The New Republic

We should experiment with changing teacher tenure Ok, fine, drive away one of the reasons people choose to become teachers, job security. Getting tenure is not easy, it requires years of hard work. And who will you replace these teachers with? I am so sick of all this: "Its the teachers fault" bs. And we are not in a serious crisis, there are parts of our system within inner city schools that are in a crisis, but they have always been, suburban public schools are fine. The teachers are fine. The students are fine. Getting rid of tenure, shaking up suburban, small city, and rural schools would be ridiculous. By the way, you take these "failing" teachers and you put them in suburban schools and they will do fine. Most people have no idea how difficult it is to teach in an inner city school. The change we would need there is far more radical than people like Darby could even conceive. Lets take a look at some of these "reforms" try innovative approaches to performance pay, (essentially reward teachers who work in suburban schools since it is far easier to perform well when the students are well behaved) raising student achievement standards, (if they are not meeting low ones, how the hell can raising them be effective, so instead of getting D's these kids will now get F's?) community schools, (yeah, with what money?) and developing better, more comprehensive standardized testing methods. (as though teaching to the test is not already a problem) Same old bullshit. Break whats already working and pretend to fix what isn't by dancing around the edges (what is it, the 2% solution?) You can not fix public schools when the community the kids are living in is broke. Get that through your thick head.

- blackton

September 22, 2010 at 2:12pm

Jonathan, the concerns many of us have with today's school reform movement are as follows: 1. There is no discussion of the purposes of education or of its actual content. This is fundamental. You can't implement reforms without knowing what you're trying to accomplish. You can't know what "works," without agreeing first on what "working" means. The tacit suggestions out there are that students need the tools necessary to go to college and get a job and, otherwise, obtain skills that are (for the moment) globally in demand. In elementary and high school, this focus has resulted among reformers in the emphasis on testing reading and math and otherwise in an emphasis on obtaining a narrow set of technical skills. This is an awfully narrow conception of the content and purpose of education. This emphasis threatens to crowd out other content and other, more important purposes. Other important content that's not on the test: writing, history, science, literature, the arts, civics, health, physical education. I would add philosophy and economics, both of which I was introduced to in a public high school. One nice feature of the American education system, as opposed to most others, is that it gradually introduces, and then carries through college, the ideal of a liberal education. School reform policies threaten that ideal in their laser-like focus on math and reading scores. Other purposes not reflected in the current debate or on the tests: to obtain a wide-ranging understanding of and sensitivity to humanity, to obtain a wide-ranging understanding of how the universe works, to obtain a supple and transferable intellectual facility, to obtain interpersonal and communication skills, to obtain the skills and experiences necessary to realize your own potential and (wholesome) desires in life, to obtain the skills and knowledge and values necessary to be a good and worthy citizen, and, most fundamentally -- and most amazingly, not on the tests -- to obtain actual knowledge of the world. None of these things should seem controversial, although I do not think that they are widely valued today in our culture, including, amazingly, the culture of today's reform movement. No matter what the current state of our system, a school reform agenda that does not consciously seek to better serve these goals and impart this content is not, I think, nearly good enough and is probably counterproductive. One is left to conclude that nobody in charge of reforming education cares about education's most important goals and purposes. 2. There is an emerging slavish devotion to standardized tests in a couple of subjects as the main way to evaluate educational success. These tests will inevitably be flawed and, as used today, are woefully incomplete. They don't test most of what's important. For example, they don't test any knowledge whatsoever, because members of the public can't agree on what knowledge is important. (See Texas.) They don't test writing to any significant degree, because it's not practical to do so. There is evidence to suggest that the skills they test may not be transferable. Why would scores on one reading test go up and scores on another taken by the same group stay flat? Obviously, the tests are different, but they're both of general reading *skills*. Theoretically, if you do better on one, it means you're a better reader, which means you should do better on the other. The likely answer is that the curriculum is geared toward getting a good score on the first test. This is what happened in New York, when state scores, which were the ones that counted for NCLB purposes, went up, but federal testing scores did not. If you can't even transfer skills from one test to another, what's the hope of transfering those skills from the test to the real world, which is the *entire* point? When tests are made to be the end-all and be-all -- when their outcome directly and crudely determines the fates of schools and school personnel -- the overhwelming incentive is to, as they say, "teach to the test." If the test were a magically perfect test that tested everything that should be learned, and couldn't be gamed by anti-educational test-prep, maybe this would be fine. In that case, "teaching to the test" would mean "teaching to life," or "teaching to our broad educational purposes." But the tests are not that. Tests must be given, and should be made better and more comprehensive, and they should be used with their limitations in mind. Today's school reform movement shows no signs of appreciating any of these issues. 3. Charter schools, as orginally conceived, were supposed to be laboratories within the public school system for testing different teaching and schooling methods and applying those lessons to the system more broadly. That would be fine, and I would encourage that. But they've emerged as "competitors" with the public school system, and are touted for just this reason. What the public education system needs, say charter shcool advocates, is competition! For these people, competition is a panacea. It doesn't quite work that way. Charter schools are not playing on a level playing field because they can select and drop, and they attract a self-selecting group to start with, leaving public schools with the hardest kids to educate -- "special needs" and ESL kids among others. How does this improve public education? It doesn't. It merely hastens a verdict of "failure," fruitless closure or "restructuring," and the "leaving behind" of more kids. Another negative outcome of the charter school movement is the emergence of lousy for-profit "competitors" that parents don't know are lousy. Our society owes kids a top-notch education. We can't rely on the poor consumer choices, or outright neglect, of their parents to achieve this. 4. Scapegoating of teachers. The current school reform movement seeks to hold teachers "accountable" for results that are *obviously* the outcome of many forces outside of their control, and nobody acknowledges or seeks to correct those forces. Some say that the teacher is the main ingredient in an educational outcome. No, the student is the main ingredient. In addition to the student, the home, the culture, and the society are obviously major factors. Some say, if only we had the best teachers, everything would be great. Sure, if only we had the best anything, everything would be better. This is not realistic or even logical. There will always be a "best" and always be a lot of others. The "value-added" system grades on just such a curve, putting teachers in competition with each other and punishing the worst performers. What is the responsible level of firing? Bottom ten percent? Bottom third? Bottom half? As many as practical? This is arbitrary. Moreover, what is the measure of the teacher's worth in this system? Back to the inadequate tests. (See 2.) What the studies show is that the teachers who are best at getting high test scores are the best at getting high test scores. This isn't the complete story, because test scores aren't everything. Of course, there are "bad teachers," in the sense that there are incompetent and lazy teachers who do not fulfill their professional responsibilities, and there are other teachers who commit more serious misconduct. This is the case in all professions, and there must be a mechanism for effectively addressing it. Teacher contracts, even for tenured teachers, do not prevent their discipline or firing, but rather insist upon due process before doing so. Horrors. Perhaps administrations find that process costly or onerous to pursue. That's not the teachers' fault. The infamous "rubber room" in New York wouldn't exist if that system dealt with teacher discipline in a more efficient manner. Meanwhile, there are educational reasons for tenure, which has existed for something like a hundred years without controversy. It's not so much to preserve academic freedom in the same sense as in higher education, but to preserve the ability to do one's job without fear of irrational or unfair or counterproductive reprisal. Schools have, in recent decades, largely abandoned academic and behavioral discipline of students. This corresponds with our educational "crisis." Perhaps this is attributable in part to misguided notions with a '60s vintage. Perhaps it continues due to similarly misguided notions on the part of some educators. But there is another force at work that can't be put at the feet hippies: The activist community members and activist parents who, today more than ever, feel emboldened to blame and challenge the teacher -- often unfairly so -- for a bad grade or a punishment or something Johnny heard in class that parent doesn't like. These complaints are often total b.s. Tenure, in short, prevents b.s. punishment of a teacher and protects justified punishment of students. If it prevents justified punishment of teachers, I agree that that's a problem, but it needn't. Meanwhile, would abandoning tenure dramatically improve educational outcomes? Who knows? You could point to a private non-union school that does better than its public counterpart and conclude, maybe. You could point to the fact that teachers have the most job protections in the highest-performing state (Massachusetts) and the least protections in the worst-performing (Mississippi), and say maybe not. And then, you might say what is obvious: it's the student, stupid. Today's education reform movement consists of two buzzwords: "choice" and "accountability," which, in reformers' hands, means setting up public education to fail and declaring war on teachers' unions and their members through narrow-test-based compensation and discipline. That's it. Not a word about curriculum, about standards, about student discipline -- in other words, about what is to be done and how to do it. Even if we acknowledge a crisis, and even if "choice" and "accountability" had something to them, they seem far too narrow to do much good and are prone to bad, unintended consequences. Obama said that he doesn't want to see the curriculum narrowed or mere "teaching to the test." Well then, what do you propose, because that's what "school reform" looks like today.

- JakeH

September 22, 2010 at 5:45pm

Oops, I didn't see that this was a Darby post.

- JakeH

September 22, 2010 at 5:45pm