A terrific interview in USA Today with John Owen, who patiently explains what is really happening today in education.
A sample:
Q: You call yourself a “bad” teacher. When did this idea first occur to you?
A: I was a bad teacher because I was a teacher. Today, “bad teacher” and “teacher” have become almost interchangeable. Listen to billionaire “visionaries” such as Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, as well as “experts” such as Michelle Rhee. The problem with our schools is bad teachers. Almost immediately, I realized that I was destined to be a bad teacher because many of my eight- and ninth-graders had learning problems, and I couldn’t fix them in the 46 minutes I had them each day. Many of my students had behavior problems, and I couldn’t fix those problems either. And I wasn’t very good at masking these problems, so my “scholars” didn’t look like they were learning when they weren’t learning. I also couldn’t keep them from getting excited and boisterous when they were learning.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Although we all are by the edudeformers definition “bad” I would hope all would earn the moniker “difficult” teacher as used by Mr. Teachbad!
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From the linked article: “After more than 30 years as a writer, editor and publishing executive, John Owens left a high-paying job as senior vice president and editorial director of Hachette Filipacchi Media to “give back” to the U.S. public schools he’d attended as a kid. He landed a teaching job at a high school in the Bronx — he calls it “Latinate High School” — that was a model of school reform, but what he found was reform “gone terribly wrong.”
Owens lasted only about five months, but in the process he began writing about his experience.”
Wow, he only lasted 5 months. He brings up the huge problem of maintaining discipline when you have a high percentage of kids who are disruptive for a whole variety of reasons.
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John Owens also highlights how underfunded his school was and how obsessed it was with testing and accumulating data points to the exclusion of almost everything else. His school had no art program, no recess and the music department consisted of a boom box and bunch of drums and gourds covered with beads, kept in a basement closet next to the teachers’ restroom. There was no school library. They had to depend on charity to have such “frills.” Why don’t some of these billionaires chip in some of their wealth for the so called frills. Unfortunately, the billionaires are too busy undermining the real public schools by setting up their own charter schools: Carl Icahn Charter Schools, Jeff Bezos Charter Schools, Paul Tudor Jones Charter Schools, etc., ad nauseam. http://www.icahncharterschool1.org/
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You figured out what they don’t want you to think about, John. You can’t do it. I taught in a charter school for a year too thinking it had to be better than public school- it’s not. I was told I was a “rogue educator” and wasn’t needed for next year. Best thing that ever happened to me. I think the guy was shocked that I was flattered by his term.
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Great interview, but what a horrible headline “New Memoir Shines Harsh Light on U.S. Schools.” No- it sheds a harsh light on US education reform policy!
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yes, exactly. most people will see the headline and immediately think
oh god! more bad public school news!
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“my school had no art program, no recess and our music department consisted of a boom box and bunch of drums and gourds covered with beads, kept in a basement closet next to the teachers’ restroom. We didn’t have a school library. The only way to get one was to receive a grant from a private foundation. We have gotten to the point where we rely on charity to fund what most of us would consider the essentials of public education. That signals a far bigger problem than any test scores.”
This is a great point, and one that gets far too little scrutiny. What are we telling these kids when we make the dependent on the whims of wealthy philanthropists? Why are they always begging for “grants”?
It’s a weird, passive, anti-democratic way to “fund” public schools. I just shudder when I see politicians like Rahm Emanual surrounded by kids and the announcement of the latest generous donation from a corporate sponsor. We’re using kids as PR props for wealthy people and business interests. We should stop doing it. It takes something from them. They deserve a gym class not based on how well they can lobby a wealthy donor but because they’re citizens and we have a free universal public education system. They’re not the objects of charity. They shouldn’t have to “qualify” for an art room.
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“We’re using kids as PR props for wealthy people and business interests.”
This is so true and it’s disgusting.
Your observation reminded me of an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago. It was written by Warren Buffet’s son, Peter Buffet. In it, he describes a phenomenon that he calls Philanthropic Colonialism. He states,
“People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms”….
“Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left”.
Our kids deserve better than to be the PR props or the guilt washing station for the wealthy. I will attempt to provide a link to the editorial.
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Thank you yet again, Diane, for your leadership and support. And thank you, everyone who shares stories so that the public can understand what we are doing to our students and our teachers. Just to clarify–it was my intention to retire from teaching. It was NOT my intention to retire after less than a year! Hats off to every teacher who survives each day, because you are making a huge difference for our kids.
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Great article. It shows the insanity of the reform movement. I couldn’t believe the part about bulletin boards tied to evaluations. Totally insane. What amazes me is that the news media has failed to report how minority children are actually receiving a narrower and weaker curriculum. The charters barely have any of the arts-virtually no music. It is a total rip-off but nary a word is written about it all. We only read about bad teachers and the need for evaluations tied to test scores.
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Thank you, Mr. Owens. All true and accurate. A great assessment of what has happened and will be repeated as we go into a new school year. I wonder if this is what you found in print media, no! all media, today? Are there parallels which coincide with the mind manipulation of society by bringing the social systems into compliance with bogus standards and making everything look official or meaningful? Are we talking standards or social engineering gone mad for the explicit purpose of a society of perfect obedience driven by fear without reason and brought to their knees by desperate survival concerns like primary imperatives such as eating, shelter (life enhancing requirements) and stripping away dignity, curiosity, creativity (no need to go on)? Sound conspiratorial, maybe, but it has already happened!
Children are the crop to be cultivated and developed for the obedient future. With exception to the inheritors or the children of the unseen who would be emperors. But the emperors are wearing no clothes and only the children are left to point in pain and abandonment by even their own parents and teachers that they are being mentally abused (and therefore physically assaulted as well) to be either sorted to the dustbin of life or spirited away to the higher cast system of a brave new world of order and obedience. For the last thirty years I have watched while narcissistic misbegotten shameless greed and power puppet masters have stripped away the minds and possibilities of our entire community through mind altering commercial nonsense and have now brought us to the inexplicable such as the number one show on TV such as Duck Dynasty, a far cry from NOVA or Fireside Theater. Standards? NO! Kidnapping our children’s minds and futures? YES! Where do you go when you want to control the universe? The children of course!
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Ronee, yes! Just…yes!!!
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this was a great book! glad to see it’s getting coverage in USA Today, hopefully some people will start seeing ed-reform differently
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I am just about to read his book and will have to suspend a sense that he is a mercenary who took the job in order to get a contract for a book that peddles outrage. If you cannot suffer with your students, however errant they are from from your notion of propriety, you are not a teacher. Teachers may not be the problem but they are the solution.
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