Wherever I go, I hear stories about the exodus of teachers from the profession. The same story is told everywhere: I am sick of the non-stop testing. I didn’t become a teacher to administer tests, I became a teacher to make a difference in the lives of children, I became a teacher because I love history and want to share my love. The testing regime is crushing my kids and crushing me too.
Our nation is losing talented and experienced teachers. They are literally being driven out of the profession by federal and state mandates attached to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Many states now administer tests not to measure student progress, but to measure teacher “effectiveness,” despite the fact that there is no research base for this practice.
Why would any nation want to drive teachers out of a profession that is under-paid, under-respected, and constantly criticized by non-educators? Enrollments in education programs are dropping. The federal government, abetted by extremist legislatures and governors, are literally attacking the teachers of our nation. Who will take their place? Certainly not Teach for America. It sends 10,000 young, inexperienced, ill-trained college graduates to teach for two years, into a profession of more than 3 million teachers.
Does anyone think that the teaching profession is getting better as a result of the relentless attacks on teachers?
The modal year of teacher experience dropped dramatically in the past generation from 15 to 1 (see page 10). Do we want most of our doctors and airline pilots to be novices?
Here is the story of one teacher, Ron Maggiano, an award-winning Virginia teacher who quit after 33 years.
Valerie Strauss wrote about him here. She wrote:
Ron Maggiano is a social studies teacher at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County. In 2005, he won the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity, and in 2006, he won the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching. Now, after a 33-year teaching career, he is resigning, just four years away from full retirement.
Why? He’s had enough of the high-stakes testing obsession that he believes has undermined public education.
Maggiano wrote:
I have taught history at West Springfield High School for the past 19 years. I have been a successful classroom teacher for more than thirty years, but now I have had enough. As a result of the obsessive emphasis on standardized test scores in FCPS and across the educational landscape, I have decided to retire at the end of the current academic year. I have made this decision, because I can no longer cooperate with a testing regime that I believe is suffocating creativity and innovation in the classroom. We are not really educating our students anymore. We are merely teaching them to pass a test. This is wrong. Period.
As for myself, I won the Disney Teacher Award for innovation and creativity in education in 2005 and the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for outstanding K-12 teaching in 2006. I am four years away from full retirement, so my decision to retire was not made lightly. It will cost me. Our school newspaper, The Oracle, just ran a story on my retirement and why I am leaving the classroom and the job that I love.
The student newspaper wrote an article about his retirement. Maggiano told the student writer:
“I don’t think I’m leaving the education system. I think the education system left me,” said Maggiano.
In another article, he wrote:
It was a difficult decision, but I am confident that it was the correct one. For me this was a moral choice. I believe that our current national obsession with high-stakes testing is wrong, because it hurts kids and deprives students of an education that is meaningful, imaginative, and relevant to the demands of the 21st century.
Research shows that today’s students need to be prepared to think critically, analyze problems, weigh solutions, and work collaboratively to successfully compete in the modern work environment. These are precisely the type of skills that cannot be measured by a multiple-choice standardized test.
More significantly, critical thinking skills and analytical problem solving have now been replaced with rote memorization and simple recall of facts, figures, names, and dates. Educators have been forced to adopt a “drill and kill” model of teaching to ensure that their students pass the all-important end-of-course test. Teaching to the test, a practice once universally condemned administrators and educators alike, has now become the new normal in classrooms across the country.
If teaching to the test was wrong 30 some years ago when I first entered the classroom, it is just as wrong today as I leave my classroom for the final time. The fact is that we are not really educating our students. We are merely teaching them how to pass a test.
And we are not preparing them for success at the college level or in the workplace. If we were, colleges and universities would not have to require remediation courses for incoming freshmen, and businesses and corporations would not have to spend millions to reteach skills their employees should have mastered after twelve years of education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The story here is equally on poor district and school leadership that forces “drill and kill.” Even if the tests are terrible, authentic education is almost always the best way to raise test scores.
It’s not just about tests but about district leaders, principals, instructional coaches, and sometimes fellow teachers who look for an easy (often Pearson driven) way out of designing curriculum.
will argue with your statement that authentic education education is almost always the best way to raise test scores. Students who know how to actually analyze sometimes have a very hard time on shallow, poorly worded questions that are formulaic. They over think the questions because they have actual learning under their belt, more than the people who made the crappy assessment in the first place.
Bad tests are incredibly bad motivators for students who appreciate real learning.
In theory, this sounds right. But my knowledge of the research is that there is a pretty firm consensus around the power of authentic education on even the worst tests. Mike Schmoker’s book Focus is dedicated to making this point and it’s extremely convincing.
Agreeing with Nick on the testing mandate being embraced as an easy way out. As bad as the drill and kill is, there are too many places where a pathological culture has also taken root. Those remaining who embody deep, thoughtful, creative education are hounded methodically and systematically right out the door. Broad-trained administrators are particularly adept at this evil art but it is widespread and is a way for the money to keep flowing to those who absolutely know that they are not and will never be about democracy and education at its best.
Agreed. I think we do a disservice when we focus just on policy and ignore the fact that there is some very bad stuff happening in our schools.
I had to fight to get novel studies into a high school ELA curriculum and writing into the social studies curriculum at various schools. It was neither the district nor the state resisting; it was the admin.
Ask Kaplan, Princeton Review and the parents who send their kids to them about that; they might disagree.
Those companies exist more so for tests like SAT and ACT which are more easily gamed and measure different things than normal standardized tests.
But for-profits are snakeoil salespeople any ways. Best way to raise vocab is to read challenging texts but that’s not what they sell. Why would you believe Kaplan?
Again, the research on the correlation between authentic education and test scores has been consistent for some time. It’s why you find authentic education more often in high income public schools – because the parents, teachers, and administrators know it works and fight for it.
Grant Wiggins (coauthor of UbD) breaks it down really nicely here:
http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/more-tests-with-higher-stakes-then-more-test-prep-uh-no-bad-logic-the-problem-is-not-the-tests-but-our-response/
Tests are one problem. But they could be overcome with independently minded, corporate resisted, persistent leaders. Let’s not forget, bad teaching existed before standardized testing.
That’s nonsense: every standardized, bubble-in test can be gamed.
You are either misinformed or are here to spread disinformation.
Just a teacher who used authentic education to get very good test scores on admittedly bad tests. Sorry if that upsets you . . .
You are right that they can be gamed. But the benefits of gaming those tests are not worth the opportunity costs of an authentic education. There have been multiple studies for social studies examining what happens when a teacher cuts the “content” standards in half to allow for depth and higher level thinking. Even though these teachers missed content, their students still performed as well as classes in which all content was covered.
When tested again a year later, the authentically educated group did far better. Equal scores, better life outcomes.
Just one example.
Again, I am simply a teacher arguing that it’s still possible to teach well.
As an instructional coach, I fought to have my ELA teachers reject the text-book, objective based curriculum that was prepared for them and replace it with a mix of independent reading w/ reflections and novel studies using grade level texts based on authentic assessment (a mix of writing and seminars).
They were, with one exception, the only teachers in school to achieve significant growth.
Nick,
I’m not arguing that tests do not require the substitution of drill-and-kill for real teaching; I try to do the same.
The problem is that you’re pointing out one slender reed in a huge forest, and missing the political context in which all of this is taking place.
One of the major facets of so-called education reform is to de-professionalize teaching and turn it into temp work, the the use of the tests, and the evaluations that follow from the them, is one weapon used for that.
I’m fortunate to have a long-time educator as a Principal, and he recognizes the point you’re trying to make. I hope you have the same, as I wish for all students and teachers, but that’s not where the rewards and incentives lie for administrators: the incentives, especially for the new breed of administrators who had, at most, a cup of coffee in the classroom, are all about numbers, and those numbers increasingly include having inexpensive, malleable teachers who’ll jump when told to.
In the abstract, your point is true; in practice, it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I think it’s important to keep the whole picture in play. We agree, I think, on our ends. In terms of messaging it’s important to put blame where it belongs. On the tests, yes. On the high stakes, yes. And on the people you describe who choose to buy into drill and kill and test prep when they need not do so.
@ Nick: Grant Wiggins calls the Common Core “common sense,” and says the motives of Bill Gates and David Coleman (of the College Board) are “pure.”
He says that NOW that standards are here, teachers are whining about them. Has he not been paying attention for the last decade, and the requirements of No Child Left Behind?
I asked Wiggins in an exchange at The Atlantic if he believed the core rationale for the Common Core – “economic competitiveness” – was “pure.” And if he thought the motives of of the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable – staunch supporters of both the Common Core and supply-side tax cuts – were “pure.”
There was no response.
What is “authentic” education?
I hear that term bantered about. Please define it.
I’m not sure if others define it differently than me or if there is an academic definition out there. For me, it’s a purposely vague term to describe what most people (I think) would consider real teaching: instruction that is designed to lead to meaningful educational outcomes.
I say it’s purposely vague because I don’t think one method is inherently more authentic than others (UbD, PBL, service based learning, Nancy Atwel – all great if done right). The only unifying themes would be that they are student centered and student driven.
From another of your responses: “. . . which are more easily gamed and measure different things than normal standardized tests.”
None of these tests whether ACT, SAT or any other standardized test measures anything. They are not measuring devices. They are assessment devices (piss poor ones at that) but assessing does not necessarily mean measuring. Most folks falsely believe that these tests “measure” something and they are wrong. Just because one “numerizes”* an assessment doesn’t mean it measures it. One of the most common fallacies that there is in education and one of the most pernicious.
*attempt to put a number onto a non-measurable concept.
“They were, with one exception, the only teachers in school to achieve significant growth.”
How much did the teachers grow? What do you consider “significant” growth for a teacher.
It was a technical term defined by the district. The students grew, not the teachers. Sorry if that was unclear. Per the district’s criteria, a certain level of growth was “significant” and my teachers’ students were the only ones to hit that threshold.
The point is, my teachers were the only ones in school engaging their kids in authentic literacy. They were the ones shunning test prep and drill and kill. Their students had the highest growth in school (along with a science teacher who ran a “real” science class driven by inquiry, rigorous content, and experimentation)
Good to see an approving post written about work funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Interesting to watch the increase in teachers hired in the late seventies work its way through public schools in the graphs on page 8.
You lost me, TE. Please expound on your first sentence. Thanks!
You are right, TE. But my rebuttal would be this: why doesn’t Gates pursue policies that would alleviate this and make teaching a career? Gates loves charters but they are notorious for teacher churn and high turnover.
The study also reflects that teachers don’t really hit their stride until 5-6 years into the profession. So why aren’t we doing the things necessary to encourage people to stay in the profession?
Instead, Gates suggests tying a large percentage of teacher evaluation to test scores. Gates promotes charters. Gates does nothing to support the pension system and enforces stack ranking type systems. (I know people get resentful of those who get pensions but I left a job in business nearly twenty years ago to take a pay cut and be a teacher. Part of that was that a pension would be a good foundation for a retirement. Without that incentive, I would not have entered this profession for financial reasons.)
In fact, many findings in this report fly in the face of what Gates promotes. Why would that be? Because Gates already has his ideas and even when his own funded research proves that he should consider other options, Gates ignores it if it didn’t fit his preconceived notions.
My point was that research is often dismissed by regular commentators on this blog based not on the quality of the work but on the funding source. That has not happened here, and I appreciate the deviation from the dominant narrative on the blog.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
WoW! this breaks my heart. Here are two teachers that devoted their life to educating the children of our future. They clearly love and are passionate about their profession of teaching. Instead of showing appreciation and gratittude from officials and private interest groups (they are DESTROYING PUBLIC EDUCATION,) they are forced to retire.I believe this is all in the plan from the Bill Gates, Koch Brothers to push veteran teachers out of the classroom and force them to lose money on their retirement.
I am disgusted in the child abuse that is taken place in every classroom accross the nation. I do not want a novice teacher in the classroom for any student. Nor do I want a teacher who is not passionate and have the best interest of all students. I will continue advocating for my daughters, teachers an every child within the school system.
Teachers should not be bullied into not speaking up, feel threaten or up against a wall. I will keep saying their are more parents than billionaire’s we can make a difference do not give up! InBloom, Common Core, Dicovery Ed and Reading 3D will not determine what and where my childs future should be headed. It is not ironic they want to manipulate the minds of our youth, the bigger question is why are the Bill Gates, Koch’s Arne Duncan’s of the world feel we do not see how they are using modern day segregation ,labeling our students and leaving parents out of crucial decisions regarding education.
My mother retired early from teaching after 35 years due to the same reasons from the teacher’s above. She was asked to be apart of a curriculum review before it was piloted on Newark Public School students. She realized it was the beginning of Common Core and she decided she would not set her students up for failure and watch the desire to learn be stifled by people of greed and the very same people have their children in the best school of the nation.(common core not being taught.)
Do not give up the battle because the war will be a challenge!
Tera
Hi everyone, I wanted to share this talk I gave recently to the School Board of Palm Beach County, FL.
VAM: The Scarlet Letter
Both excellently done.
OMG, this is WONDERFUL. Thanks, Andy!!!
For use on Twitter: Just copy, paste and ReTweet as often as possible
How to get rid of teachers who love teaching kids
Test them to death
through #NoChildLeftBehind
Obama’s #RaceToTheTop
http://bit.ly/1lDt35W
For use on Twitter: Just copy, paste and ReTweet as often as possible
You’ll only find one country
Where every child must be college ready
Out of high school
In America
laws fr
Bush/Obama
http://bit.ly/1lDt35W
When good teachers quit, the corporate reformers and thier paid off political stooges win – and everybody else loses.
Can’t you just nod your head, close your door, and teach the way you know works best for your students?
When you see other people become victims of retaliation, you think about your mortgage, your kids’ college educations, your retirement, and you compromise.
The corporate reformers know this. That is one of the reasons that they are trying to get out of the pension business. When teachers are casual labor, schools don’t have to pay retirement or insurance benefits. Many teachers are retiring before their benefits get taken away. Many more seasoned teachers have their fingers in the wind.
Not under the current reform-driven evaluation schemes you cannot!
I tried to do so for the final 5 years of my teaching career.
I was hassled by numerous “walk-through” evaluations (they should have been “assessments”, but each came with a full evaluation and instructions on how to improve). If I was not using several of Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like A Champion” strategies every couple minutes or if even a single student looked out the window or looked down at the floor, I got ripped in the evaluation.
If I was using one of my exploratory ot inquiry lessons (biological science), I was ripped because my kids were not “on task,” but were talking with each other and some were moving from workstation to workstation (I called it collaboration, but the admin insisted it was off-task and noisy behavior).
As an older member of the staff, I was shut out of school improvement committees, all my volunteering to assist in developing teacher mentorships, to assist in real school improvement, etc. were ignored and I was never asked for so much as an offhanded opinion. We are a small school with a small staff, so the snubbing was evident and obvious to others besides me.
My stress levels rose. I found myself spending more time trying to game the system rather than developing new lessons. Regardless of my education, experience, and state/national national awards, I was impotent to effect positive change in the school. Every time I tried to do the “right thing” I was slammed. I could never get anywhere during the 1-sided followup “discussions.” I left 3 years before full retirement.
No. Because my administrators come in randomly and then ding me if I’m not teaching the SPECIFIC core (and not anything that is “closely” related, only specifically related). It will eventually affect my job, and my subject isn’t even CC yet.
I agree. One of the reasons I quit was because I could do nothing right. I was written up in one evaluation because one of my first grade centers involved taking turns to play a vocabulary game. In the admins minds, students are wasting time while they wait for other students to play the game (there were four kids in a group playing I have, who has? They can’t learn from watching and listening to the other students? Are you kidding me??!!). Each student must be engaged 100% of the time, I was told (by an admin with no background in early childhood, of course!). Making ever single center like that means I’d have to work 90 hours a week. Forget it! Not to mention other nit-picky things like not changing the objectives on the board (gee, ya think I was short on time? lol!) and anything they can think of. When I saw what they did to the 30 and 40 year veteran teachers, I up and quit. I’m not signing up for 30+ years of escalating harassment. I’m much happier now that I’m out. Now my name won’t be published and ranked in the newspaper, now I can expect my pay to go up with years of experience and added education and credentials, and now I can work extra hours to make more money (instead of working for free).
Regarding the exodus of good teachers. That statistics speak for themselves.
I retired – 23 years ago after “A Nation at Risk” began this whole debacle as soon as I could although I LOVED teaching, still miss it after all these years, but the politics of people rushing in where angels fear to tread did me in.
A school board which read, swallowed the propaganda and destroyed a lifetime of work by great teachers who had worked selflessly for years, put in HOURS of work with no fiscal compensation for that extra work because they could believe in what they were doing.
Who in their right mind can believe in the misinformation, the autocratic forcing of stupidity from the top, ignorant top. I was taught to believe in the efficacy of democratic principles. It worked great for us years ago.
Why, why, why the belief that dictatorial policies work better than democratic ones where administration and teachers work together to produce great schools.
Innovation? WHEN in the history of our country have not teachers innovated. As Dr. Ravitch so cogently pointed out some time ago, these were called fads. Some worked, some didn’t but we were always looking for better materials, better methodology. Force feeding does not make for great nutrition.
Reblogged this on My Thinks and commented:
This is a US teacher giving reasons why they’re retiring – too much high stakes testing stifling creativity and innovation. If National Standards continue this is where NZ will be in 10 years.
I agree that we are over-testing our students. But, I retired two years before full retirement due to not being able to help the students who needed the most help. It was so frustrating to have a big third grader that everyone knew was autistic (even the principal said she knew), and he didn’t receive the help he needed. He would wander around the playground talking to himself, stand up in class and tell me stories that had nothing to do with what we were learning, etc. I have been gone two years, and my teammates tell me he is still not being helped. His mom doesn’t get it. Isn’t it the educators duty to help her understand? I have had students that had such difficulty reading and did not receive the testing they should have had. Many of our parents do not understand their rights. Of course, I couldn’t tell them, although I did when I thought I could trust them not to tell on me. Our Title I disabled and emotional/behavioral students are being abused. I think it is illegal, but who is going to raise hell about it? These are the children who have been forgotten.
There has always been children who “fell through the cracks” because the state’s ed code didn’t deal with them or provide funds or support. The only way to fix this is more funding and support for the schools and probably going to court to change the ed code. Parents have done this before and succeeded.
Other than that, nothing is perfect and teachers are not Superman or gods. We do what we can.
So much for our impotent laws which say parental rights must be explained to parents. The explanation is a couple of pages long and parents who obviously do not understand sign their names obediently on the designated line. Who wants to admit that they have no idea what this paper means. I so much wanted a parent to make the meeting administrator explain the whole paper. The meeting would have been over before they finished. In the wealthy districts if parents don’t like an IEP meeting or program they bring their lawyer. School administrators do not like parents with lawyers. Right or wrong administrators tend to lick lawyers boots.
I’m curious.
Ron Maggiano says he retired because of rampant testing. He says the education system “left him.”
I think there’s a lot more to the story.
For example, Maggiano criticizes the Virginia Standards of Learning (the SOLs), and No Child Left Behind. Republican governor George Allen gave the state the SOLs, and Republican president George W. Bush gave the nation NCLB. Maggiano was the advisor and sponsor at his high school for the Young Republicans. Was he absolutely clueless about Republican education policy?
Maggiano also taught Advanced Placement (AP) history. Did it never occur to him that the College Board perpetrated a huge hoax on educators (and parents and students) with their bogus claims about the PSAT, the SAT, and AP? Because in all the articles written about him, and what he’s written as well, there is no criticism of the College Board (the College Board was a major player in the development of the Common Core, and will be intimately involved in Common Core testing).
Maggiano may have been a good teacher, I don’t know. But his complaint about “merely” teaching kids to “to pass a test” holds little water. What did he think the purpose of an SAT prep-class or an AP course was?
I second your motion, plutocracy.
SAT and AP did not always have this blanket of shame and deceit enveloping them. The change in marketing has happened gradually over time and has not infected every school equally. I know many fine teachers who have taught AP courses with integrity as advanced courses not available otherwise. You would have to damn a generation of teachers if you assign damnation to one. He quit precisely because of the changes he has seen over a long career.
Reblogged this on Florence Carlton Advocates for Better Education and commented:
‘Our nation is losing talented and experienced teachers. They are literally being driven out of the profession by federal and state mandates attached to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Many states now administer tests not to measure student progress, but to measure teacher “effectiveness,” despite the fact that there is no research base for this practice.”
It seems that it must be a GOAL to force teaching to the test. Most teachers must change so much of their content, style, and emphasis. New vocabulary is always necessary. New terms for what we have been doing for 30 years has been replaced by terminology that is awkward and artificial.
I retired for many of the same reasons. I am no famous person but I got a couple of teaching excellence awards. But it became sjob not a passion. Stress kills joy.
And when you entered teaching Diane, were you not young, inexperienced and ill-prepared? Your slam on the Teach for America is beyond disrespectul. Would.you dare offer this same judgement on young adults involved in the Peace Corps?
Have a brother and inlaws who are teachers and would be shocked if they viewed their profession in the same light as yours. That you would be honored to address a group of educators naming themselves “Bad Ass Teachers” speaks.volumes about their caliber and yours. As a parent, your advice regarding school.boards and the democratic.process sends off warning bells. How.many of the BTA members are Social Studies or American Civ teachers ?
Diane, if you are so dissatified with teaching, please retire. Your contempt for your CHOSEN profession is so disheartening. On a personal level, I once lived one floor below two teachers who smoked up (wacky tobaccy) every night. That they “graded papers” under the influence was distasteful to me. As a parent I would.be appalled to know that my childs grade and GPA was in the hands of.two.people who.were clearly under the influence! How.thankful that my.brother, inlaws and cousins did.not do this disservice to their students and parents. Now, after viewing two of your posts, I find myself with those same feelings of distaste and mistrust of teachers.
Cannot wait to share your blog site with other parents, taxpayers and local politicians. Thamks for the wakeup call and alerting me that this dark cloud is on the horizon.
Anne, I have.no disrespect for the well-meaning young people who join TFA hoping to serve a cause. I do have disrespect for the organization, which claims that its young recruits are better than veteran teachers. That is not only nonsense but it hurts the profession. In what profession is a person with no experience and no professional training superior to a well trained professional? Would you go to a doctor with five weeks of training? Then there is the fact that TFA has taken about $100 million from the Walton Family Foundation, the far right group that hates unions and public education. Shameful.