Earlier this year I saw an article that was so good that I saved it, thinking that some day I would have a chance to write about it. It was a blog by a teacher named Katie Osgood, who teaches students with disabilities in a psychiatric hospital. Her insights were so keen, her description of her students so moving, that I knew that I had to write about this article.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/02/katie_osgood_the_reform_my_stu.html?r=132021561&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2

Ms. Katie (as she calls herself) described what her students need. Not charter schools, not green TFA teachers, not teachers pushing their students for higher test scores.

What her students need are “caring, committed, EXPERIENCED teachers.”

They need stability.

They need ‘a village.’

They need extra resources.

They need to have their basic needs met.

They need creativity and flexibility.

They need strong peer groups.

What they don’t need is to have policymakers prattling that “poverty doesn’t matter.”

Ms. Katie’s eloquent plea for common-sense solutions stands in stark contrast to today’s education deform policies. She might have just as well have been writing about all the children in the Chicago public schools, or for that matter, students in every school.

She comes up with different answers than policymakers because she is interested in the children she teaches; our policymakers care only about their test scores. We mustn’t forget that children are, above all, getting ready for global competition. Except that they are not. They are children trying to grow up in a cold society. Let them be children. Attend to their needs. Help them become healthy.

I remembered this article last night when I read another blog by Ms. Katie. (Thank you, Twitter.) She had been thinking of teaching in the Chicago public schools, but decided that it was not possible. It was not possible because Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pursuing policies that will harm the children she wants to help. A brief quote:

“I refuse to teach in a school which your appointed Board purposefully starves in order to justify closure and privatization. I cannot watch the savage inequalities of school funding play out in children’s lives.

“I refuse to administer standardized tests to children with special needs over and over and over again. I did that once in a school, and I consider it immoral forcing a child who is having panic attacks, crying, flipping desks in frustration to take a test far above the level we know that child is currently learning. And all for the purpose of judging, sorting, and punishing.

“I refuse to teach the scripted curriculum forced on your teachers. My students need creative, responsive, individualized instruction. Not canned test-prep.

http://mskatiesramblings.blogspot.com/2012/04/dear-mr-mayor-why-i-will-not-teach-in.html

As I read Ms. Katie, I wonder why the powerful organizations that sponsor symposia and conferences about how to solve the problems of education seldom invite teachers like her. Instead, they stack their conferences with high-tech gurus, charter school advocates, and business leaders. A few days ago, I was invited to participate in a New York Times-sponsored event to discuss the teacher quality problem. There were no teachers (as yet) invited to speak. I declined. They need Ms. Katie.

Diane

Marc Tucker has an interesting blog today in Education Week

(http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2012/05/teacher_quality_and_teacher_accountability.html) about teachers. He recounts his many encounters with incompetent, drunk-on-the-job teachers. But he uses this beginning to say that we really need to give more thought to helping teachers, encouraging the best teachers, and improving the conditions of teachers so as to attract excellent candidates in the future.

I thought and thought but I couldn’t remember a single teacher in my own experience, or that of my children or grandchildren, who was a drunk-on-the-job teacher. I went to ordinary public schools in Houston, and I had my share of ordinary teachers. I remember someone told me once that if you have even one great teacher in your lifetime, you are blessed. I was doubly blessed, as I had at least two.

But I must say, I never came across any of the horrible men or women who seem to give the reformers sleepless nights.

If they exist, and I suppose they must, then they should be fired in their first year on the job. If not, then their principal is not doing his or her job.

From all I have seen of the research, the multiple-choice standardized tests that are now in common use will not reveal who those “bad” teachers are. Who knows, the “bad” teachers might be extra good at drilling kids on test questions. And we might end up giving bonuses to “bad” teachers.

When I spoke in Missouri a couple of years ago, I met hundreds of teachers after the event, as I usually do. So many told me that their father or mother had been a teacher before them. I realized that these are the teachers we have now, in the towns, villages, and cities of America. And in the future we will have their sons and daughters in the classrooms. We owe them a good start. We owe them respect for the hard work they do for all of us. We owe them good leadership. We owe them the autonomy to make decisions in their classrooms, rather than to be treated as automatons or robots. And we owe it to them and their colleagues to treat teaching as a true profession, not as a temp job meant for young college graduates who will be gone in two or three years.

Diane