A teacher wrote this comment about school “reform”:
One thing I loved about teaching when I first began, 24 years ago, was the degree of inspiration and creativity I could bring to my lesson plans. It made teaching and being a teacher exciting for me. My excitement was the motivation, it was infectious to the students and learning was the natural by-product.
Now, everything is highly structured and scripted. We are told the objectives, and given a highly methodical method of lesson design and expected to do it, regardless of whether it makes sense with the content. Talk about boring “cookie-cutter”!
This is classic organizational theory (a business model) where everyone is seen as a machine that can be tweaked to increase production. We are not seen as experts or professionals, just workers who couldn’t tie our own shoes without the supervisor’s policy detailing the method.
I for one wish this corporate-management/student-consumer mentality would leave the public school system. Teachers are not like assembly-line workers putting together a widgit, and learning is not a product that can be pre-packaged and sold at market.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The term teacher does not describe me anymore. I am neither an educator nor a teacher.
I am a test proctor, an uncreative follower of instructions.
In truth I am an instructional robot and so are all of my colleagues.
http://www.examiner.com/article/i-am-an-lausd-teacher-and-i
” and learning is not a product that can be pre-packaged and sold at market.”
Love that last line – I may post it on my wall.
Many teachers would agree. Most are not told the “methiod” but only told to use “best practices.” All of them, all of the time, we are to assume. Love your posts. Thank you. My father asked, “when can you retire?” He wanted us to do what interested us, but now in this super competitive world of teaching where tenure is gone in most states and successful teachers are not asked, “what do you do to help your students learn?” Instead we are often belittled at every turn and now only newly hired teachers are sent to trainings on the newest technology and even P,E. teachers have committed infractions for not taking students to the computer lab (which is now deemed the only learning tool worth using). I have taught “regular” education for over 20 years. In Illinois a new law was passed saying attendance can be used in teacher evaluation. Districts are interpreting the law in many different ways. I have over 175 sick days saved but taking any will give me less points on my evaluation, therefore I, or the teacher who gets regular cancer screenings, can be fired because we have less points on our evaluations than newer teachers. Please keep blogging, writing and inspiring. I’ve been at the computer for over 3 hours looking for resources for teaching in the next few weeks. My family is frustrated that I spend 10-14 hrs. at work many days and usually work every Sunday. Creativity is not gone but administration wanting to recognize it for its value may be.
Thank you, Kathleen
Kathleen, you don’t want to hear what I’m going to say, but it’s time to quit. Just like some people cling to a political party when the political party has left them, teaching- actual teaching- has left us.
I have wanted to be a teacher since I was 9 years old. After 23 years, I shrugged last year. Unfortunately, education has to implode so people like you and I can go back to rebuild.
Why did you get into teaching? Is that happening anymore or do you find yourself constantly worn out and fighting the system that makes absolutely no sense. I was a rogue teacher and very proud of it. My fight is gone.
I’m looking into starting a business as a Homeschool Consultant. That way I can help people who really want to learn and teach others to help their own kids learn. Find out what else you want to do. It’s over.
Best of luck,
Lisa
It’s often claimed that the reform movement is driven by business principles, that it is an attempt to apply business principles like “you get what you measure” to education. But management theory teaches us that when you decrease worker autonomy, you decrease worker initiative, innovation, and morale, AND you lose the concerned eyes and ears on the ground capable of doing REAL continuous improvement.
There are many other lessons from management theory and contemporary best practices in business that are being completely violated by the “reform”/deform movement. A few of these contemporary principles:
striving for nonheirarchical, flat organization (modern management theory);
testing before adoption or implementation (acceptance testing)
getting stakeholder buy-in at every stage during the implementation of major changes (change management);
telling people what to accomplish in a very broad way but not micromanaging the minor milestones or the how (sociotechnical systems design theory);
making continuous improvement a line phenomenon involving worker empowerment (quality control and lean production systems in Japanese industry, with their worker councils, and Japanese elementary and secondary education, with its weekly “lesson study”).
The folks pushing these reforms are from the top-down, authoritarian school of management associated with the worst excesses of the 19th century versions of capitalism that had thinking people expecting that the whole system was going to blow up–the sort of management that led Marx to write, eloquently, powerfully, persuasively, about the forms of alienation being engendered by top-down, autocratic systems–alienation of workers from working of workers from workers, of workers from themselves, of workers from the products of their labor. See “Estranged Labor” from Marx’s “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844”:
Click to access Economic%20and%20Philosophical%20Manuscripts%20of%201844.pdf
And no, I am not a Marxist. However, about alienation and its dangers Marx was spot on.
Nice! Thank you.
Here’s an article by Steven Denning that outlines ten current shifts in management thinking that the “education reformers” haven’t caught up with yet: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/08/05/the-golden-age-of-management/
Apparently, the reformers and their corporate allies don’t want to catch up with these ideas, because so far they’re succeeding with the old demoralizing and unproductive rules. These people come across as old-fashioned autocrats and would-be monopolists, even as they promote individual autonomy and “choice.”
Some of the management books listed in the article might not be applicable to schools. Still, the suggested fundamentals for a big paradigm shift in management do make sense. (There are some problems with the corporate models offered–Amazon, for example, is crowding out independent bookstores by means of unfair tax advantages and stressful, low-wage warehouse jobs.) But in general the new management principles are a welcome alternative to the top-down, punitive methods used by the reformers.
As for the new creative economy the author talks about, we don’t have to believe that the main purpose of creativity is to improve the economy. It’s obvious, though, that stifling creativity through standardization and over-testing is going to hurt our economy in the long run. It’ll make us less competitive, not more.
It’s back to the future, Robert.
Management “theorists” may comfort themselves and their clients by coming up with soothing buzzwords to get the workers bees thinking that they are part of the team, but it’s a fraud: the modern workplace is at least as authoritarian – certainly more so than forty years ago, thanks to de-unionization and the digitalization of the work place –
as the “factory model,” which never went away, and has been replaced by the “cubicle model.”
The claim that modern management has discarded the authoritarian model has as much validity as a part-time, benefit-less Walmart employee being an actual “Associate.” Does anyone think that upper management and the Board of Walmart actually consider their employees “associates?”
As with Walmart employees, now increasingly so with teachers.
Don’t fall for their BS: “labor discipline,” characterized by intimidation, insecurity, lack of autonomy, electronic surveillance and hyper-oversight by management, is the rule in the American workplace, and it is now invading the schools.
The language has changed, but Taylorism and its progeny are still with us.
Sure, at the mindless PD sessions they make us attend for the Common Corporate Standards and test-based evaluation systems, they seek our “input” and “participation,” but that’s a sham, since the premises and parameters of discussion have been established ahead of time, and these worthless exercises are intended for nothing more than getting the worker-bees to buy-in to the new administrative panaceas, not to hear what they have to say, let alone revise decisions made in the paneled boardrooms of the Gates and Broad Foundations.
Here’s the problem! The MAJOR PARADIGM in this country for everything and I mean everything is far too centered in the MILITARISTIC, CAPITALISTISTIC, TECHNOCRATIC approach! HOW LIMITIMG a perspective this is. This perspective is NOT necessarily shared by indigenous people…who are, of coursed, dissed and used FOR PROFIT. They are not of the dominant white culture.
Egads…pundits dot understand that learning involves human touch – love, compassion, tenderness, joy, surprises, and other qualities that cannot be delivered by a robot. Egads…we soon be the BORG.
Just props. Here is one way to enforce the Common Core. Not to be done during testing please.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/nationwide-post-sandy-hook-terror-drills/5346612
On a related topic last week I made the following comment —
Until recently I probably took it for granted that monetary greed and lust for power were motives enough to explain the campaigns of corporate raiders and their political lackeys, but having made that remark I began to think more carefully about the possibility of other, more deep-lying, psychological factors.
Today I woke with the realization that the theme of child abuse — if you think that’s hyperbole then you haven’t been paying attention — gives us a clue.
My guess is that we are dealing with people who were robbed of their childhood in some significant way, and that this hole in their souls is the source of their overriding compulsion to rob other children of theirs.
It is time to see this pathology for what it is, and well past time to put a stop to it.
I think you are right about this, Jon, that many of these people–these folks with their across-the-board, simplistic, technocratic “solutions” are acting out pathologies–rigidity, narrowness, lack of empathy, lack of emotional range, inclinations toward violence, fear, etc., resulting from overly authoritarian upbringings and inadequate socialization.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/kolumnister/janguillou/article17349001.ab
Diane, this is a piece from Sweden. They privatized public schools the same way the US is now doing (they’re about a decade ahead of us in privatization) and the quality of ALL schools in Sweden has dramatically declined.
They were ranked 4th internationally prior to privatization. They are now 15th.
“In our neighboring country, Finland has maintained approximately the same school system that we had on the equivalent Swedish school time, in addition, all profits geschäft prohibited, as indeed in the other neighboring countries Norway and Denmark. And, which should get some privatization zealots think, the Finnish school results are now far superior to the Swedish. In Finland, hence the issue closest school depoliticized. In Finnish elections debated never taken for granted that all Finns seem to agree, that there should be an equally good school in Tornio in Tammisaari.
Marketing and privatization proponents in Sweden claimed that free competition would drive improvements in school performance in the country. They had thoroughly wrong.
There is no room for ideological discussion, it is just so.The privatization of the school system – 80 percent of schools in friskolesvängen run by companies that make profit on savings – then went to hell.
The simple conclusion would then be to learn from this failed experiment and return to the democratic, profit-free school. Not even the most die-hard supporters of increased inequality should be able to argue otherwise.An estimated 80 percent of the Swedish people agree.The problem is all these politicians with his head deep in the sand.”
I wonder if Americans who support public education could get some evidence/info from educators in Sweden, where they privatized public schools under “reform” and now are seeing catastrophic results.
Maybe reformers need to take a field trip.
Interesting for a computer translated document, eh!
Here’s more on Sweden’s experience with “reform”
“But Swedish schools today are far removed from the system that was in use even a few decades ago. In 2000 ended Swedish schoolchildren on a shared fourth place compared with the world. At the last survey in 2009, we had fallen to 15th place. In mathematics, Sweden has plummeted from a peak, to location 20 of the 43 OECD countries. All such comparisons give similar results. It goes downhill fast.
The big change is of course the privatization wave.”
Destroyed in a decade by privatization. Wow.
I always think teaching and learning are a lot like loving…totally unique to each individual at any given moment. You need to love and be loved differently according to personality, interest and current life situation.
Maybe the reformers can come up with a manual to sell us that we can all follow without deviation with the outcome being a perfect loving relationship with everyone. And, of course, assessments to make sure we’ve met the standards.
Well said, Amy!
Yes, Amy, a very perceptive comment.
As for the so-called reformers, what’s love got to do with it?
I think we know: love of money and power, and little else.
It is so disheartening to think the “human factor” is removed as value added models and SLO’s replace it. Just wrote a book about it- “Secrets From the Middle: Making Who You Are Work For You.” There is no substitute for the inspiring teacher!!!! You cannot teach kids if you can’t reach them!
My system adopted the new Common Core Pearson/Scott Foresman Reading Street series this year, so of course we had to do training with a Pearson presenter. My only take of the 2 hours presentation was that I guess Pearson figures that as long as he has a SMART Board or can read the teacher’ edition, even a caveman can teach reading and the students are still guaranteed to be college and career ready! Of course, all the caveman would be doing is following Pearson’s scripted lessons….not really teaching!!!!
Just give me a bunch of books at different levels and my first graders will be reading in no time! I HATE basal readers!
A bit off topic, but thought some would be interested in the thoughts of this former (very short time) teacher.
“I Taught At the Worst School in Tx”
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school_in_texas/
Teacherbots are the solution!
http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2012/08/teacherbots-tomorrows-solution-today.html
I thought I was reading my own words. I made it 23 years before shrugging this year. I’m still friends with many teachers and every time I grow whimsical about leaving education, they graciously slap me back to reality. It’s sad and it’s got to implode…soon.