This is a wake-up call to the “reform” industry. For the past 15-20 years, they have been telling us that the biggest problems in education are low expectations, bad teachers, teachers’ unions, tenure, seniority, and the need for competition and accountability.
The nation’s top teachers, the people who are the best teachers in their states, don’t agree.
According to a survey of the nation’s teachers of the year, the biggest obstacles to student success today are family stress and poverty. We need a new reform movement that focuses on the real problems of our society, not the fake problems that generate profits for the education industry.
Lyndsey Layton reports in the Washington Post:
The greatest barriers to school success for K-12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.
Those were the factors named in a survey of the 2015 state Teachers of the Year, top educators selected annually in every U.S. state and jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Guam.
The survey, to be released Wednesday by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc., polled the 56 Teachers of the Year, a small but elite group of educators considered among the country’s best, on a range of issues affecting public education.
Asked to identify the greatest barriers to student academic success, the teachers ranked family stress highest, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.
Why don’t Congress and the states listen to the experts?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Nothing new – just study the teachings of Maslow
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When I volunteered at my child’s school It was obvious to me that many of the children were attention starved. Parents of my generation need to get their priorities straight and devote more time to their children and not their careers. We are creating an emotional crisis. I think this is another reason why our children are not maturing in the way they should. That child adult interaction is crucial to healthy psychological development. I also agree that poverty and lack of family cohesion is the leading reason why our students fail to meet their potential. Poverty has increased because our manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. Bring back manufacturing and support cottage industries through tax breaks and we will see a reduction to poverty. The Midwest is especially hurting. Walk through the abandoned cities of Toledo and Detroit and you will understand how criminal it is to sell our jobs overseas. Jobs and Education are intricately woven together.
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I agree. Families must work and home life suffers. A strong middle class always requires a conscious effort on the part of society and government. A steady state is more likely to be a few extremely wealthy and a massive number of poor. With technology replacing more human labor, it becomes even more important to support a middle class through active government policy. The old, supply side, trickle down economics of Laffer and Reagan have failed. We need a new, effective economic model. I do not see that in either party.
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Yes, the attention deficits and behavior issues resulting from poverty are the obstacle that always left me so very tired and frustrated when teaching. I never gave up, until it was time to move on from teaching. But it was hard to hang in there, often.
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With the degrading of the teaching profession, the poverty and stress may also exist among the teaching staff. This is not a recipe for success.
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This is true! It is the basis for a civil rights lawsuit just filed in California against a school district for failing to deal with student trauma–and the vicarious trauma of their teachers. This is very encouraging in that it could force districts to provide counseling and restorative justice programs rather than claim there is no budget to do so.
http://laschoolreport.com/lawsuit-against-compton-usd-aims-at-how-schools-deal-with-trauma/
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“For the past 15-20 years, they have been telling us that the biggest problems in education are low expectations, bad teachers, teachers’ unions, tenure, seniority, and the need for competition and accountability.”
The reformsters do not care to recognize the actual problems in education. Obviously it is not in their financial self interest to do so.
They are pulling out all of the stops to destroy as many public school systems as they can before other communities organize to put a stop to their privatization plans. Once the public schools are eradicated, as they were in New Orleans, they know that it is close to impossible to rebuild the public system.
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Congress and the State Governments don’t listen because we get what we vote for.
All the experts in the world can’t over ride the voting for politicians paid to present their point of view.
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Don’t confuse me with facts. My mind is already made up.
The battle cry of the “reformers”.
Every educated person knows the above facts.
Where money talks, facts make no difference.
The bottom line is money, money, money.
“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”. Money supplants people, children in importance.
Stating facts will make no difference to these people. Our history shows that only when people stand up and fight for their rights will positive things happen.
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40 years ago I worked for half a year as a teacher’s aide in an elementary school in a working/middle class suburb of Baltimore. The teachers I worked for assigned me to work either one on one or in very small groups with children who needed extra time to master reading skills. I still remember talking with the teachers about the family backgrounds of some of the children. It was eye-opening and so sad to learn that the children who were really struggling usually came from families who were just scraping by economically and/or psychologically. One child was bouncing between his parents-was it any surprise that this child came to school with an attitude and needs that none of us at the school, and his teachers and principal genuinely cared, could come close to addressing?
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Because Congress and the states aren’t interested in *improving* education. They want to *reform* it. That means, to them, privatization. They want to take the “public” out of public education. That will replace civil dialogue and local control of schools with “market solutions.” The lie is that our kids will be much better off in the hands of corporations than in the hands of public servants. That is the belief. As a side benefit, Congress and the states will get rid of the hated teachers unions and will confirm the treatment of poverty as a separate issue from learning, something that somehow the market will solve. Of course it won’t. What will happen is that we will just get greater class division.
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I am savoring the irony that this is a reformer poll. The CCSSO must be beet red with shame!
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Thinking of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Unfortunately with all the freedoms we have in our country, we have the freedom to be sorry parents and to continue to reproduce more children to not parent. I am not looking for a major blow up over that statement, just that there is little society can do if people choose not to parent responsibly. Few programs exist to support responsible parenting and it would be a violation of personal rights to mandate participation. We as educators try to garner the parental taking on of responsibilities when we touch base with parents about their children. Churches and community agencies also provide support but in many cases people just don’t want to be bothered. I see it every day but there are little successes that keep us trying.
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This comes as a real (and pleasant) surprise to me! I had been under the impression that “teachers of the year” basically nominate themselves through application forms and/or essays that are then vetted by the super-education powers–usually the people who most favor so-called “reform” and “accountability”, high-stakes standardized testing, common core state standards and scripted curriculum. Suddenly I have a new appreciation for Teachers of the Year.
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