Ethan Siegel, a senior contributor to Forbes, understood what was happening to public education well before the wave of teacher strikes in the spring of 2018. America was literally destroying public education with ill-advised policies and was not reacting to the failure of these policies with common sense. (Please ignore the use of the word “industries” in his article, as he is addressing it to business people.)
The ultimate dream of public education is incredibly simple. Students, ideally, would go to a classroom, receive top-notch instruction from a passionate, well-informed teacher, would work hard in their class, and would come away with a new set of skills, talents, interests, and capabilities. Over the past few decades in the United States, a number of education reforms have been enacted, designed to measure and improve student learning outcomes, holding teachers accountable for their students’ performances. Despite these well-intentioned programs, including No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, public education is more broken than ever. The reason, as much as we hate to admit it, is that we’ve disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals..
The first and largest problem is that every educational program we’ve had in place since 2002 — the first year that No Child Left Behind took effect — prioritizes student performance on standardized tests above all else. Test performance is now tied to both school funding, and the evaluation of teachers and administrators. In many cases, there exists no empirical evidence to back up the validity of this approach, yet it’s universally accepted as the way things ought to be.
Imagine, for a moment, that this weren’t education, but any other job. Imagine how you’d feel if you found yourself employed in such a role…
You have, on any given day, a slew of unique problems to tackle. These include how to reach, motivate, and excite the people whose education and performance you’re responsible for. It includes imparting them with skills that will enable them to succeed in the world, which will be vastly different from state-to-state, county-to-county, and even classroom-to-classroom. Gifted students, average students, special needs students, and students with severe disabilities are all often found in the same class, requiring a deft touch to keep everyone motivated and engaged. Moreover, students often come to class with problems that place them at a competitive disadvantage, such as food insecurity, unaddressed physical, dental, and mental health issues, or home life responsibilities that severely curtail their ability to invest in academics.
If your goal was to achieve the greatest learning outcome possible for each of your students, what would you need to be successful? You’d need the freedom to decide what to teach, how to teach it, how to evaluate and assess your students, and how to structure your classroom and curriculum. You’d need the freedom to make individualized plans or separate plans for students who were achieving at different levels. You’d need the resources — financial, time, and support resources — to maximize the return on your efforts. In short, you’d need the same thing that any employee in any role needs: the freedom and flexibility to assess your own situation, and make empowered decisions.
In public education, if teachers do that, they are penalized to an extraordinary extent. Passion is disincentivized, as whatever aspects you’re passionate about take a back seat to what will appear on the standardized test. Expert knowledge is thrown to the wayside, as curiosity and engagement are seen as distractions. A vision for what successful students look like is narrowed down to one metric alone: test performance. And a teacher’s evaluation of what skills are important to develop is treated as less than nothing, as anything that fails to raise a student’s test score is something that everyone — the teacher, the school, and the student — are all penalized for.
If this were common practice in any other industry, we’d be outraged. How dare you presume to micromanage the experts, the very people you hired to do a difficult job full of unique challenges to the best of their abilities! Yet in education, we have this unrealistic dream that a scripted, one-sized-fits-all strategy will somehow lead to success for all. That we can somehow, through just the right set of instructions, transform a mediocre teacher into a great one.
This hasn’t worked in any walk of life, and it doesn’t work in education. If we were serious about improving the quality of public education in this country (or any country), we wouldn’t focus on a one-size-fits-all model, whether at the federal or state level. We would fully fund schools everywhere, regardless of test scores, economic concerns, or teacher quality. We would make a concerted effort to pay desirable wages to extremely qualified, expert-knowledge-level educators, and give them the support resources they need to succeed. And we’d evaluate them across a variety of objective and subjective metrics, with any standardized testing components making up only a small part of an evaluation.
I venture a guess: Mr. Siegel is either the son of a teacher, is married to a teacher, or spent some time as a teacher. Glad he is writing for Forbes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 