I know that many teachers are demoralized. It is not just because I read your comments every day, but because national surveys by Scholastic/Gates and by the Metlife survey report that this is so.
Some of the newbie organizations founded and/or funded by Gates (like TeachPlus and Educators4Excellence) think this is wonderful. So does The New Teacher Project (TNTP), founded by either Wendy Kopp or Michelle Rhee, depending on whom you believe. They see a new day coming, when teachers who don’t care about a pension or job security, who want to be evaluated by test scores, will fill the classrooms of America.
I say all this is nonsense. Ten years from now, the teaching corps in most districts in the nation will be drawn from the same pool as now. It is an absurd goal to want to push out or drive out experienced teachers and rely on a group of young people to change teaching into a job for short-timers. It could happen, but if it does, it won’t be good for students or for the quality of education.
Short term, there is good reason to be demoralized. Long term, I am convinced that the destructive trends of this era will pass. Failed ideas eventually are recognized as failed ideas.
That is why I urge everyone to stay and fight for what they know is right for their students. Signs of resistance are growing. The test boycott at Garfield High School in Seattle is the first sign of spring. There will be many more.
Here is someone who disagrees with me, or made her decision a while back:
“Maybe the greatest act of defiance is to stay and fight for what is right.”
Diane, I believe most teachers who have decided to leave the profession felt that way years and years before they left. These changes have been a long time coming. The writing was on the wall years ago and most teachers hunkered down and got the job done anyway. They stood up to bullying principals and insane edicts, more paperwork, much more testing, and more decisions being made by people who never taught a day in the classroom. They fought hard and were belittled, ignored, or forced out.
There comes a day when it becomes impossible to stay, when you feel you can no longer be a part of something that is directly harming children and that takes a little piece of your soul each day that you continue to play by someone else’s rules. I know because I was one of those teachers. I taught for 20 years and the district offered a buy out, hoping to get rid of their veteran teachers so they could hire cheaper, more pliable, younger teachers. That was almost two years ago, and most of the teacher friends I left behind are retiring this year. Like me, they reached a point where they had to leave.
Even though we’re no longer in the classroom, we continue to fight “from the outside.” Thank you for everything you do.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sometimes I wonder if the under 30 generation is completely disconnected from those of us who are baby-boomers and have or shortly will be retiring… In some cases their differences are apolitical… for example, I know anecdotally that the under 30s have far fewer concerns about on-line privacy than I do… In other cases the beliefs and attitudes of the under 30s have been molded by the MSM and what they’ve heard from political leaders. Everyone under 30 believes “government is the problem” because that’s what they’ve heard from the day they were born… few if any under 30s believe there will be social security or medicare for them because everyone talks about how those programs are unsustainable… I wonder how many of the under 30s believe teachers are overpaid and have too many benefits? After all, that’s been the drumbeat on the right for at least a decade, or since they were eligible to vote… I wonder how many of them think public education is a failure? After all, that’s what they were told their entire lives… And the under 20s? They’ve heard even less about how government can help those in need and provide affordable services… and less about how unions shield employees from arbitrary rules… and less about the qualities of our public schools… I hope that you and those of us who have confidence in government, democracy and public education can get our message through the noise they are hearing from statehouses, Washington DC, and the reformers… If they keep hearing that merit pay is viable, that they can devise and manage their own pensions, that unions are obstructionists and the private sector is the salvation of public education we might lose any chance of convincing them differently….
It is demoralizing to realize that corporate reform is turning education into a Milgram experiment of epic proportions. The “I quit” letters indicate that many people have already chosen to leave the profession — to quit the experiment and be replaced by a new (teacher) test subject who will push the requisite buttons and torture his students until their agonizing cries are no longer heard.
How will this help your students?
I don’t think teachers are remembered for the standardized tests they inflict on their students. They are remembered because they helped students realize that they are not defined by their test scores.
It seems that administrators and corporate reformers only read the headings and the text-type statistics listed in the Common Core rather than actually doing a close reading of the informational text. Administrative implementation of the Common Core therefore seems to imply “A focus on results rather than means.”
Stay. The means are all we have. Ameliorate.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1jG1bity2E for inspiration.
“… corporate reform is turning education into a Milgram experiment of epic proportions.”
A terrifying but perceptive analogy.
Let’s also throw in the Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed “… the impressionability and obedience of people when provided a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support.” Like Milgram’s work, this study showed how fast pathologies of power and submission can take over an institutional setting.
There’s strengthening dynamic at work, whereby this power grab furthers the intended conversion of virtually everything (children included, as Michelle Rhee informed us) related to the schools into assets (teachers being rapidly depreciating ones) that can eventually be monetized.
I agree with Diane
Back in June I wrote this. “Time to Play Offense”
I agree, and am going to stay. Please likewise stay with us in the fight as you have been doing. We need your support in Bridgeport, Conn.!
The next phase there is going to be both charter schools and online “learning.”
look at this graphic– it is why the expensive wiring of our schools and “laptops for everyone”, recently announced by Mr. Vallas scares me.
It’s a large document, but probably the most important image I’ve seen in coming to understand this side of Corporate Education Privatization.
“Disintermediation” is one of the most dystopic things I have ever heard of.
This is what we may be facing should we stay.
Demand that charter schools take their fair share of children with the greatest needs. Insist that they stop skimming.
Fight against online charter schools. They are a scam and a rip-off and bad education.
I will. We should stand up in meetings and ask:
“Is this research based? Oh? Well, would you say that research was correlative or experimental? Was it laboratory or field research? Don’t know? What exactly was the research? Well, please get back to us….”
Part of what is going to happen will be this: public school buildings housing delivery of online education, too — this, I think, is the hybrid model we’re going to see more of in our district.
Fewer human teachers and less human interaction will be the end result.
Charter schools are already selectively sending letters out to “certain” students in and around my district from what I was told this week.
Are CT charters alllowed to selectively recruit?
I thought the final bill, SB458, stipulated opt out lotteries only (not sure if that is the correct terminology). They cannot target select students.
Do you know if this is true?
Matto, I remember reading your post and thinking what a great attitude to have. It helped me make a decision not to give in, and to fight back. As an administrator I realized that I could be a support system for our teachers and to try not to put more pressure on them. I made a decision to do my homework and give them as much information and resources as we could to help them hang in there. I see the look of desperation on their faces as the state test looms closer. We work together to help identify ways to make things easier and make decisions together about content and instruction. I hope they know we are in this together. The deck is stacked against us here in Louisiana, but I refuse to abandon our students and families. Our school is about 93% F/R lunch, so we have a hard road ahead of us. It makes me sad to hear teachers who feel their administrators are the bad guys. My job is tied to our school VAM score, so I am invested here. I hope they don’t see me as the enemy. I wish I could change the horrible laws that require us to subject children to these horrible tests. We need to speak out to our legislators who allowed this to happen. The key is to help parents understand what is being done to their children.
After a good bit of time of being demoralized, reform forces continue to expand even more extreme debasement, depravity, and destruction of pubic schools, teachers, as they make deals with and target the teachers’ unions for extinction. Stay and support the agenda supported by our Secretary of Education? Why? I agree, there will be a return to sanity and well-trained, public school teachers (and hopefully responsive and supportive teachers’ unions, some of which are currently involved with double-dealing and underhanded activities). But, until the big reform fail convulses and collapses, why would teachers who care about the students continue to support the inequities obligating them to become exactly what the reform model wants?
How are you defining short and long term? It seems like it’s been “politically incorrect” to be a teacher for a long time now. Looking at history, how long does the average era within education seem to last?
All this nonsense will come crashing down within five years.
Sooner if more people speak out.
Your optimism gives me hope, Diane. This blog has given me information that I can use to argue against “reform”. I have been sharing the entries on this blog as well as others with the other teachers in my school in the hope of inspiring and educating them. I have recently had to go underground because of complaints from the younger members of the staff. They simply don’t get why this matters so much. That concerns me a lot. What will happen to our schools when we old curmudgeons are gone?
I am a suburban mom of two school aged children. My kids walk to our neighborhood school. It has a very good reputation. Our parents are very involved and many of our teachers spend their entire careers at this school.
Several years ago, I thought it would be great to reform public education and hold teachers accountable. Every child should have the kind of quality educator who teaches my children. I heard about the movie “Waiting for Superman” and wanted to believe the right educator could perform miracles in failing schools.
Last year, there were a number of changes made in our schools both locally and statewide including new evaluation procedures for teachers. This caused a lot of anxiety. I saw my children’s beloved teachers being taken to the hospital with chest pains, dangerously high blood pressure, and other stress induced illnesses. It broke my heart to see so many retire or take extended sick leave.
This year, I have seen people with little to no connection to our schools coming to school board meetings and getting highly involved in local education. A group called Stand for Children began to position itself as the voice of the community. PTA moms were being pushed aside and Stand for Children paid advocates were serving in their places on parent involvement committees.
Now, other groups are emerging on a statewide level. Thanks to blogs like this one, I know about Teach for America, Students First, and those ALEC companies who fund them. I know the names of the players and their connections to each other. I am more closely following politics and keeping track of political donations. Most importantly, I am spreading the word.
A politically minded friend told me, they have an amazing amount of money and are very powerful. We just have to hope they overplay their hand. From what I have seen, the egos driving these reforms are forcing change in such an aggressive manner that they are affecting the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. They are going too far, too quickly, and overplaying their hand.
As a child of the 70’s who survived the open classroom experiment, I have enormous sympathy for my youngest who will suffer the brunt of this reform movement. Like me, he will survive and be the wiser for it. Still, those who hurt his school should feel his pain.
It’s nice to hear a parent’s perspective here. I hope there are more parents around who are aware and speak out. The only way to stop this is for patents to stand up and have their voices heard, and for our legislators to hear from us all.
Diane, I don’t disagree with you at all. I wanted to make the point of how hard it is these days to stay. It is very easy to tell teachers to stay and fight when you are not in the classroom day after day, having to deal with the current state of affairs in public education. In some districts and some states and some schools, deciding to leave is a life saving matter. And when we deride teachers for making the decision to leave, ignoring the fact that you never really leave teaching, at least in your heart, we run the risk of being the flip side of the coin of those who blame teachers for all the problems with public education. Its kind of like “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
When I left two years ago, the Texas legislature had made the decision to slash education funding by over $5 billion for the next school year. My large urban district had announced they would be laying off teachers and increasing class sizes to offset the cuts, and decided to offer a buy out to give teachers a chance to leave with a small incentive before the cuts were made. Of course, most of the people who left were veteran teachers close to retirement. Since the budget cuts affected all of Texas, we knew the chances of finding another job in the area were slim to none. I left thinking I might be saving someone else their job. I have quite a few friends who took a risk and stayed, only to be laid off in the end.
Our new principal’s demeaning, bullying, insulting treatment of his staff was another huge factor in deciding to leave. He was a shining example of top-down, “my way or the highway” leadership, and to him anything that had been done before he got there was either outdated or ineffective — despite our excellent test scores. He had no new ideas, only threats, and the only thing that mattered to him were test scores.
I interviewed at a local charter school afterwards for a school secretary position, thinking I could take a break from teaching but still be part of a school. I knew nothing about charter schools at that time other than they skimmed off the best students from my school and sent back the behavior problems. When I went for the interview the head of HR told me they had teaching openings and that I would be “perfect” because of my years of teaching experience. The charter school principal felt exactly the opposite, however, seeing my twenty years of teaching as a huge deficit. I wrote about that horrible encounter in two posts, if you’re interested: http://mindmargins.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/i-never-felt-old-until-my-first-job-interview-in-twenty-years-part-i/ and http://mindmargins.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/i-never-felt-old-until-my-first-job-interview-in-twenty-years-part-ii/
Leaving teaching was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, but it was the best one for me. My position was cut the next school year, so chances are I would have been laid off or shuffled off to another school and another teaching assignment three months into the school year. I suspect there are many teachers who have left for many of the same reasons I did. I stayed for twenty years and fought as hard as I could, day after day. Almost all of my teaching friends have decided to retire since I left, and a few have been lucky enough to move on to another school or school district.
I applaud everyone who continues to fight the ridiculous corporate “reform” movement. I am not advocating leaving. Until I read Diane’s book and started reading her blog, I had no idea that things were as bad around the entire country as they are, and not just in my city and state. Just remember there are a lot of former teachers who continue to fight for public education outside of the classroom as well.
Back in December when I was feeling particularly frustrated with everything going on in education in Michigan, I found myself actually looking at other careers after 25 years doing what I love. And then it hit me, and I posted this status that was quickly liked by over 150 people including co-workers, family members, friends, and students (past and present). I’ve gone back and read my own words multiple times since then, and will continue to do so as long as needed.
“You know what? To heck with you people in Lansing. To heck with you people who don’t understand what I do, how I do it, or how much I love it. To heck with you people who have no idea that I just facebook chatted with a student about retaking a test, texted a former student sitting at the basketball game, and agreed to help the orchestra class with a little project. To heck with you people who don’t understand what it’s like to have your 3rd hour class be kicking butt in the Toys for Tots competition, signing up to do Secret Santa with each other, and averaging 93% on the last test. To heck with you people who don’t understand that hugging, laughing, and roasting are part of my job. To heck with you people who don’t understand that pushing, pulling, and prodding are also part of my job. To heck with you people who think you know my job yet could never do my job, who think you know the curriculum yet probably couldn’t pass a test, and who think you know how bad teenagers are when they are freaking amazing. To heck with you people. I am a teacher. No, I don’t teach. I AM a teacher. There’s a difference, and this “job” is not just a job. It keeps me up at night, it makes me laugh, it constantly challenges me to be better. To heck with you people who have determined my emotions for far too long. To heck with you people who have me researching other careers. And shame on me for letting you push me that far. You keep on trying to destroy what I do, but I’m tougher than you. A lot tougher than you. I may not have big money or big power, but I have something so much more powerful. Something you will never understand. Something you almost made me forget.”
Brava! I pretty much said the same thing last September and I am enjoying my second-graders like I haven’t since before the test mania hit. I drastically cut back on the mountains of useless worksheets that I was giving them to “prepare them for third grade” and their first round of state exams that year. Our midyear assessments were just administered and the great news is that my students performed just as well as the other class in my school, and in some cases, performed much better. It’s what I knew in my heart would happen, but that confidence in developmentally appropriate practices had been slowly eroded by those who have never taught, especially those who have never taught primary-aged children.
Now this is good news. Real teaching, and let the tests fall where they may. The silent revolution.
“Lie low and avoid the radar” is my new motto. I am no longer afraid of losing my job, as I have decided that I could no longer sell my soul to remain a teacher. If I can’t teach the way I know is best for young learners, I would rather leave than become a drill marshall. This new attitude has certainly helped me lighten up. In turn, the kids have lightened up as well.