In 3 weeks the Educator Roundtable has collected over 20,000 signatures on its petition to end No Child Left Behind. We are extremely grateful to this community for its support in our endeavor. Our organization continues to gain support and to make progress.
Today I want to extend my last diary entry, which focused on one teacher’s story about the conditions of her school. I want to argue that the architects and supporters of this legislation intended to drive teachers such as her out of schools. In case you missed that: NCLB was crafted to drive certain types of teachers, such as those willing to complain about corporate dictates, out of schools.
I hope you will stick with me, as we cannot have anything remotely resembling a participatory democracy without citizens prepared to maintain it, and we will not have citizens capable of maintaining this country in a state of integrity and usefulness if we don’t have highly-qualified, critical, passionate, and engaged teachers raising them to do so.
First, a few choice quotes from the petition (some are truncated):
Donna Kready: I am an educator in a GREAT school, and I have seen the extra pressure of testing, Testing, TESTING, take a toll on educators. We are losing really good educators and the desire for young people to go into education as a profession.
Edward Benjamin Hilton: I would like to add that NCLB discourages people from entering the profession. I have a highly educated friend who wants to change careers and is willing to take a salary cut in order to become a teacher. I felt honor bound to advise against doing this even though he would make a great teacher. How can I recommend entering a profession for the best of reasons, when there is a good chance that he will either become discouraged due to NCBL or only stay in the profession a short time. Teachers need to be energized by the joy of doing well, not beaten into submission. If they submit, and they usually have no choice, they then must engage in practices that are designed to fail.
Robin Howard: I taught for 3 yrs. NCLB forced me away from the job I enjoyed.
Catherine A King: I am a recently retired educator and do not think I would go into education today based on NCLB and state requirements. Education is no longer about educating kids to think critically but about memorizing useless facts.
Rebecca Pappas: Excellent teachers are leaving education because of NCLB.
Carrie McDonald: There has to be a better way to improve public education-so many teachers have left the profession due to this law.
Ross F. Guldenbrein: I am a retired educator and this program is one reason I chose an early retirement.
These quotes were pulled from the last 3000 entries...there are hundreds more. Now, if all of these teachers were unqualified, unprofessional, unconcerned, tenured do-nothings, we might all celebrate their departure.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Many, if not all, of those leaving the profession under NCLB are dedicated to helping children develop into adults who are capable of doing more than filling out worksheets.
And that my friends, is a good thing...at least according to the neoconservatives and neoliberals who support the legislation.
Public school teachers, according to the Hoover Institute’s Terry Moe, have become accustomed to a system
in which they have substantial autonomy, their pay and jobs are secure, and they are not held accountable for their performance. Indeed, it is likely that these properties were part of what attracted many of them to the profession in the first place.
Joseph Newman’s work contradicts Moe’s assertion; the majority of people entering teaching do so because they want to make some sort of meaningful difference in people’s lives.
Ignoring the work of scholars such as Newman, Moe asserts that the people who have stayed in teaching are the ones "who have found these qualities [autonomy, security, and lack of accountability] particularly to their liking." Note here that, according to Moe, the individuals who have remained in America’s classrooms have done so for self-serving reasons alone.
The problem: schools suffer from a problem of "adverse selection."
They have not only attracted certain types of people to work for the school system, but have actually attracted the wrong types and repelled the right types.
Moe goes on to conclude, "the current system is probably filled with teachers and administrators who are the wrong types."
The right type of teacher, according to neoconservatives and neoliberals, gives up autonomy in order to better serve state and federal demands. In schools, where corporations and ideologues compete to shape and limit the mental, physical, and ethical development of children via standardization and imposed curricula, "something has to be done" about the wrong type of teacher.
While the wrong type of teacher, according to Moe, has too much autonomy, cares nothing for accountability, and is only interested in job security, I wonder whether Moe’s wrong type of teacher might not actually be the type of teacher some parents want.
If I understand autonomy to mean a willingness to speak out against antidemocratic movements within schools, then teacher autonomy has the potential to foster educative learning environments for children.
If I understand autonomy to mean a willingness to trust teachers as professionals in their selection, creation, and delivery of information and ideas, then autonomy engenders diversity, creativity, innovation and care.
If I understand teachers’ refusal of accountability to be a refusal of a specific type of accountability, one that limits student growth and punishes public schools, then their refusal might not be solely related to job security. Rather, their refusal might come in the name of genuine interest, student development, and participatory democracy.
Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute celebrates the fact that high-stakes testing will force these teachers out:
For several decades, the American public education establishment has embraced a vision of professional, autonomous, teachers who operate out of a sense of duty and commitment...The premise of high-stakes testing challenges this culture by pressing teachers to teach the content and skills mandated by the state, regardless of their personal preferences.
While there are undoubtedly a number of teachers and administrators who are professional, semi-autonomous individuals operating out of a sense of duty and commitment, this has not been the dominant educational paradigm over the past century. The strengths of such a system would be participatory governance of schools, where communities and individuals shape educational ends with "a sense of duty and commitment." Hess believes this phantom culture can be challenged by forcing teachers to adhere to strict rules, regardless of—or perhaps because of—their level of professionalism.
Hess’s "challenge" requires a certain type of teacher, one untainted by colleges of education and willing to deliver the content and skills mandated by the state, regardless of their "personal" (professional?) preferences...
Two pressing questions:
- What are the content and skills mandated by the state?
- Who will help children attain them?
Are the content and skills the content and skills needed to produce a critical, engaged, compassionate, reflective, and active population of doers and dreamers? Or are the content and skills mandated by the state producing a workforce capable of outperforming every other country but unable to recognize the inhumanity of democracy here and abroad?
The teachers leaving our schools are the teachers committed to helping children reach their full potential as citizens of our democracy. While the neocons and neoliberals celebrate this fact, progressives must do something to stop the hemorrhaging.
It is not likely that teachers willing to bow down and do whatever they are told to do, even though they know it be wrong are going to teach children to become adults who raise their voices in opposition to injustice such as, say, oh i don't know, an illegal war, illegal wiretapping, or torture.