US education, heading in the right direction?

[Gob]

"As a teacher and a mom in America, I’m doubly invested in the new education policies being created by the Obama Administration and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, called “Race To the Top.” As of this writing, 40 out of 50 states have applied for 4 billion dollars in education grants, set aside for states to implement specific governmental objectives for public education. I have much the same mixed reaction to its contents that most people do to all politics these days: some optimism, some pessimism, and a lot of scepticism.

Race to the top legislation requires states to make several consequential promises about how they run schools (in my state of New York, for example, it would require several current state laws about schools to be thrown out the window). The most controversial promises include the following.

#1: States will commit to supporting effective training and professional development of teachers and potential teachers.

Well, thank god. Study after study has demonstrated the failure of America to properly train, assess, support, and “professionalise” teachers- unlike in, say, Singapore.

The worry, however is that “teacher support” can quickly turn into teacher trashing, springing from the erroneous idea that merely the heroic efforts of good teacher can - and should - turn our school woes around. Perpetuating this terrifically damaging “teacher as saviour” myth is this recent article in The Atlantic, which holds up as a model one of the most intensive - and unsustainable - approach to teacher training that exists in America. Participating teachers (usually unmarried and in their early 20’s) are recruited from Ivy League colleges, spend 50-80 hours a week in their high needs schools, and serve out a two year term. Then, if they so choose, they quit. They invariably do so, in rates higher than the already staggering US average of traditionally certified teachers.

There is no way this approach can work for most educators. It certainly doesn’t for me, and I am unusually blessed, possessing a generally supportive school, terrific colleagues, an amazing husband who is a hands-on parent at home, and a predilection for staying abreast of good teaching by reading geeky education tomes for fun.

I scrape up 60 hours a week for my job without completely neglecting my 5 year old daughter and 7 year old son, but only just, and I still struggle with my workload. What about the rest of us?

#2: States will use standardised test scores to evaluate teacher performance.

I can’t tell you how many times I have wandered down the halls of my school yelling at colleagues about how much I want more accountability. Please. Come into my classroom. Watch me. Evaluate me on a panel of experienced educators. Require me to bring evidence of student learning. Do it every week, for Pete’s sake.

So this proposition would not scare me at all, if I had any confidence that stand-alone standardised test scores genuinely reflected students’ learning and growth. They don’t, for myriads of reasons.

But let’s say a standardised exam is something we just need to accept. Would I welcome well-designed, accurately timed, growth-based data which measured decent learning standards, and individual kids’ learning, as a part of my evaluation of a teacher? Absolutely. But let’s take as an example my own bugaboo test, the New York State 7th grade English exam.

It’s scheduled in April (a full two months before kids have completed the 7th grade curriculum). It tests completely different skills than the 6th grade exam (thus making score comparisons irrelevant). It’s also calculated by cohort, not by child, without taking into account who may have moved in or moved out of my classroom, such as the large group of learning-disabled children and ESL students I am trying to educate for the first time this year.

Yet Race to the Top may be moving the nation in the same direction as Washington DC, where half my performance evaluation would be based on nothing but my kids’ standardised test scores. Yikes.

#3: States will support the creation of charter schools, and act aggressively to renovate or close failing schools.

This is the knottiest proposition for me. As a teacher, I know this policy is a mirror of Mr. Duncan’s reform efforts in Chicago, called optimistically “Renaissance 2010.” And here it is, 2010, with Ren10 schools improving in some ways, but in student achievement? Not a jot. This is what we want to scale up unquestioningly to all schools in the nation?

Linked inexorably to this proposition, though, is the question of whether charter schools actually educate students better. I know for a fact that some of them do. In my western New York hometown, it is arguably only one or two charter schools that are truly innovative in education, educating kids holistically in small and supportive settings. I hate to say it, and readers can appreciate the guilt I experience, but those schools are where I would strongly consider sending my own children first.

That being said, “one or two” wonderful charter schools may represent the exception. Smart, experienced education experts worry that charter schools represent a move to privatise public education as a for-profit enterprise, ultimately at the community’s expense. And my country’s latest experience with Wall Street corporations, as you can imagine, does not make me happy about this idea at all.

Is there a summary of my concerns to be had? I think there is, and its heart is not actually in the realm of education.

There is an argument, evidenced in our recent health care debate, that Americans have forgotten how to be a community. Our admirable historical emphases on individualism and personal achievement have run amok. The resulting polarisation of wealth in the United States, the worst in any industrialised country, has divided us even further-- so that growing numbers of students are coming into our schools with teen parents, with malnutrition, with preventable health impairments, with inadequate housing.

The answer our current administration seems to be advancing, that high-stakes testing is a viable means of measuring successful education, that a cadre of martyr teachers can save our schools, and that private corporations know best how to train those teachers and run education as a whole—seem to ignore the real issues at hand.

Clearly, we’re racing to something in America. This scary question, however, still remains with me: what is it?"


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