A group of distinguished educators addressed a letter to Secretary Arne Duncan that carefully explains how to get excellent teaching. Such an effort would begin by setting a high bar for entry into the profession, continue by establishing an atmosphere of autonomy and professionalism, and grow stronger by enabling teachers to work together and build a vibrant culture of learning and professional development.
The group warned that Race to the Top does not encourage good teaching. It wrote:
“Current education policy, including the Race to the Top law, and especially the practice of evaluating teachers by their students’ performance on high stakes assessments, will likely weaken, rather than strengthen, the teaching profession. Although the current policy may have intuitive appeal, a variety of evidence indicates it will not lead to sustained improvements in teaching and learning over the long term. In fact, it is likely to lead to unproductive teaching practices and poor outcomes, including “narrowing of curricula, teaching to the test, less creative teaching, more superficial and nontransferable learning, more controlling behavior at all levels of power, more withdrawal of effort from at-risk students, and increased dropout rates” (Ryan & Brown, 2005). We are especially concerned that current policy works against the professionalization of teaching, that it reinforces a situation in which teachers do not own or control their profession, that it does not set teaching on a vigorous path of development and sustainable improvement, and that it alienates and demoralizes teachers.”
Read this letter. What it says in plain English is that there is no evidence to support the punitive approach of Race to the Top and evaluating teachers by the tests scores of their students. It says that using extrinsic rewards to elicit changed behavior undermines intrinsic motivation. The education policies of the Bush-Obama era are misguided, ineffectual, and ultimately harmful to teaching and learning,
03 June 2013
Dear Secretary Duncan,
The US National Commission on Mathematics Instruction (USNC/MI) is a committee of the National Academies. Our commission thus advises Congress and the Nation on mathematics teaching, both nationally and internationally. We are writing to you as individuals, whose views reflect our service on the USNC/MI, to share our vision for mathematics teaching and to advocate for policies that will support this vision. We would like mathematics teaching—from PreKindergarten through college and beyond—to become a vigorous, vibrant profession that is designed for continuous improvement.
From our work with educators in other countries we are finding that systems that support teachers’ autonomy and professionalism, set a high bar to entry into the teaching profession, and foster ongoing development within learning communities produce an environment in which teaching and learning thrive. We think that in this country, systems should be developed—or expanded—in which teachers collaborate, examine and discuss their work, use and build on each other’s ideas, and seek to impress their peers with the quality of their methods and ideas. Such an environment could allow for excellence to be achieved and demonstrated in various ways. It would push the teaching field forward, in much the same way as mathematics and science make progress by sharing and building on ideas. It would create vigorous striving in the same way that the sciences do: by the need to impress one’s peers and the possibility of doing so in one’s own way. Of course, the ultimate motivation for teachers is more and deeper learning by students.
We have learned from Chinese teachers that “to learn continually” is a central motto in education, that “superrank” teachers analyze and improve the curriculum, and that testing is viewed as less critical than in the U.S. (U.S. National Commission on Mathematics Instruction, 2010). We have learned from Korean teachers that they have a strong and impressive teacher research culture, and that their system supports and nurtures such a culture.
Evidence in favor of developing systems in which teaching is an autonomous profession with a high bar to entry also comes from Finland, where systemic changes led to improved teaching and learning over the last several decades. While the U.S. has intensified standardized testing and accountability since the 1990s, “Finland at that time emphasized teacher professionalism, school-based curriculum, trust-based educational leadership, and school collaboration through networking.” (Sahlberg, 2011). Indeed, Sahlberg’s main message is that there is another way to improve education systems. This includes improving the teaching force, limiting student testing to a necessary minimum, placing responsibility and trust before accountability, and handing over school- and district-level leadership to education professionals. These are common education policy themes in some of the high performing countries—Finland
among them—in the 2009 International Programme for Student Assessment (PISA) of the OECD… . (Sahlberg, 2011)
Finland’s education system fits with Jal Mehta’s vision, which he contrasts with our own current system:
Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.
By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance. (Mehta, 2013)
We believe it is critical for teaching to be a respected profession and we agree with Sahlberg that “[a]s long as the practice of teachers is not trusted and they are not respected as professionals, young talent is unlikely to seek teaching as their lifelong career anywhere. Or if they do, they will leave teaching early because of lack of a respectful professional working environment” (Sahlberg, 2011). We are concerned that—as stated in a teacher’s widely circulated resignation letter—“[w]e have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven” (Strauss, 2013).
The need for professional, collaborative communities of teachers is further supported by findings from research on professional development and school improvement. Research on professional development in the U.S. and internationally indicates that collaborative approaches to professional learning and building strong working relationships among teachers are key components in improving teachers’ practice and student learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009, p.5). At the school level, Bryk et al. (2010) found that having a professional community that uses public classroom practice, reflective dialogue, peer collaboration, and collective responsibility for school improvement with a specific focus on student learning is an important indicator for school improvement. Relational trust was found to be essential for organizational change and for sustaining the hard work of school improvement.
Current education policy, including the Race to the Top law, and especially the practice of evaluating teachers by their students’ performance on high stakes assessments, will likely weaken, rather than strengthen, the teaching profession. Although the current policy may have intuitive appeal, a variety of evidence indicates it will not lead to sustained improvements in teaching and learning over the long term. In fact, it is likely to lead to unproductive teaching practices and poor outcomes, including “narrowing of curricula, teaching to the test, less creative teaching, more superficial and nontransferable learning, more controlling behavior at all levels of power, more withdrawal of effort from at-risk students, and increased dropout rates” (Ryan & Brown, 2005). We are especially concerned that current policy works against the professionalization of teaching, that it reinforces a situation in which teachers do not own or control their profession, that it does not set teaching on a vigorous path of development and sustainable improvement, and that it alienates and demoralizes teachers.
Some of the evidence against the practice of evaluating teachers based on high stakes assessments comes from research on motivation. For example:
It is well established that use of salient extrinsic rewards to motivate work behavior can be deleterious to intrinsic motivation and can thus have negative consequences for psychological adjustment, performance on interesting and personally important activities, and citizenship behavior. (Gagne & Deci, 2005)
SDT [self-determination theory] research has found that motivation based on more controlled motives, such as rewards or punishments (external regulations), or self-esteem-based pressures (e.g., ego involvement) is associated with lower quality of learning, lessened persistence, and more negative emotional experience. (Ryan & Brown, 2005)
In their meta-analysis of 128 well-controlled experiments exploring the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation, Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999) found a “clear and consistent” picture:
In general, tangible rewards had a significant negative effect on intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks, and this effect showed up with participants ranging from preschool to college, with interesting activities ranging from word games to construction puzzles, and with various rewards ranging from dollar bills to marshmallows. (Deci, Koetsner, & Ryan, 1999)
Teaching is an inherently complex, interesting, and creative activity because it involves knowing ideas and ways of thinking and engaging others with those ideas and ways of thinking. Thus, according to the research on motivation, improving teaching will require work environments that foster intrinsic (or autonomous) motivation. Motivation research further indicates that “the experiences of autonomy, as well as of competence and relatedness, are important for effective performance and psychological health and well-being” (Deci & Ryan, 2008).
We doubt that students’ learning gains will outweigh the negative effects to the teaching profession of test-based accountability. According to the National Research Council’s Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education, “the available evidence does not give strong support for the use of test- based incentives to improve education” (National Research Council, 2011, p. 91). Furthermore, The research to date suggests that the benefits of test-based incentive programs over the past two decades have been quite small. Although the available evidence is limited, it is not insignificant. The incentive programs that have been tried have involved a number of different incentive designs and substantial numbers of schools, teachers, and students. We focused on studies that allowed us to draw conclusions about the causal effects of incentive programs and found a significant body of evidence that was carefully constructed. Unfortunately, the guidance offered by this body of evidence is not encouraging about the ability of incentive programs to reliably produce meaningful increases in student achievement—except in mathematics for elementary school students. (National Research Council, 2011)
Looking at the effects of test-based accountability from an international perspective, we also do not find support for such a system:
Are those education systems where competition, choice, and test-based accountability have been the main drivers of educational change showing progress in international comparisons? Using the PISA database to construct such a comparison, a suggestive answer emerges. Most notably, the United States, England, New Zealand, Japan, and some parts of Canada and Australia can be used as benchmarks. … The trend of students’ performance in mathematics in all test-based accountability-policy nations is similar— it is in decline, in cycle after cycle, between 2000 and 2006. (Sahlberg, 2011)
None of the above implies that standardized tests for students are bad or wrong. The issue is how tests are used. Using test results for informational purposes in a trusting, collaborative environment is entirely different from using test results to monitor, evaluate, reward, or punish teachers. In this matter, we would be wise to heed Campbell’s Law and his observations about test scores:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (Campbell, 1976, 2011, p. 34)
… when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Campbell, 1976, 2011 p. 35)
Near the end of its report, the National Research Council’s Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education stated:
Our recommendations, accordingly, call for policy makers to support experimentation with rigorous evaluation and to allow midcourse correction of policies when evaluation suggests such correction is needed. (National Research Council, 2011) We think that the time has come for a midcourse correction. In Singapore, there is the motto “teach less, learn more;” in the U.S., we need to “test less, learn more.” We have argued that test-based accountability stands to have negative effects on teaching as a profession and that there are better ways to improve teaching. We respectfully urge changes in policy to support a strong and vibrant mathematics teaching profession.
Sincerely,
Sybilla Beckmann, University of Georgia
Janine Remillard, University of Pennsylvania Gail Burrill, Michigan State University
James Barta Utah State University
Myong-Hi (Nina) Kim SUNY College at Old Westbury Roger Howe (NAS), Yale University
Bernard Madison, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Sara Normington, Catlin Gabel School
James Roznowski Delta College
Patrick (Rick) Scott, New Mexico Higher Education Department Padmanabhan Seshaiyer, George Mason University
References
Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. Q. (2010). Organizing Schools for Improvement, Lessons from Chicago. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Campbell, D. (1976, 2011). Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 7(15), 3 – 43.
Darling-Hammond, L., Wei, R. C., Andree, A., Richardson, N., & Orphanos, S. (2009). Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A Status Report on Teacher Development in the United States and Abroad. Dallas, TX: National Staff Development Council and The School Redesign Network at Stanford University.
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627 – 668.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Facilitating Optimal Motivation and Psychological Well-Being Across Life’s Domains. Canadian Psychology, 49(1), 14 – 23.
Gagne, M., & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26, 33- – 362.
Mehta, J. (2013, April 12). Teachers: Will We Ever Learn? New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/opinion/teachers-will-we- ever-learn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
National Research Council. (2011). Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education, M. Hout and S.W. Elliott, Editors. Board on Testing and Assessment, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Ryan. R. M., & Brown. K. W. (2005). Legislating competence: The motivational impact of high stakes testing as an educational reform. In C. Dweck & A. E. Elliot (Eds.). Handbook of competence (pp. 354-374) New York: Guilford Press.
Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? New York: Teachers College Press.
Strauss, V. (2013, April 6). Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession… no longer exists.’ Washington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/wp/2013/04/06/teachers-resignation-letter-my-profession-no- longer-exists/
U.S. National Commission on Mathematics Instruction. (2010). The Teacher Development Continuum in the United States and China: Summary of a Workshop. Ana Ferreras and Steve Olson, Rapporteurs; Ester Sztein, Editor; National Research Council. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Please address correspondence to Sybilla Beckmann, sybilla@math.uga.edu or Department of Mathematics, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602.
Duncan is just the Hired Hand.
Hence the phrase, “Talk to the Hand”.
“Current education policy, including the Race to the Top law, and especially the practice of evaluating teachers by their students’ performance on high stakes assessments, will likely weaken, rather than strengthen, the teaching profession. Although the current policy may have intuitive appeal, a variety of evidence indicates it will not lead to sustained improvements in teaching and learning over the long term. In fact, it is likely to lead to unproductive teaching practices and poor outcomes, including “narrowing of curricula, teaching to the test, less creative teaching, more superficial and nontransferable learning, more controlling behavior at all levels of power, more withdrawal of effort from at-risk students, and increased dropout rates” (Ryan & Brown, 2005). We are especially concerned that current policy works against the professionalization of teaching, that it reinforces a situation in which teachers do not own or control their profession, that it does not set teaching on a vigorous path of development and sustainable improvement, and that it alienates and demoralizes teachers.”
Um, these things that they object to are deliberate and BY DESIGN.
Comments on the letter can also be posted at the Mathematics Teaching Community:
https://mathematicsteachingcommunity.math.uga.edu
The specific link to the letter is:
https://mathematicsteachingcommunity.math.uga.edu/index.php/617/secretary-policies-support-teaching-profession-accountability
While this article rings true… we cannot allow one of the major problems to be ignored… it really does not matter how much excellent teaching goes on… kids from poverty have to many issues that IMPACT adversely the learning taking place in the classroom. This is so important and I would like a letter of this magnitude to include this all-imporant information. Teachers need students who are ready to learn… they eat properly. have stable home lives, sanitary living conditions etc…
I see nothing about this movement which tells me it has anything to do with children. It does have to do with a future workforce, profit driven initiatives for selling technology, redefining cities and real estate in seperation of economic classes, owning education and redefining curriculum to meet a global competitive force and competition between countries, grabbing the golden ring of power and reshaping and retooling our fundamental goals and objectives as a society and global market force, even reshaping government and control. The children are nothing more then a bi-product and means to further those agendas driven by the wealthiest among us married to our industrial military complex, and government. Really no different then most of history around the world.
We have been living an amazing experiment which is not very old and is presently under attack. We can fight to preserve and make better that which we have prided ourselves on which gave room for equity and an opportunity for all and care for those that have been challenged by fate. These reforms and this movement driven largely by greed and lacking a very strong base for humanitarian need or causes, is cold and calculating and at its very core are the minds of those that measure everything. Worse! They are convinced that their way is the right and only way and will not yield to anyone, least of all a public they believe beneath them on every level.
This has been brilliantly conceived, designed, and implemented. It has been years in the making and the ink has been dry on the contract and the money in the bank for a very long time. Thousands of people are so deep into this and have told themselves it is absolutely necessary to destroy our education system and start over that they dare not back down. Of those, I do believe that they are
beginning to see this is ill conceived and maliciously contrived.
It is not about the people or the children, it is about a select group of people with no real plan for the rest. And there is where this is beginning to get interesting. This is how a revolution is born….in this case very unnecessarily!!! Both sides of the isle need to step down, ease off and regroup for the sake of the country and it’s people..our future.
You catch on quick.
What you say is more or less true, except for the part about global competitiveness. There is nothing about the cremative destruction of public education that will make any country more competitive, except in the sense of forcing down labor costs in a race to the bottom that benefits no one but the 1‰ at the top.
“This is how a revolution is born….in this case very unnecessarily!!! ”
In this case… it may be too late!!!
The neo-liberals are well entrenched!
We have a billionaire in NY that is willing to throw 100,000 into a school board election in Cali. Do you think they may spend some money to buy Politicians or Union Chiefs or Secretaries of Ed. ? The neo-liberal has realized that it is cheaper to buy someone in power than to pay for someone to run for a position with a possibility of losing.
Public Education is a loss. Teachers are still sitting in their classrooms telling themselves that if the Education Department is telling us to do this it must be right! Instead of challenging the “reforms” they try to conform.
It may take 10-15 years before enough people are starving that a revolution begins, which again may be too late!
Tim, it’s BOTH neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. The one thing they have in common is their lust for money.
“Teachers are still sitting in their classrooms telling themselves that if the Education Department is telling us to do this it must be right! Instead of challenging the “reforms” they try to conform.”
You must not be a teacher. Pretty much every teacher I know does not believe in what is coming down from the top (“trickle-down stupidity”), but are forced to accept it or find work elsewhere.
I’m in too deep now to publicly do anything about it. If I were near retirement, I’d be willing to chew glass and blow the whistle on these frauds.
I must say I agree. It compounds my already disgusted and worried mind. The children I respresent (I have been an advocate for the disabled for the last thirty five plus years) have already been kicked to the curb.
The mandates for so called protection are being trampled and the promise for equity more like an unfunded mandate full of promise and hype but not a way to implement adequately or at all. The money for the disabled has been downloaded to space just like all the rest of our tax dollars. I am convinced there is no gold under Fort Knox. We are living in the age of liars figure and figures lie. I call it the Midas Age…..hopefully I am just too tired right now to feel much in the way of positive…but there is tomorrow and with renewed energy I will remember to look for the revolution…I sense a disturbance in the force.
Reblogged this on The Indignant Teacher and commented:
What are the chances Arnie will respond?
Passing along fascinating reading material such as this is one of the reasons I wrote “Diane Ravitch is My Idol” today…:)
Today’s word processors have tools that help you keep from exceeding the reading level of your intended reader.
Tomorrow’s word processors will no doubt have a radio button just for Letters to Arne.
But while we wait for that, I think it’s a safe bet that the above letter is waaaaay above the Secretary’s reading level.
Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored? The only indication I get that the reformers even hear any criticism is that they change their narrative to fit the current focus of dissent. Hardly a speech is started without hearing how much they love teachers…as long as we don’t join a union, protest the lack of resources, or object to excessive high stakes testing. How insulting that they leave educators out of the discussion. We are treated like minor irritants.
Will Duncan take the time to read this letter from these very distinguished educators?
Will someone make sure CNN has an education tab on their website?
How can we make sure the people that need to hear…LISTEN!!!!?????
Using testing to evaluate teachers does truly alienate them.
Teachers become competitive and DO NOT WORK with other teachers.
They work for themselves….Can you blame them??
Will Duncan at least read the following paragraph before he continues his Testing Fiasco???
“We are especially concerned that current policy works against the professionalization of teaching, that it reinforces a situation in which teachers do not own or control their profession, that it does not set teaching on a vigorous path of development and sustainable improvement, and that it alienates and demoralizes teachers.”
“Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch
While I applaud the sentiment and aspirations of this letter I am saddened with the weak tea rhetoric and carefully qualified points in academic insider language. This is how academics exchange views at conferences. Arne Duncan is not an academic and he has yet to show any respect for or interest in anything academics have to say.
Offering a long list of research citations is great if your are publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise they indicate a false belief in the authority of the research, which the reform movement has largely ignored and dismissed all along. This high flown rhetoric doesn’t stand up well to Duncan’s canned talking points outside of academia.
A non-academic reading this might well ask: So what exactly are they saying? What exactly are they asking for? Where’s the beef?
Can we get a plain-spoken English translation, something like: You are destroying public schools and the teaching profession. Standardized testing is out of control, cruel, and useless in determining success of students and teachers. Your “Race to the Top” creates losers as well as winners. These programs have been tried over and over and always fail — why are you still promoting them?
If the purpose was to convince other academics then it serves that purpose well, a preaching to the choir moment. If the purpose is to impact and change wrong-headed policies then the audience should be much broader and the language much less academic and their tone much more forceful. That’s how the game is played today.
“Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch
“Yes.”
Leave it to the ivory tower types to look down their noses at us regular elementary and secondary folk as usual.
So Chris, if I’m reading you right, it’s basically talk to the people in charge as if they are total morons?
Wow Chris, I just had an epiphany. I think you are on to something. We have been going about this all wrong. We are definitely guilty of using high brow “academic” language in our dissertations when addressing all that is wrong with these Deform agendas. I love your rephrasing! It goes right to the point. No fluffy language needed. It is exactly what parents and public need to hear. I think you are on to something here.
I am curios about people’s reaction to this part of the letter:
Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.
By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance. (Mehta, 2013)
Do you agree?
As I spouse of a teacher, a school board member, and a father of two (mostly) public school graduates, I have to agree—at least as a broad characterization of teaching today. Too many teachers often seem to lack a real mastery of their subjects, especially in areas like science, math, and history at the junior-high and high-school levels. Too many teachers approach their work like technicians, worrying about applying the latest fad and not thinking about their subject and its place in the curriculum in a broader sense.
But this criticism is just the symptom, the apparent result of the system we created for public education. I urge everyone concerned with public education to read about the history of education, reform, and American culture. I don’t see how we can even begin to address our educational problems without understanding how we came to this point. Our current efforts have been largely a waste of time and money, because we keep looking for some technical fix—either by using machines, like computers, or by adopting methodologies, like phonics or sight reading—to “fix” some crisis without even really understanding what an “education” is and how education relates to raising our children.
If you read about our educational and cultural history, I think you’ll find two major themes: (1) Americans hate intellectuals and intellectual pursuits; and (2) Americans cling to the belief that the most important things in life are money and possessions (read: money). Again, this is a broad brush—I know quite well there are many Americans who do not have these sorts of misguided passions—but nevertheless, these are the dominant themes in our culture since about 1800. Just read Tocqueville, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Veblen, etc.
The result of these two strong currents is that we have created a school system that mimics business operations, when the first businessmen cum reformers took over with the help of the (then) new graduate schools of education around 1900. Principals became prized for their management experience even more than teaching prowess; every nickel and dime of the school budget is pinched to avoid “waste”, as if the school existed to turn a profit; teachers were treated like line workers; students were products. Since then, business hacks and charlatans have bombard us with new ways for teachers to “sell” students on subjects, often implying there is a painless way for students to learn if only the “right” person using the “best” method were running the class. Parents and sycophantic politicians want the school to provide “job-ready” graduates, as if they are widgets coming off an assembly line. Just compare the recommended curriculum of the Committee of Ten in 1892, which was abandoned, with that of the life adjustment movement that flourished in the ’30s and ’40s and still is felt today.
And the students respond accordingly, with a mix of ennui and terror. The drone of the uninspired teachers, the frequent shifting of subjects and materials with each new fad, the pressure on the teachers from administrators who have no expertise to offer as an example of professional teaching, creates a petri dish of mediocrity.
And we can’t forget how we’ve turned our schools into makeshift medical and psychological clinics, and our teachers into social workers. We’ve steadily demanded that our schools fix the problems of childhood poverty, neglect, and abuse as well as provide an education. We also demand that our schools graduate “100%” of our children, no matter how severe their physical and mental disabilities. Our public schools also serve as a dumping ground for the failures of our economic and public policies.
Now add the constant assault from TV, radio, computer marketing; the images of easy wealth and constant partying; the relentless attacks on the legitimacy of our public institutions and intellectuals. The never ending drumbeat that all that counts is what you have, not who you are or what you do. The result isn’t surprising—the schools become warehouses; many of the kids tune out other than for sports or other non-academic activity.
Why then would anyone be surprised that we do so poorly? But transforming (or returning) teaching into a profession will only work when we create conditions that favor professionalism. No doctor or lawyer would ever agree to work under the sorts of conditions we impose on our teachers. Doctors and lawyers can fire clients who refuse to do their part in getting services; we hold teachers and schools accountable for everything, without exception. Doctors and lawyers are paid well for their services based on the commitment they’ve shown to their fields and maintaining a vision of quality. We refuse to pay people to bring similar attitudes to teaching.
To fix these problems, we have to start changing our culture. We can’t just keep waiving a stick like a magic want and claim “professionalism” will fix everything. Indeed, that will only spur new books, videos, and consulting gigs.
David, brilliant post. Spot on.
Nice letter which will have no impact. As mentioned above, following the money tells us the “reformers” are in this for the bucks, and they will not go quietly into the night.
It will take national boycotts and much more to end the corporate influence in public education (and every other part of American life, too). We need a civil rights person like MLK to awaken the populace, lead marches, make speeches, get people involved. What an irony, that our Democratic president, who could be a national leader on this issue, sides with the corporatists. Doesn’t bode well for America, friends.
I applaud the authors of this letter and their attempt to inform the administration of these very important points and examples of what has worked in places like Finland.
What irks me is that there is no mention of any of thousands of concrete examples of those very same practices here in the United States.
Not to mention them is to allow the naysayers to continue to say how bad we are when in fact there is some damn fine teaching going on in many communities. To improve education in the US (and there are too many places where it needs improvement) we need to look to collaborate amongst ourselves and not look for “leadership” from non educators.
I wrote the Times op-ed quoted above. In retrospect, I wish I had said more about all of the good work that is going on out there. My point was that we don’t have a system set up to support good teaching, which is true. But that isn’t to deny that there are many, many, really skilled teachers out there, and the kind of system we need would take them as our greatest asset — they would be the master teachers, develop materials, and train new teachers.
Jal, thanks for writing. This is a good opportunity to say that I over-reacted to your opinion piece in the Times. I thought you were too quick to blame teachers and not to recognize how many truly excellent, dedicated teachers there are in our schools today, even in schools with low test scores, now working under unwarranted criticism. We have in our society an absurd amount of teacher-bashing, and it has become a sport for the privileged and for legislators to see how much they can punish teachers. It felt–at least as you started your essay–that you were piling on. We do need to raise the bar for those who enter the profession and then, as the letter cited recommends, let teachers have the support, the collaboration, and the resources they need.
Diane,
This little conversation between you and Jal Mehta is extremely vital to the larger conversation. When we view things systemically, as we often should, we forget the individual teachers who rise above it all to succeed with children of all classes. We do not stress how to make what they do systemic by making what they do public.
It is one reason I wrote the book I hope will soon be published, to share some of what I learned great teachers do from great teachers with not just people on these blogs, but with parents and other educators who need to know.
Yet when we stress the individual and anecdotal, as all good academics understand, we fail to fix the larger systems. Thus what we must find a way to accomplish is the bringing together of the excellence of individuals so that it becomes systemic. That is another reason I wrote the book.
Any ideas as to how to do that?
Good letter to help us in public advocacy, thank you to the scholars who penned it. We need all kinds of discourses to build a coalition for the public sector. Academics who command research knowledge of learning, teaching, teacher prep, child dev, etc., are our welcome allies b/c they enable us to seize the moral and intellectual high ground. They articulate ethically and intellectually why the current and long-term policies of authorities in govt and business comprise hostile assaults on the children, teachers, families, and communities who are the majority of our nation. We need scholars like Diane and the letter-writers to keep Duncan, Obama, Rahm, Kopp, Rhee, Broad, Koch, etc., on the defensive, back-pedaling to explain their rampage, their abysmal record and devious distortions and outright plunder of our precious public assets. We also need other discourses which plainly rally folks from the bottom up, school by school, community by community, to consolidate a force that turns the tide against the billionaires. Let’s welcome all voices who contribute to the monumental task ahead.
The way you improve the teaching profession is that you recognize the problem in education is not with teachers. The problem is with the structure of public education, which is a top-down, virtually dictatorial, approach that heavily favors administrators over teachers. It is unlike anything else in this economy, this extreme power imbalance between principals especially and teachers. This stems from the simple fact principals are not closely supervised by superiors and therefore they can do virtually anything they want to teachers and have the power to blackball teachers from ever teaching again anywhere in the country. Principals have the unilateral power to destroy teachers’ careers, and they can do it very easily despite whether or not that teacher has a “right” to continuing employment, and, when they mess up, which is often, are not fired outright but are merely moved around, demoted, or even promoted to central office positions. Many principals have collective bargaining rights, which should NEVER be allowed for supervisory personnel, and this all but guarantees lifetime employment, unlike teachers.
“Reformers” will never tackle this very real problem with the poor quality of the majority if not vast majority of principals because many of these reformers are made of the same sociopathic cloth.
I am currently reading “What’s Worth Learning” by Marion Brady. In it, he explains how our school curriculum came into being. Essentially, a group of college officials got together over a weekend and decided what would make it easier for them when accepting students. That was in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Society has changed so much, but we still follow that model. It really is time for change, but not the way the reformers are headed. Integrated curricula, technology, creative thought and problem-solving, those are important to the 21st century, in my opinion.