumped teachers into a big pile called "schools", and said that if the "schools" fail, it's the teachers fault.
Thus, teachers will continue to suffer for things they can't control, and be blamed for it, not just by ignorant politicians and right wing blame-the-lowest-first windbags, but by the president himself.
The accounting Obama wants with his new policy is accounting for standardized tests, which themselves are unaccountable to teachers and students. What Obama wants is for bureaucrats to do the accounting, and these bureaucrats are unaccountable to the teachers and students. Teachers and students can make no demands on their superiors, the students cannot direct their own education, and the teachers cannot direct the educational policy they work under. Whatever methods currently claimed to allow such direction are invalidated by Obama's ignorant policy. If he had asked public schools teacher vote on it, or asked a wide spectrum, they would have said no way.
Obama of course, is quite educated, as was his mother. I doubt if his education is comparable to that of middle and lower middle class American children, herded in and out of underfunded classrooms, and ignored and dehumanized in favor of abstract standards developed by administrators who ignore and dehumanize teachers. And as for the input of parents, where I work, among preschool children, many parents are unable to speak much English and likely disadvantaged when it comes to shaping educational policy.
The pain and suffering, dreams and hopes, personalities and talents, of America's students and teachers, will continue to be ignored.
2 comments:
Thank you for the commentary based on your experience and observations.
I would love to see a long list of comments from stakeholders like you Darren. Teachers, students, parents and even administrators and the president if you are reading join in this dialog.
"I took responsibility for my own students' success."
Two points: first, as a teacher there are - not as a matter of moral sanction - but as a matter of fact, limitations within which you can respond. A child's success, however it is measured, cannot be entirely dependent on you as a teacher, and even if that were possible - what a monstrous conception of education to think that nothing a child may do by way of his or her own initiative and effort could ever count toward that success; that instead everything was down to the teacher. So that is a claim which I do not think you are entitled to make.
The second point I put to you is that, although it would be right to assume responsibility for helping students toward success rather than blaming the school or the culture or something else, those things can and often do nonetheless count as obstacles restricting the extent to which you can respond to your students' need for help and it would therefore be obtuse to dismiss them. Consider your own admission:
"But, in order to help my students, I also had to be free to change what I needed to change and learn what I needed to learn."
Freedom is the necessary social condition for responsibility - the moral obligation to respond - to operate. One implication of this connection is that so long as state funding of, and control over education continues to grow, the responsibility of teachers will continue to diminish - with I might add, broadly predictable results.
Always happy to help.
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