The teachers in Brazil said they would not give tests that did nothing to help their students.
They would not give tests that harm their students by giving them demeaning labels.
Testing is not teaching.
They said they are professionals and cannot be driven to do things that are wrong and violate their professional ethics.
Remember the Hippocratic Oath: “At least do no harm.”
Teachers must do the same as a minimum, to protect the children who are in their care.
And now we step into a debate about charter schools and public schools:
Pulling public funds together to run public systems, such as public schools, is what communities do. By taking out the “per pupil” funds for the children going elsewhere, the community suffers.
The public school IS the community’s for better or worse. Therefore, the community MUST take pains to make it the best it can be in order to provide for community success. I think working to improve the public school is what some in Cynthia’s community are trying to do. However, it appears that the wants of this faction of the community are falling on deaf ears. This is where the community must take the fight to the next level.
Here we are getting into very subjective territory of “wants.” If the school is not in violation of its “requirements,” then it appears that Cynthia and friends want something that the state does not require. The high turnover rate of teachers concerns me a great deal—and I think the community members have a real case to bring to a higher level of the education system with evidence of the school’s trouble with staffing.
However, there has been no real discussion of just what was wanted beyond a vague list. I am interested in knowing what courses are wanted at this school that the school does not already provide? Where is the evidence that sports have a higher priority over academics? So far, all that’s been offered is philosophical conjecture based on a list of perceptions.
This is not to say that the members of the community that have been trying to improve the school have not outlined their wants in detail to the local school board. I feel that the details of their requests and the evidence to support such are germane to the discussion we are having here. So far, very little concrete information has been offered here with the exception of “sports are king and courses are lacking.”
Cynthia claims that her public school is serving her needs but not her wants, and she wants something better. The endeavor of seeking something better is commendable and I encourage her to pursue it, but it’s important to examine the purposes and support systems that exist for citizens in society. In order to do this, I will take this argument one step further in terms of “citizen wants.”
The cost of living in my community and state is through the roof, but there are advantages to living here. I take the fact that I’ll never be able to afford my own free-standing home and will be living in a tiny condo for quite some time as the price for living here and enjoying some of the other advantages of this community. Believe me, I want to live in a McMansion like so many people do here, yet I want to pay next to nothing in taxes like so many people WANT here, as well. However, I cannot get what I want because of the cost of real estate where I live.
Now, if my community is not serving my needs and wants, I need to go to a community where my funds will serve my needs and wants…OR…I need to contribute to this community to make it better. I have chosen the latter. I have no children as of yet, but I have chosen to stay here and invest in my community and its infrastructure. And yes, this means, I have chosen to invest in the public schools because public schools are part of the commons that both support and are supported by all citizens.
I have attempted to establish that the community is supported by the citizens and its systems support the citizens in return. Now let’s move to the concept of “per pupil” funding.
“Per pupil” funding (in the charter school argument) is often treated like a tax break for parents to educate their children.
This is wrong.
Public education serves the community, therefore “per pupil” funds belong to the community, not the individual parents.
If you do not believe that the “per pupil” funding belongs to the community, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment:
Since I have no children, should my tax money go wherever I want it to go to meet MY needs? No. Why not? Why should MY tax money go to pay for Cynthia’s children to be educated? I didn’t ask her to have all those kids, and I certainly did not ask to have to pay for them to go to school. However, I do pay into their education because their education supports the community.
“Per pupil” funding belongs to all of us, not just to the people who have kids. If you are giving parents a choice of what to do with the “per pupil” funding, shouldn’t I have a say as a taxpayer, too? WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME, the childless taxpayer who is paying so that YOUR children could go to school?
See? The “me” argument is not conducive to a strong society. I am glad that I contribute to my society—an educated society benefits everyone in the community. If you don’t think so, I hope you lock your doors at night because the people who grow up on the street because they had no access to strong public education will do whatever it takes to get by, even if that means stealing from you.
I support the infrastructure in my community which means I pay for the children in my community to get educated because I am a citizen in my community and public education serves my community. Therefore, it serves me, kids or no kids.
If your subjective needs are not reflected in your community, I would say, move elsewhere and put your public funds to good use in that community. But if you stay in your current community, do not take your public funds out of the system that supports your community. We cannot always have what we want in life—there is no perfect system that caters to individual wants.
By running to a charter with “per pupil” funds in hand, these community members abandon the children left behind in the public schools. Abandoning the public school is abandoning the community children whose parents do not have the wherewithal to send their children elsewhere.
In Cynthia’s case, she feels that the public schools are “adequate” but apparently not good enough for her children. If her children are worthy of so much more, why doesn’t she continue the fight to get more for all of the community’s children since they are all in this together?
The original idea behind charter schools was to complement and improve the public schools they serve by offering alternative learning situations within the public construct—experiments or “think tanks” of a sort—to help serve the public better.
Today’s charter schools rob the public schools of the students whose parents care while leaving behind the students who desperately need someone to advocate for them. If you think the community is NOT responsible for all children, think again.
This isn’t about “what’s in it for me”—it’s about “what’s in it for the community as a whole.” The “me” attitude is what’s inherently damaging to the public and what drives much of the rhetoric in the charter school debate. You’ll find this “me” attitude permeating many other public issues. I believe that this is the philosophical crux of our political problems as a country.
Charter schools are being misused as institutions that compete AGAINST the public schools—why else would Cynthia be considering one? The public in each state needs to be very wary of charter school laws and how the charters are funded, run, and implemented.
Each state has its own version of the charter schools law, but here is an example of how charter schools in one state divide the community.
I found a blip about Wisconsin public charter schools on the web (see below) that states that these schools are open to the public…BUT they have waiting lists due to space limitations.
Why? If Wisconsin’s charters are open the public, why are there space limitations? How can you call public charter schools “public” when they limit space and then enrollment is limited as a result?
Is that serving “the public?” Not at all. This limitation is unacceptable and will seek to divide a community into those with the luck of getting in to a charter and those without the luck that have to stay behind in what’s left of the community’s public school. Granted this is just an example of charter schools in one state, but it gives you food for thought.
http://www.wicharterschools.org/faqs.html
If magnet schools are part and parcel of the public school system, they are operating with public funds and they are overseen by the public entities in charge of them.
Charters do not have the same regulations as the public schools yet they are siphoning “per pupil” funding that belongs to the public away FROM the public under the guise of a “public” institution with limitations in serving the public. This is dangerous to the public, no matter how you slice it.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and billionaire Bill Gates and gadfly Michelle Rhee wring their hands over American students’ test scores. They look enviously at Shanghai and wonder why we can’t be like them.
But the Los Angeles Times had a story explaining that Chinese educators have mixed feelings about those high test scores. They know that they are squeezing the joy of learning out of their schools and pressuring children to grind, grind, grind. They worry that their students lack creativity and imagination.
Before we follow China’s example, we should think about the qualities that we value. Do we want good test-takers or do we want creativity and innovation? Do we want obedient and compliant workers or do we want divergent thinkers? Which will serve us better in the decades ahead?
A columnist in Pennsylvania reports that the billionaire Koch brothers are disappointed by Governor Tom Corbett.
They feel that he didn’t push his voucher bill hard enough, so they are planning a major advertising campaign to put pressure on legislators.
There is no reason for them to pay attention to the unimpressive results of twenty-one years of vouchers in Milwaukee, where kids in voucher schools got no better test scores than their peers in public schools. And no reason to pay attention to vouchers in D.C., where there were no test scores gains in either math or reading.
What matters most is to break the public education system.
I like to introduce readers of this blog to people I respect, to scholars and writers who are thoughtful and insightful.
Here is someone you should read.
Aaron Pallas of Teachers College, Columbia University, is one of the wisest, most perceptive observers of trends in American education.
He just finished a study of why middle-school teachers leave. It came out around the same time as The New Teachers Project report on “the Irreplaceables.” He compares the two studies here.
Where the two diverge is that the TNTP report thinks it is relatively easy to identify the best and the worst teachers in a year. You give a bonus to the former and get rid of the latter. As Pallas puts it, we can’t fire our way to excellence. (It was Linda Darling-Hammond who once said, memorably, in response to economist Eric Hanushek, who claims that we will see vast improvements if we fire 5-10% of teachers whose students get low scores: “We can’t fire our way to Finland.”)
Pallas does not agree. He writes:
I’m less sanguine than the TNTP authors about the ability to easily identify those teachers who are “irreplaceable” and those who are—what? Expendable? Disposable? Unsalvageable? Superfluous? The terms are so jarring that it’s hard to know how a principal might treat such a teacher with compassion and respect. Given what we know about the instability from year to year in teachers’ value-added scores as well as the learning curve of novice professionals, a reliance on a rigid classification of teachers into these two boxes seems unrealistic.
I don’t doubt that there are some individuals who are natural-born teachers, just as Michael Phelps has shown himself to be a natural-born swimmer, and perhaps their talents are revealed on Day One. But there are thousands and thousands of children and youth around the world who are competitive swimmers, and none of them is Michael Phelps. For these children and youth, as for most teachers—and there are approximately 3.5 million full-time K-12 teachers in the United States—technique and practice can yield great improvements in performance. This is perhaps even more true in teaching than in swimming, as there are many goals to which teachers must attend simultaneously, rather than just swimming fast to touch the wall as soon as possible.
Indiana has been in the forefront of pushing school choice and ignoring the needs of its public schools.
Indiana was once known nationally for its great public schools, but now it is known as a national leader in vouchers and charters and high-stakes testing.
The news from Fort Wayne, the second largest city in the state, does not bode well for the rightwing reform agenda of Governor Mitch Daniels (soon to be president of Purdue) and his superintendent Tony Bennett.
When the state scores were released, Fort Wayne’s three charter schools were among the lowest performing schools in the state. Two of them are managed by the for-profit Imagine corporation. One of the three saw its scores go up; one went down; the other was flat. All had huge achievement gaps between black and white students.
But, say the reformers, these schools are a silver bullet. They are fonts of innovation. They will save our youth.
Do you believe they still say these things? When will they admit that they don’t have any answers, just hype and spin? How many more years will we endure their false claims?
One reader–obviously not a teacher–has expressed his disdain for teachers and public schools repeatedly. Apparently he thinks teachers don’t work hard enough. Since public schools have not ended poverty, he asks why we should bother to pay for them. This is a site for discussion, and several readers have responded. This teacher explains here what he does.
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Matt Mandel is a National Board Certified Teacher in the Philadelphia public schools.
He has figured out reform.
He explains it here for those who were puzzled.
The most important thing you need to know is this:
“It’s not about the children.”
The reason reformers keep saying that it is “for the children,” is because it’s not.
They say that to confuse people.
Read Matt Mandel and learn what it would look like if it were really “about the children.”
This New York City teacher has been beaten down and out by ten years of reform that ended in more segregation and demoralizing actions by those at the top.
My advice to you: Don’t leave. There will be a new mayor. Maybe it will be someone who recognizes the damage of the past decade of endless and pointless reform and bragging. Stay and fight for the kids. Don’t let them push you out. Your students need you!
| After 10 years of teaching in NYC public schools, I’m quitting because I’ve become discouraged and can no longer deal with the upheavals that the so-called “reforms” bring to the everyday task of teaching. I’ve literally shed blood, sweat, and tears during these years of teaching at a school where the majority of the students live below the poverty line. Poverty Is the problem! NYC schools are segregated. How shameful that this is the case in this great city, and how unfair to students, teachers, and administrators. |
My article with the title above appeared on CNN.com.
They heard from you. They invited me to respond and this is the article I wrote.
I think that if we all speak up again and again and again and again, and tell the truth, supported by facts and experience, our voices will be heard.
Write letters to the editor, comment on blogs, speak up at public meetings, do what you can, when you can, where you can.
Your actions will encourage others.
And that is how a movement is built.
From the ground up.
Not with billions of dollars, but with millions of willing hands and hearts and minds.
Diane Ravitch's blog 