|
Last week, President Barak Obama proclaimed that the firing of teachers at a Rhode Island school was a rational and effective solution for low test scores and high dropout rates. He said, "If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability." The "accountability" that the President is referring to continues the drumbeat of rants against educators and schools that has been ongoing for decades. Only now, the rant has been adopted systemically as policy by the federal government in the form of Race to the Top and other incentives.
Goaded by the prospect of getting a share of the multi-billion-dollar RTT funds offered by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, state leaders, mayors, and school superintendants are implementing "turnaround models" for school improvement that rely on taking severe measures, measures that make educators primarily bear the full burden of school reform.
All four turnaround options being pushed by Mr. Duncan have profound effects on teachers and how they do their jobs, if they're lucky enough to be left with one. And all four are based on a notion that improvement will happen only through threatening educators.
This whole notion of making increased "accountability" the leverage point to push failing schools toward success is borne from the musings of free-market enthusiasts and corporate leaders like Bill Gates. The rationale, we are told, is that "our students are falling behind those in other countries." The reason for this is that schools lack the "marketplace accountability of schools competing with one another." So therefore, "accountability is sorely needed," but educators so "resist the idea" that they need to be subjected to harsher threats and incentives. Never mind that the record for turnaround approaches used in the private sector has shown no "evidence of boosting performance."
The desire to make schools "more accountable" has been so broadly accepted by politicians and the media that virtually no one outside of the education profession speaks out against it. But the finger pointing solves nothing other than continuing to give life to the notion that education is something other than a shared, community obligation - in short, that we're all accountable for educating children.
|
| The irony that President Obama made his remark in the headquarters of the US Chamber of Commerce seems to have been totally lost on the reporters covering the event. For if there is any sector in the American economy that resists accountability it's big business. Examples of the utter irresponsibility of US corporations abound. A year after investment bankers led the US economy over the cliff into the Great Recession, those very same bankers rewarded themselves with record-high bonuses. Architects of our nation's dilapidated health care system continue to give themselves raises as more and more Americans go without health insurance. And even when business leaders are let go, they're rewarded with unbelievable amounts of largesse.
There's this standard line that businesses are successful because they're accountable to their customers, and educators aren't held to that same standard. But this quaint notion that businesses operate under the tenant that "the customer is always right" was thrown to the financier wolves of Wall Street years ago - if it ever really was true to begin with. If you believe that businesses are successful by pleasing customers then just try to get someone at Google on the phone. Businesses succeed for a variety of reasons, but total abdication to the will of customers isn't one of them.
Free market cheerleaders are always quick to point to "teacher tenure" as particularly evil because of its resistance to marketplace forces that periodically purge employment in private industries. But attempts to fire anyone from the executive echelons of the business world are no less difficult - and are often accompanied with way more in legal fees - than getting rid of incompetent teachers. What critics of teacher tenure are really asking for is not parity with the private sector but the same subjugation that factory and farm workers had before the existence of unions and labor laws.
Some have suggested that parents and school board members need to be more of the focal point for hiring and firing teachers. They point out, as Mary Elizabeth Williams did Friday at Salon.com that "when Obama talks about accountability, he's supposed to be talking about accountability to us" (emphasis not added.) But can you imagine what the results would be if parent-teacher firing boards became the rule in schools? How could I, for instance, make an impartial decision about the statistics teacher who almost flunked my kid in his senior year in high school? How could a school board made up of people who don't believe in evolution make an impartial decision about the biology faculty?
The contention that educators are solely responsible for student achievement is so easily refutable that one wonders why the argument has to be made. Even parents and students in the Rhode Island school district where teachers were threatened with being lined up and summarily fired recognize the fallacy of this argument:
"'It's not fair,' said Angela Perez, who has a daughter at the high school. 'They shouldn't be punished because the students are lazy. The teachers care so much,' said Perez's daughter, Ivannah Perez, a recent Central Falls graduate. 'I've seen them stay after school. I've seen them struggle. It's the students. They don't want to learn.'"
As noted in comments by a teacher responding to this article, the fallacy of holding teachers solely accountable for achievement seems obvious on its face:
"I once read an article where a teacher was talking to a dentist, about a 'new' rating system that would list dentists according to how many cavities their patients had at the ages 4, 8, 12, 18 and so on. The dentist was shocked and argued 'But I have no control over how they care for their teeth! Parents might let their kids eat sweets, not make them regularly brush or floss. They could be genetically pre-disposed to tooth disease. I can only do so much and control a small portion of these kids lives!' The teacher said, 'Exactly why you can't expect a teacher to be the only factor in a child's success in school.'"
There's ample research pointing to a broad array of factors that affect student academic achievement. For sure, teachers are a significant factor but in no way the sole determinant of success. In fact, there's evidence that teachers may be too docile and overly willing to take on the blame of failing schools.
Surveys of teachers show that the vast majority of them feel obligated to "prepare students for more than high school graduation;" in other words, do more than just get kids to graduation. And they don't particularly feel that they need to be paid more to do so. What they would appreciate is, as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, put it, the "tools, time, trust, and support to do their jobs well."
Even the much-maligned teacher unions are generally falling in line with the dictates of prevailing policies. Despite opposition to Race to the Top from teacher unions in New York and California, most state union chapters support their state's proposals to compete for the funds.
In contrast to the image of lazy teachers and obstinate unions being painted by politicians and the media, the reality for most educators is more like what principal Judy Grace relates in comments to a recent article:
"How do we justify tying promotion, retention, and evaluation for teachers to student growth when we continue to look the other way when it comes to the complete breakdown of the nuclear family and common values in our society? These are the same teachers who spent an entire Sunday the weekend before Christmas this year cleaning the home of one of our family[ies] in order to rid it of the infestation of head lice. If we were afforded the luxury of just addressing our students' academic needs, it would make sense to evaluate teachers on academic growth. I worked with a fourth grade student in my office last evening until 5:30 because his drug addicted mother won't get up in the morning to get him to school. He's a sweet little boy who spent the morning watching a movie instead of coming to school. This is the kind of challenge my staff face everyday."
So what this "blame and shame game" against educators is really all about is a failure of our leadership to speak the truth that when kids don't learn, we're all responsible. Everyone in the community, whether it's in Rhode Island or Long Island, - from parents and politicians to businesses and the school board - needs to be part of the solution and take on the collective burden for educating kids. But instead, our leadership is being complicit in a corporate-backed effort to destroy public education that is spreading across the country. |
STATE BLOGS
